NFL Winners and Losers: Chip Kelly and Eagles get embarrassed
The Philadelphia Eagles’ season went up in flames on Sunday afternoon.
Technically, the Eagles are still going to be hanging around the NFC East race because that division is awful. However, the Eagles are a big reason the division is so bad. Even if, somehow, the Eagles win that putrid division, they’re not a team that can make any waves in the postseason.
Sunday’s 45-17 loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers was absolute futility for the 4-6 Eagles. Doug Martin had 235 rushing yards for the Bucs, including 177 in the first half. Jameis Winston tied an NFL rookie record with five touchdown passes. The Buccaneers had 521 yards on Sunday, the second most in franchise history and the most in 35 years.
Winston is playing well as a rookie, but he was just 18th in the NFL in passing yards coming in. Likewise, the Buccaneers were 18th as a team in total offense. In other words, the Eagles got absolutely shredded by a mediocre team. Can’t blame Mark Sanchez for that.
The Eagles’ many failures this season come back, of course, to Chip Kelly. Many people are excited for him to fail in the NFL, and he fed that machine on Sunday.
And maybe Kelly is failing. His offseason moves haven’t worked well. His big gamble, trading Nick Foles and a second-round pick for the expensive Sam Bradford in his contract year, has worked out about as everyone could have guessed: With Bradford playing uninspiring football before he got hurt. And obviously the defense isn’t any better this season, because it had an embarrassing day against a Buccaneers offense that scares nobody.
I don’t think Kelly is going to get pushed out in Philadelphia. That ignores that he had 20 wins the past two seasons. Only seven of 32 teams have posted double-digit wins each of the past two seasons, and Philadelphia is one of them (Denver, New England, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Seattle and Arizona are the others). Some people really, really want Kelly to fail, but he hasn’t yet. This is, however, a bad season. And it can’t be ruled out that Kelly will want out, either to a college job or maybe to the Tennessee Titans and quarterback Marcus Mariota (with a ton of draft-pick compensation from Tennessee to Philadelphia, of course). Kelly is a bit of a mystery, so anything is possible. But Philadelphia simply firing him doesn’t add up.
That doesn’t mean the Eagles are going to turn it around this season. They look like a lost team, and they haven’t really played well all season. They have just lost back-to-back home games to the Miami Dolphins and Buccaneers.
At no point since the preseason have the Eagles looked like a playoff-caliber team. That falls on Kelly. He likely is not going to get chased back to college against his will after the season, but this season looks like an obvious step back for him and the Eagles. Sunday was a wake-up call to anyone who hadn’t realized that yet.
Here are the rest of the winners and losers from Week 11 of the NFL season:
WINNERS
Cam Newton, MVP candidate and fox tail wearer: Tom Brady is still lapping the NFL MVP field, but Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton is making sure he’s right there if Brady opens the door for anyone else down the stretch.
Newton was very good on Sunday, throwing for a career-high five touchdowns. He now has 20 passing touchdowns and six rushing touchdowns, mostly working with a receiving corps that would have trouble getting playing time in most other NFL lineups. He’s been very good for a 10-0 team.
And you know you’re really feeling it when you can wear this getup to your postgame news conference, complete with an apparently real fox tail:
James Jones’ hoodie: Since we’re speaking of fashion, NFL fans seemed quite fascinated at the Green Bay Packers receiver wearing a green hoodie under his jersey on Sunday.
First, former NFL officiating head Mike Pereira had the answer to the question everyone was wondering about: Is it legal? In short, yes, the hoodie was legal.
There wasn’t a crazy backstory behind the fashion statement. Our Kevin Kaduk has the full story here. Jones had 109 yards and a touchdown in a big Green Bay win, so superstitious Packers fans might try talking him into wearing it the rest of the season.
Andy Reid: There are a couple of undefeated coaches so I’m not going to stump for Reid to be in the Coach of the Year mix, but he has done a remarkable job.
The Chiefs were 1-5 and seemingly done (it’s worth pointing out here that Reid’s terrible decision to hand off to Jamaal Charles against the Broncos led to a last-minute fumble and a loss). Charles was done for the season, and he provided most of the Chiefs’ offense. It would have been easy to write off the season.
But the Chiefs kept at it and after Sunday’s 33-3 win against the San Diego Chargers they are 5-5 and riding a four-game winning streak. If the Buffalo Bills lose Monday night at the New England Patriots, the Chiefs will be tied for the final AFC wild-card spot.
Credit the defense. Philip Rivers came into Sunday’s game on a pace for about 5,300 yards this season, and he was totally shut down. Rivers threw for just 178 yards. The Chargers didn’t score a touchdown but the Chiefs’ defense did, when Justin Houston grabbed a pick-six on a screen pass. The Chargers have a lot of injuries, but the Chiefs played really well on Sunday.
The Chiefs also have a favorable schedule the rest of the way. They play one more game against a winning team, and that’s next week against the Bills at home (and by late Monday night, the Bills might not be above .500 anymore).
If the Chiefs go from 1-5 to a playoff spot, give Reid a ton of credit for it.
Thomas Rawls: When Marshawn Lynch was a late scratch due to injury, Thomas Rawls was thrown into the starting lineup. And he played better than Lynch has all season. Statistically, he had a better day than Lynch ever has in the NFL.
Rawls had an incredible game in a win against the San Francisco 49ers. He had 209 yards rushing, 46 yards receiving and two touchdowns. Lynch has never had more than 153 rushing yards in a regular-season game, surprisingly enough. Rawls has a 169-yard game and a 209-yard game already as a rookie, the only two games in which he has received more than 20 carries.
Of course this all leads to a bigger picture talk about Lynch and his future. Lynch is slated to make $9 million in base salary next season, and his numbers are down and he is missing games for the first time in his Seahawks career. He’ll be 30 years old next year. Rawls is slated to make $525,000 in 2016. It will be hard for the Seahawks to let Lynch go, if they decide on that route. Seeing Rawls play like he has will make it a little easier.
LOSERS
New York Jets: At one point, the Jets looked like a pretty good bet to make the AFC playoffs. Now, they can’t even beat a Houston Texans team quarterbacked by T.J. Yates, who didn’t have an NFL job a month ago.
The Jets, who started 2-1, have now lost four of five. The offense is a mess, and the defense with all those big names hasn’t been too great either.
DeAndre Hopkins had 118 yards for the Texans, and a lot of that came against Jets cornerback Darrelle Revis. Chris Ivory had a quiet day on the ground for the Jets offense, and Ryan Fitzpatrick isn’t the kind of quarterback to carry a team.
It was a troubling loss, and it’s not like the schedule is that easy the rest of the way. The Jets play home games against Miami, Tennessee and New England, and on the road against the Giants, Cowboys and Bills. At 5-5, the Jets will probably need to go at least 4-2 the rest of the way to make the playoffs. The team that lost at Houston doesn’t look capable of that.
Atlanta Falcons: Oct. 4 was a big day for the 2015 Falcons. It’s the last time they had a good performance.
The Falcons have lost four of five, and the only win in that stretch was an ugly 10-7 victory at the Tennessee Titans when Zach Mettenberger had to start for an injured Marcus Mariota. The last win before that came on a Kirk Cousins pick-six in overtime against the Washington Redskins. The team that rolled to four convincing wins to start the season hasn’t been seen in a long, long time.
Sunday’s 24-21 home loss to the Matt Hasselbeck-led Indianapolis Colts was really bad. Now all of a sudden the Falcons are 6-4, barely ahead of the 5-5 Buccaneers and 5-5 Seahawks. And it doesn’t look like the Falcons are up to the task of holding them both off for a playoff spot, either.
The Chicago Bears’ two-point conversion call: The Bears scored with 24 seconds left, and then needed a two-point conversion to tie the game and send it to overtime. Their play call was not good.
The Bears ran it. Safety T.J. Ward came off the edge and helped thwart the Jeremy Langford run, but there was nowhere for Langford to go. He was tackled, and the game was basically over.
The play call was a pass and quarterback Jay Cutler checked to a run.
“It was one of those deals where we had a pass checked to a run,” left guard Matt Slauson said, according to WGN Radio. “Jay felt like we had the right look and he wants to put it on us to put it in. And we just have to get it done.”
WGN and Adam Jahns of the Chicago Sun-Times were among those to point out that there was an apparent miscommunication because tight end Martellus Bennett ran an outside pass route. Ward slipped in the backfield and was a big part of making the play.
It’s not exactly clear what Cutler saw to cause him to change the play, either. The Broncos had the Bears outnumbered in the box. If Bennett blocks Ward and the receiver to the right, Cameron Meredith, blocked cornerback Aqib Talib (which he did), it’s still eight Broncos defenders for seven Bears blockers. No obvious edge there.
No matter what the reasons, it didn’t work out well for the Bears. And they took a loss that is a huge blow to their slight playoff hopes.
The 49ers’ front office: Let’s remember that the 49ers’ big plan was to run Jim Harbaugh out of town, and then hire Jim Tomsula to be the new head coach. Apparently this was going to make for a calmer workplace environment, I guess. Whatever.
Fox Sports’ Jay Glazer threw out the possibility of Tomsula being fired at the end of this season (and a new coach perhaps wanting to keep quarterback Colin Kaepernick around). It’s hard to even imagine how much dysfunction would have to go into the 49ers firing the guy they wanted to replace Harbaugh, who went 44-19-1, after just one season.
Tomsula hasn’t done a great job, but he also is leading a team that had what is likely the worst offseason of any NFL team in history. Firing him after a year is screaming to any coaching candidate out there that your front office is as bad as it gets in the league. Although, it wouldn’t take much for anyone to guess that already.
The 49ers are a mess, and apparently they’re considering making it an even bigger mess. That Super Bowl appearance seems like it happened so long ago.
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Frank Schwab is the editor of Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @YahooSchwab
