Let’s Jump to Some Conclusions!

Week 1 is in the books, and National Jump to Conclusions Week is here once more! Our favorite time of year, when #onpace and one-game sample sizes leads the takemasters among us to make bold, declarative statements that might even hold up all the way into the heady days of October. And this year, the internet has collectively decided to…

…be calm and reasonable and patient? Wait, that doesn’t sound like any internet I’m aware of…

Maybe it’s a factor of the relatively chalky Week 1 – just three upsets, with the Bengals, Falcons and Browns losing. Maybe it’s the NFL doing a good job picking highlight games for the isolated windows; no random 40-0 Giants losses for everyone to see on Sunday night. Maybe it’s the presence of big news, like Jordan Love’s MCL sprain or Christian McCaffrey’s surprise absence on Monday night that’s drawn the attention of the takemasters, so they don’t have to blow some random Sunday morning game out of proportion. Whatever the reason, the general reaction to Week 1 has been relatively muted compared to years gone by.

Well, we can’t be having that. If we can’t make big, bold conclusions after 5% of the regular season, then what’s the point of even watching Week 1? We’ll just have to find some conclusions of our very own.

You Were Right About Anthony Richardson

Now, I don’t know what you thought about Anthony Richardson before Sunday. Positive, negative, anywhere in between – whatever you thought going in to Week 1, you were validated! Your position was fully supported by what happened. Anthony Richardson verifies your priors, no matter what they were coming into the game.

Richardson may have already had the throw of the year. His 60-yard touchdown pass to Alec Pierce has been replayed on a constant loop on SportsCenter, social media, and in in the dreams of Colts fans across the country. You can count the number of players who can make that throw on hand, and possibly on one finger – maneuvering the pocket, uncorking a bomb without setting up, and finding a receiver roughly eight zillion yards down field. Per Next Gen Stats, the pass traveled 65.3 yards through the air, the third-longest they’ve ever tracked. Hang it in the Louvre.

And if it was just that one play, that’d be whatever, but it was part of a suite of Richardson highlight-reel plays to celebrate. Richardson already has two completions of 50+ air yards on the season, more than anyone had in the entire 2023 season. Our charting has him with three highlight throws on the day on just 19 attempts. That’s a highlight throw rate of 15.8%, which is both unsustainable and ridiculous. The leader in highlight throw percentage in 2023? Joe Flacco, at just 6.9%. If you’ve been drooling over Richardson’s potential since he took over in Florida, this is what you’ve been waiting for

And yet, at the same time, Richardson only completed nine passes. He had some pretty ugly misses – some bad overthrows that could have turned into touchdowns in a game the Colts lost. His 31.6% success rate was the third lowest of the week, in large part because his 42.1% accuracy rate was the worst of Week 1. You expect some of that when you lead the league with a 16.4 aDOT, but even then, the lack of accuracy was palpable. We track something called “prayer yards” – air yards on passes that were uncatchable. Richardson had 155 of those, and while that wasn’t the most in Week 1 – that would be Deshaun Watson at 312, with Bryce Young just behind him at 266 – it’s a lot of empty calories. This is how you end up with a below-replacement level YAR (no defense adjustments just yet) and a passing VOA of -12.1%, despite the eye-popping highlights.

In short, the man was either immortalizing himself in highlight reels for years to come or floundering like he had never seen a football before in his life, with very little in between. And that doesn’t make him good, and it doesn’t make him bad. What it makes him is the ultimate quarterback for RedZone viewing. A quarter of Richardson’s dropbacks earned at least +1.0 EPA against the Texans. A fifth lost at least -1.0 EPA. Nearly every time he touched the ball, something significant happened. This is all very familiar – this is where Josh Allen was in 2018 and 2019, when he was a cannon with no targeting system whatsoever. And that means, for the foreseeable future, the most exciting thing you can hear Scott Hanson say is “we’re going to Indianapolis now, where Anthony Richardson is leading a drive.” It might be a 70-yard bomb. It might involve Richardson scrambling around the edge for 30 yards. It might be Richardson being suplexed out of his shoes, or throwing a ball directly to a defender with no one within 30 yards of him. The whole gamut of possibilities is there, and I cannot be more excited. As a patented, registered and confirmed Richardson doubter, I’m totally fine with sliding Richardson from “bad” to “unreliable” after just one game in Year 2, and I can’t wait to see more of it.

Rams to Open a Triage Unit in Woodland Hills

It’ll just save time. The Rams entered Week 1 already shuffling their offensive line around with Rob Havenstein (day-to-day, ankle) inactive. And now they’ve lost Steve Avila (4-6 weeks, sprained MCL), Puka Nacua (4+ weeks, knee), Joe Noteboom (‘several weeks’, ankle), Kevin Dotson (day-to-day, ankle) and Cobie Durant (day-to-day, toe). It’s an injury list that looks more like November than September, and with so much of it focused on the offensive line, Matthew Stafford is going to have to run for his life for the next month or so. The Rams were the least-injured team in the NFL last season, a big part of what sparked their surprise playoff run. So hey, at least this season has already provided Rams fans with something new and exciting!

Your Natural MVP Favorites

Baker Mayfield: 24-for-30 for 280 yards and four touchdowns. Forget Dave Canales, quarterback whisperer; Canales was holding Mayfield back, and now that Tampa Bay has learned that they can throw deep on first and second down, they will be unstoppable!

Derek Carr: 19-for-23 for 200 yards and three touchdowns. Oh, how we all laughed when SIS claimed Carr was the third-best quarterback in all of football. How we chortled, snorted and guffawed. Well, who’s laughing now! Not just any passer can make the Carolina Panthers look like they don’t know what they’re doing, you know!

Sam Darnold: 19-for-24 for 208 yards and two touchdowns. A stint with Kyle Shanahan absolves a quarterback of the many sins gathered playing for Jeremy Bates, Adam Gase, Joe Brady and Ben McAdoo.

All three of these magnificent leaders boasted a passing VOA of at least 49.2%. Our great quarterback drought is over! Note that Josh Allen also joined those three with a top passing VOA, but he’s not allowed to get MVP votes. It’s in his contract, somewhere. Look, we don’t make the rules.

Haasan Reddick is Going to Get Paaaaaaaaaid.

If you’re a New York Jets fan despondent over Monday’s overall performance, take a piece of old advice from your quarterback: book yourself on a flight to Egypt R-E-L-A-X. The 49ers are going to make a lot of good teams look silly this year, and a Week 1 loss while your new players are just beginning to gel is far from the end of the world. Aaron Rodgers looked far better than Kirk Cousins did coming off his Achilles injury – he could actually move around like a human being rather than a statue, and the zip on his passes looked just as good as it did in his prime. Garrett Wilson was an absolute menace at points early, picking apart the 49ers’ zone coverage. We saw glimpses of what this offense can be when everything gels together on the 70-yard touchdown drive in the first quarter; the Jets only had six longer touchdown drives in all of 2023, so to pull that off in the first 15 minutes of the Rodgers era is exciting. Ideally, they’d run a little less often on early downs, but easing Rodgers back into action is not the worst idea in the world. Defensively, Sauce Gardner remains a shutdown corner. He was only targeted twice all night, allowed zero receptions, and nearly completely shut down Offseason Contract Nightmare Brandon Aiyuk – at least when he was on the field and not mysteriously pulled off for a drive for on adequately-explained reason. If the Jets lose to the Titans next week, sound the alarms, but for now, just take a deep breath, think happy thoughts and…

…panic over the state of the defensive line!

Do you suppose Haasan Reddick was texting Joe Douglas after each 49ers’ scoring drive, just sending him more and more moneybags emojis? The Jets thought they had the concept of a plan on how to manufacture enough of a pass rush with Michael Clemons, Jermaine Johnson and Will McDonald, and instead, they got mostly stonewalled. Trent Williams had his first day without allowing a pass pressure since 2022, despite having to come off the field for an IV thanks to his holdout. It’s not that the Jets got no pressure – nine, by our count, including three sacks. But one of those sacks was on a too-cute-by-far trick play that appeared to have Deebo Samuel looking to throw the ball to Brock Purdy, and another was Purdy sliding to the ground on a bootleg where everyone was covered, rather than any real play-altering pass rush. Only some bad drops and some truly heroic defending work in the secondary – four broken up passes on plays from a clean pocket – kept the Jets from getting washed off the field entirely.

Then again, Douglas could be texting Reddick back asking if he wanted to play the run at all. That’s not Reddicks’ game, and it’s where the Jets were really in trouble on Monday. They allowed 120 “win yards” — yards after contact + yards after forced non-contact missed tackles – and a league-high six runs of 10 yards or more. They had the second-highest stacked box rate in the league at 18.4%, daring the 49ers to run against them – and they still allowed 3.9 yards per carry while doing so. Reddick getting paid will help the Jets out significantly, but that front wasn’t one player away from competency on Monday.

The Giants and Panthers are Really Bad

…Guys, wait. You guys are early. This is supposed to be “Jump to Conclusions Week.” You guys are more a casual stroll to conclusions. A continental drift of conclusions. A reserved seat at the table of conclusions. The DOOM Index for 0-2 teams is next week, and I suspect we’ll see plenty of you guys there. Do you think you can manage to be terrible for a second week in a row? Great. Glad to hear it.

Mike Tomlin is Auditioning for the Magic Circle

Not content to merely somehow drag questionable Steelers teams to winning records for a decade-and-a-half, Tomlin is now trying to add degrees of difficulty and showmanship to his act. Don’t just watch the Steelers beat the Falcons. Be amazed as Tomlin and his lovely assistant Justin Fields make the middle of the football field disappear!

Stay tuned for his next stop on the Amazing Tomlin’s tour, where TJ Watt will saw Bo Nix in two, right at midfield.

Antonio Pierce Cannot Do Math

We knew, entering the season, that Antonio Pierce was not going to set the analytics world on fire. He was the least aggressive coach last season and comes from a defensive, non-coordinator background that doesn’t really typically generate fantastic fourth down decisions. And yet, even by those standards, the Raiders’ fourth-down decision making was incomprehensible on Sunday.

The play that really brought out the torches and pitchforks for Pierce was the decision to punt on 4th-and-1 from the Chargers’ 43-yard line, down six points with 7:15 left in the fourth quarter. You don’t need a statistical model to tell you that that’s a terrible idea, but fortunately, we have multiple! ESPN called that a 5.7% win probability error, suggesting that the Raiders needed a 37% chance of converting for the risk to be worth the effort. Ben Baldwin’s model was even harsher, docking the Raiders 8.5%, while the Surrender Index said it was in the 99.9th percentile of all cowardly punts dating back to 1999.

And we can do better than that, too! Since 1994. There have been 210 plays where a team, trailing by between 4 and 6 points, has faced a fourth-and-1 inside enemy territory in the fourth quarter. This was just the sixth punt on record, and the first since 2012. It’s also just the second to happen with less than eight minutes left on the clock, joining Cleveland head coach Pat Shurmur’s decision to punt from the Colts’ 41 down 17-13 in 2012 – a decision which was pilloried at the time and was part of the reason then-new owner Jimmy Haslam canned him at the end of the year. And at least Shurmur had the excuse of starting running back Trent Richardson being injured! This was a solved problem over a decade ago.

And if it was just one bad decision, maybe we could let it slide, but no! Per ESPN, Pierce’s fourth-down decisions in this game alone cost them over 10% in win probability, with two more punts and a field goal on 4th-and-short in the game. And Pierce’s excuses after the game were laughable: “It was a long one. Got stopped earlier in the game. Momentum. The punter had done a good job pinning those guys back… Again, the defense was a strength for the most part of the game. Keep [the Chargers] backed up with three timeouts.” He was about 30 seconds away from blaming sunspots in his eyes and the dog eating his fourth-down play chart. “Just punt, baby” is not a good look for Pierce’s first game as non-interim head coach.