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Tag: national football league (n.f.l.)

  • Aaron Rodgers, Football’s Rorschach Quarterback

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    How much of his declining skills—or growing media presence—actually mattered to what he might contribute to the Steelers? Tomlin had previously demonstrated an inexplicable ability to lead teams to wins with terrible offenses. His Steelers had won games with Mason Rudolph and Duck Hodges at quarterback. They had made the playoffs with Kenny Pickett and Mitchell Trubisky as starters. Last season, Tomlin benched Justin Fields for Russell Wilson, who took the team off a cliff in the last four games of the regular season—and the Steelers still finished 10–7. But, coming into this year, the Steelers had lost six straight playoff games, and they haven’t won during the post-season since 2016. For years, people have whispered that Tomlin was near the end of his tenure. And it’s possible to see something a little desperate in the Steelers’ pursuit of Rodgers. But Rodgers is also a four-time M.V.P. award winner, a future Hall of Famer, a model for the modern quarterback. And he could still, on occasion, flick a long spiral up the seam and hit a receiver in stride, the kind of throw that seems to turn chaos into perfect, thrilling order. Rodgers had already declined the chance to be Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,’s running mate during the 2024 Presidential campaign, he said, because he wanted to keep playing. And the whole Jets thing hadn’t worked out. He needed a job. And Tomlin needed a quarterback.

    Perhaps the vision wasn’t the result of a bad burrito, or of taking ayahuasca with Rodgers on one of Rodgers’s spiritual quests. Perhaps there was something logical about it. It seemed that way for a while. The Steelers started the season 4–1. Rodgers began the season by laughing at his old team, the Jets, scoring four touchdowns. The Steelers beat the New England Patriots (one of only three teams to do so all season) and then went to Ireland to beat the Minnesota Vikings. They lost to the Cincinnati Bengals—who, with their star quarterback Joe Burrow injured, employed another fortysomething, Joe Flacco—but Rodgers put in a vintage performance, with four touchdowns and nearly a fifth, a Hail Mary attempt that flew sixty-eight yards through the air before it was batted down. He’s still got the arm, at least some of the time.

    But not the legs, it seems. No one this season got rid of the ball faster than he did, whether the situation seemed to call for a quick pass or not. Only one wide receiver, DK Metcalf, had Rodgers’s obvious trust; his targets were often the Steelers’ running backs, closer to hand. That Hail Mary was an anomaly: no other quarterback’s completions travelled a shorter distance, on average, past the line of scrimmage. And when the pocket broke down, he usually crumbled with it. Yet there he was, in the final moments of the regular season, with his arms triumphantly raised.

    Was he responsible for bailing his teammates out under pressure, or for putting them in trouble to begin with? Rodgers is football’s Rorschach test, one of the league’s most polarizing players. It’s a role he seems comfortable in; it fits with his contrariness, and provides an ongoing relevance. The Steelers finished the season with their usual 10–7 record. (Maybe Tomlin’s vision was actually for more of the same.) On Monday, in any case, he’ll get another chance to finally win a big game: the Steelers host the Houston Texans during the wild-card round of the playoffs, with the winner advancing. It will be Rodgers’s twenty-second playoff start; his first came when the Texans’ quarterback, C. J. Stroud, was eight years old.

    The Texans are a flawed and beatable team, but they have one of the league’s best defenses, which means that it won’t be an easy night for Rodgers, most likely. But when has Rodgers ever made things easy? Before the start of the season, he said that he was “pretty sure” he’d retire after it was over. But after the Ravens game, he refused to close the door on his career. Who knows what visions may lie ahead? ♦

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    Louisa Thomas

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  • The Odd, Shifting Role of the N.F.L. Punter

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    During a typical game, Ethan Evans, the punter for the Los Angeles Rams, is synonymous with disappointment. All punters are. No fan cheers when their team’s punter jogs onto the field facing fourth and long. His job is to concede possession—to send the ball back into the control of the opposing team, and to put them in the worst possible field position. Punters, historically, have a bit of a suspect reputation, with their un-grass-stained uniforms. When a punter was drafted in the third round of the 2012 N.F.L. draft, an analyst famously cried, “Let me tell you something, people: punters are people, too.” True, but they are also the game’s vestigial organs, a remnant of the days when football was “foot ball,” before the invention of that modern horror, the forward pass.

    Evans has the square jaw and athletic build of a tight end: six feet three, two-fifty and change. But his job involves a lot of waiting around, these days more than ever. The Rams have one of the best offenses in the league, and their coach, Sean McVeigh, is no longer the conservative fourth-down play caller that he was early in his career—nowadays, he heeds the analytical models that encourage keeping the quarterback on the field for fourth down, trying to keep possession. Even coaches not on the cutting edge have shifted away from punting in short-yardage situations, or when losing late in a close game; everyone now knows that going for the first down will, in many situations, give them better odds of winning. And so, increasingly, punters are sitting on the shelf. According to one metric, which seeks to capture a player’s over-all contribution to his team’s scoring, the best punter this season is the Colts’ Rigoberto Sanchez—and he didn’t take a single punt until the third week of the season.

    Evans has taken two or fewer punts in five of the first eleven games, which would have been unusual only a decade ago. Last Sunday, though, against the Seattle Seahawks, he was busy. Seattle’s stifling defense had bottled up the Rams’ quarterback, Matthew Stafford. The team’s defense kept them in the game, harassing Seattle’s quarterback into an even worse day, which included four interceptions. But Seattle, like most N.F.L. teams these days, didn’t need much in the way of offense to score; they just needed to cross into Rams territory. The Seahawks’ kicker, Jason Myers, attempted five field goals in the game, including one of fifty-seven yards, which he converted. At the same time that punters have been getting less and less use, field-goal kickers, their clean-uniformed comrades, are being brought out for longer and longer attempts—and hitting them at a historically high rate. Yet another reason that teams don’t need to punt as much as they used to.

    But when punters do get called upon, their punts can matter more than ever. Evans used to practice punting the same way he had in college, at Wingate University, a Division II school in North Carolina: by dropping the nose of the ball and driving it as high and as far as he could. This was how a lot of N.F.L. punters approached their art. But long punts up the center of the field gave the opposing team’s fast, explosive returners room to run. Even blasting the ball into or through the end zone, causing a touchback—which gives the offense the ball at their own twenty-yard line—became less appealing as field-goal kickers expanded their range, since offenses with that kind of field position were just a couple of first downs away from a decent chance at three points. Evans realized that he could no longer “just bomb punts all day” the way he once had. He needed a more varied and complicated approach—kicking the ball deep toward the sidelines, or throwing in a deliberately wobbly kick, or using his foot to slice the ball, changing the trajectory to give the returner less time to make a decision about which way to go.

    Punters have started borrowing techniques from Australian-rules football, a sport in which kicking figures more prominently, and which is full of weird, swerving punts. There’s the “reverse banana,” which gives the ball an inverted swerve, and the “torp,” which is executed by holding the ball at an angle across the body and kicking so that it spirals like a torpedo. Some of the newer punters—including Michael Dickson, of the Seahawks, whom Evans was up against last Sunday—are from Australia. Young punters study techniques on YouTube and attend élite camps. Special-teams players, who really do have a lot of time on their hands, have begun experimenting both with the physics of sailing a ball through the air and with new ways to confuse returners and get them off balance. In the twenty-tens, the Ravens’ special-teams unit called themselves the “R. & D. Department,” the long snapper Morgan Cox told me.

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    Louisa Thomas

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  • The New New England Patriots

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    But there were signs during that win against the Dolphins that this year might be different. Maye completed nineteen out of twenty-three passes, for two hundred and thirty yards, throwing for two touchdowns and rushing for another. The game’s real highlight, though, came at the end, when the running back Antonio Gibson returned a kick ninety yards for a score—and Vrabel chased him along the sideline in excitement. When was the last time anyone in New England looked like they were having fun?

    Since the loss to the Steelers, the Patriots have won eight straight. They’re atop the A.F.C. East, with a good chance to secure a first-round bye in the playoffs. On Thursday, at home, they avoided an embarrassing loss to one of those New York teams, the Jets—a trap game if ever there was one. What stood out most was what now seems unremarkable: the quarterback playing up to increasingly lofty expectations, serenaded by chants of “M.V.P.!” Maye threw fewer of the spectacular deep throws that he has become known for, but that was a sign of growth: he seemed content to take the yardage that was given to him; nothing was forced. He completed his first eleven pass attempts of the night, and even after cooling off didn’t turn the ball over once. Again and again, he showed how well he can move, dodging pressure and sliding through danger to find open receivers, whether it meant making difficult throws over the middle while on the run or taking the quick out.

    But about those deep throws! Nothing has brought life back to Foxborough like the rocketing spirals Maye has been launching downfield. Last season, New England ranked thirty-first in explosive-pass rate, or how often a play gains at least twenty yards. They were thirtieth in that metric the season prior. Now Maye is considered one of the best in the league at long throws, Diggs is having a resurgence, and the team has developed a few of its other receivers into deep-ball threats. There is no doubt that the culture in New England has changed. Vrabel has a tradition of greeting each player on the way to the locker room after games, and the coaches are quick to praise the players. (This was not Belichick’s forte.) The players, for their part, deflect the praise; they speak about one another with delight and awe. The team seems to have found that elusive balance of confidence and calm, accountability and community, which characterizes many excellent teams. There appears to be a willingness to take big risks on the basis of trust.

    Where does that trust come from? Sports narratives inevitably have a teleological dimension. Once the ending is known, everything that leads up to it seems to be instruments of that end. In a well-sourced account of the Patriots’ renaissance in the Substack Go Long last month, the football journalist Tyler Dunne noted that, shortly after Vrabel became head coach, he discovered trash in the sauna and dirty washcloths littering the floor of the locker room. He immediately instructed the players to treat their workplace, and the people who cleaned it, with respect. The players understood that the point wasn’t simply civility. It was winning. “If you want to win, you do the small things,” the running back Antonio Gibson said. Dunne’s story was full of details like that. In Dunne’s telling, Josh McDaniels isn’t an asshole; he’s the perfect coach for a hungry and talented young quarterback. Vrabel’s smashmouth style isn’t old-school brutality but necessary toughness. The cultural shift is oriented around the team’s newfound success.

    Maybe so. Vrabel is right: respect really does begin at home. Different personalities mesh differently, and what doesn’t work in one situation might be just the thing in another. Maye seems to be thriving under the guidance of McDaniels, whose mastery of the Patriots’ offense has never been in doubt. “It’s fun to be in the headset with him,” Maye said recently, of McDaniels.

    It’s also undeniable that the Patriots have had an unusually easy schedule, and perhaps they look great because they’re playing weak opponents. Through eleven games, the teams they have beaten have a combined record of 30–54, and the Patriots have the easiest remaining schedule in the N.F.L. In fact, one measure pegs the Patriots’ schedule as the third-easiest in the N.F.L. since 1978. Clearing the sauna of debris might not have been instrumental, after all. And if a few things had gone in another direction, if a few loose balls thrown by Maye on Thursday night had been intercepted, or if Antonio Brown hadn’t outrun the Dolphins and the Patriots had begun the season 0–3, some stories—such as the one about how Vrabel emerged from a preseason brawl between the Patriots and the Washington Commanders with a bloody face—might sound a little different. Maye has been having a fantastic season. He might really win M.V.P., but he’s been sacked more than any other quarterback (among qualified starters) except one, and over all the Patriots offense has been middling. Take away a few of those thrilling plays, and we might be telling a different story.

    But what’s true of negative-feedback loops is also true of positive ones. Encouragement becomes courage. Luck starts to seem like fate. For years, the Patriots couldn’t catch a break. Then came Brady—the hundred-and-ninety-ninth pick in the draft—and the team’s fortunes changed entirely. Losers become winners, until the cycle repeats itself. ♦

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    Louisa Thomas

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