For this week’s NFL recap, I have once again decided to merge two things that I love very much; football and “The Office”. I believe that weaving in the incredible quotability of the NBC phenomenon with the highs and lows of NFL football will make for spectacular content. I take great joy in creating a world where Pam Beesly and Russell Wilson share a commonality, where Michael Scott has something to do with Patrick Mahomes. Oh, what a beautiful world that is.

“It’s about to get all stupid up in here!” — Michael Scott

Literally the entire weekend

Alright, I’m doing something unprecedented. Fasten your seatbelts. 

Instead of giving every topic I’m about to write about its own unique quote, I’m putting it all under the one above, because this weekend took us for a wild, logic-defying joyride. It was like “The Purge” except if common sense was eradicated instead of actual laws. Whatever you thought was going to happen, what you thought should’ve happened, probably didn’t happen. 

This quote is perfect for not only the actual words that came out of Michael’s mouth, the way Michael said it matched up perfectly with the mind-boggling events that took place on Saturday and Sunday. 

The situation in the show was extremely odd; Michael had ordered pizza for an office party, but he’d ordered from the wrong Alfredo-named pie shop, which he didn’t expect. He’s exasperated. He doesn’t quite believe what’s happening is actually happening, and his attempt to convey that feeling comes out a little…funkily.

Upon the pizza delivery kid’s arrival, Michael angrily demanded a refund or a discount from the kid, and when he relented, Michael and Dwight held him hostage in the conference room. I don’t think he expected that. I, the viewer, did not expect that (I also did not expect to see the epic blooper that came out of this scene. Fun times in Scranton, PA). 

When I woke up on Saturday morning, I didn’t expect to be here, feeling the way I’m feeling, and nor did a lot of teams that played this weekend. I’ve never seen anything like it. Let’s dive in.

Vikings 39, Colts 36: The largest, dumbest comeback in NFL history 

Last Friday, I watched a few episodes of “Survivor”. Good show! 

Whatever season it was, they were in China. There was one girl named Courtney who was mostly well-liked by her tribe and seemed to have the social aspect of the game down, but she, to put it nicely, wasn’t very physically gifted. Or coordinated. Or anything that would help her tribe in athletic-centric challenges. This was a talking point amongst people that were anti-Courtney. 

During the third episode, there was a challenge that required the survivors to slash wood and ropes with a sword to collect pieces for a puzzle that had to be completed in order to win. Courtney was up first for her tribe, ready to swing it like Sheffield for immunity. When ageless wonder Jeff Probst signaled go, Courtney…did not swing it like Sheffield. (Fast forward to 1:57).

This was bad. Like, John-Starks-in-Game-7-of-the-‘94-Finals-level bad. Just an embarrassing performance on a big stage. It looked like Courtney had never performed the act of swinging something in her life. She didn’t give up, which was somewhat admirable, but she single-handedly lost the challenge for her tribe. Courtney survived the ensuing tribal council, but her depressing attempts at chopping wood were hard to forget. I have no idea what happens after episode three, though, so no spoilers, please. All I’ll say is that Frosti is growing on me. 

Although any connection between a sword-bearing waitress from New York City in China during the mid-2000’s and the 2022 Minnesota Vikings may seem far-fetched on the surface, Courtney and Kirk Cousins are very similar. There was a group of people that believed in them, there was another group that believed they were fraudulent, and there was a performance so disheartening that it made the former group look foolish for ever believing in them in the first place. 

The Vikings were having that performance on Saturday.

Nothing was going right in the first half. At all. The Colts returned a blocked punt for a touchdown. Dalvin Cook fumbled, then got stonewalled on fourth down on the next drive. The Vikings failed a fake punt inside of their own 35-yard line. Kirk Cousins fell on his butt after tripping over his own center’s foot and threw his 12th career pick-six, the third-most of any quarterback drafted after 2011. Justin Jefferson got injured. All the while, the Jonathan Taylor-less Colts offense was moving the ball well en route to a 33-0 halftime lead.

This is when the higher football powers turned the chaos meter up to unprecedented levels, which broke the thing altogether. Worst (or best) of all, it wasn’t repaired until Sunday night, causing chaos to rain down on the NFL like a south Florida thunderstorm. I’m accepting of differing real-life religious beliefs, but if you don’t believe that sports gods and goddesses exist (which would be sports atheism, I guess), I don’t know what to tell you. 

It’s about to get all stupid up in here. 

Above were the CliffsNotes from the comeback, but I think it’s a wonderful summary. The second half felt like a slow, yet fast wave that improbably kept growing in size. The Colts couldn’t do anything about it. Flashbacks from Super Bowl LI seemed to run rampant throughout Matt Ryan’s brain as his offense seemed to have been stripped of everything that had been working in the first half.

Kirk Cousins went absolutely ballistic in the second half; it was as if Courtney suddenly started swinging the sword like a seasoned baseball player. After looking completely disheveled in the first half, Cousins finished the game with a career-high 460 passing yards as well as four passing touchdowns, all of which came after halftime. 

Heading into Saturday, NFL teams were 1,548-1 when taking a 30-point lead, with the only loss coming in 1993, when the Bills erased a 32-point deficit to stun the Oilers in the AFC Wild Card game. 1,548 out of 1,549 is 99.903%; the Vikings literally had less than a 0.1% chance of winning according to history. 

Pffffft. History. What an irrelevant topic on a day like today. 

For the Colts…wow. That’s their fourth loss in a row, with the last two seeing Indy look completely inferior and out-coached for at least one whole half. I thought Jeff Saturday coaching on a Saturday would be like Rick Monday playing baseball on a Monday, or eating pigs in a blanket in a blanket: nirvana! It turned out to be the complete opposite. I really wish I’d stood my ground on the “hiring someone with no collegiate or professional coaching experience to be an NFL head coach is a bad idea” hill. 

For the Vikings, I have absolutely no idea how they keep doing this. Last season, a whopping 14 of their 17 regular season games were decided by one possession, and Minnesota lost eight of them. 

This season, 10 of their 14 contests have been decided by one possession, except this time around, they’ve won every single one of those games. Whether it was a game-winning field goal, a comeback victory, or literally one of the greatest catches of all-time, the Vikings keep finding ways to win, and now, they’re headed to the postseason as kings of the NFC North. Is this sustainable? I don’t know. Is it ridiculously entertaining? Absolutely. 

Jaguars 40, Cowboys 34: The large northeast Florida jungle cats are roaring

It’s late in the third quarter. Brett Maher, who’s having a fantastic season for the Cowboys, drills a field goal to put Dallas up 27-10. Since the Jaguars became an NFL team in 1994, they’d never come back from a 17+ point deficit against a team with a winning record. 

It’s about to get all stupid up in here. 

Jacksonville would go on to score touchdowns on three consecutive offensive drives to take a 31-27 lead. The game would eventually go to overtime, where Rayshawn Jenkins picked off Dak Prescott and made a glorious house call to complete the comeback victory.  

Over the past decade, losing has consumed Jacksonville. From 2012-16, the Jags never won more than five games in a season. After they almost made the Super Bowl in 2017, they reverted back to their losing ways, winning a combined 15 games from 2018-21. 

All the while, there was never really a lot to look forward to, to get excited about. Chad Henne, Blake Bortles and Gardner Minshew were never franchise quarterback material. Every year except 2017, at least two of the Colts, Texans and Titans were in far better positions to win than the Jaguars. 

It might be time to get excited. 

While it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows for the Jaguars on Sunday – they were down 27-10 in the third quarter – not only did they come back and win, the foundation for long-term success seems to be in place. Jacksonville has two of the most important positions on the team locked down: head coach and quarterback. Both played extremely well. 

This might just be me, but when it comes to coaching, I’m very much in favor of putting your players in favorable situations, situations where they have a high chance of succeeding. Last season, Urban Meyer did not do that, amongst, uh, other problematic things that got him fired before the season’s end. 
Pederson, on the other hand, seems to be pretty good at not harming his players; he’s actually helping them! A lot! On Sunday, like a ball-handling savant in basketball, Pederson went deep into his bag. For example, Jamal Agnew is knowingly awesome in space – he’s returned four punts and two kicks for touchdowns since he entered the league in 2017 – so Pederson called some sweeps and end arounds for him, which worked pretty well.

As for Lawrence…we might have something special on our hands. He isn’t perfect; he turned the ball over twice yesterday, bringing his total to 13 on the season. But on Sunday (and throughout these past few weeks), Lawrence looked like a star, radiating confidence while delivering darts, rainbows and lots of things in between. On Sunday, Lawrence threw four touchdowns in a game for the first time in his young career. It’s throws like these that get me excited. 

Even if they fall short of the postseason, valid hope has seemed to have sprung inside of TIAA Bank Stadium. For the first time in a long time, the Jaguars have something to be hopeful for.

Raiders 30, Patriots 24: My brain is still in a million pieces

When a team tries a last-gasp lateral play at the end of a game, they’re usually losing, and they almost never find the end zone. The only walk-off multi-lateral touchdown in NFL history happened in 2018, when the Dolphins pulled off a 69-yard miracle score against the Patriots. It happens once every blue moon in college, most notably the Cal-Stanford band play and Miami’s eight-lateral walk-off in 2015 that kind of definitely shouldn’t have counted. 

Sunday was different. 

First off, the Patriots didn’t need to pull off a rugby-style touchdown; the game was tied. If New England didn’t score here, it was far from the end of the world. Although Rhamondre Stevenson could’ve (and probably should’ve) just accepted overtime as he was being tackled by multiple Raider defenders, he decided to embark on the backwards-passing endeavor, pitching the ball to Jakobi Meyers. 

It’s about to get all stupid up in here.

Now, Meyers was a quarterback in high school, which might be the reason why he thought he could throw the ball 20 yards on the move to Mac Jones. After the game, Meyers admitted that he made a grave mistake, saying that he thought he saw Jones open. 

With all due respect to Meyers and Jones, that’s like D’Angelo Russell saying that he saw Rudy Gobert in the corner for a game-winning three. Not the most optimal target in that situation! Even if Jones had caught it, he would’ve stared down multiple black jerseys with no blockers in front of him. Unless he Joe Adams’d his way through the entire Las Vegas defense, Jones would’ve likely been tackled without much effort. 

Not only did Meyers get lit up by Maxx Crosby, his throw was way off, as Chandler Jones (who was standing a solid five yards to the right of Meyers’ intended target) didn’t even have to move to intercept the lateral. 

All of a sudden, something had shifted. I talked earlier about how Minnesota’s miracle comeback against the Colts felt like a wave. That wave was gradual; this one happened in the blink of an eye. A second ago, it looked like overtime was imminent. Now, it was big Chandler Jones and not-as-big Mac Jones, mono-y-mono in the open field.

Jonathan Vilma, the color commentator, could sense the impending doom Mac Jones faced; “uh oh!” Vilma uttered in nervous yet excited anticipation. The result looked like something out of “Little Giants”. Poor Mac got stiff-armed all the way back to second grade. The tackle attempt was also about a 0.2/10. 

Not only was the play completely bonkers, it actually had a serious effect on the AFC playoff picture. With a victory, New England’s playoff chances would’ve crossed 60%; instead, that number is now 22% according to probability-savant Steve Kornacki, which is understandable considering that their final three games are against the Bengals, Dolphins and Bills. 

Sometimes, you have to go backward in order to go forward. Other times, going backward might lead to your quarterback getting viciously run over en route to an all-time embarrassing loss. In that case, getting tackled might just be the best option.

Bengals 34, Buccaneers 23: The midsize southwest Ohio jungle cats are roaring

For most of Tom Brady’s career, Brady and making mistakes did not go together. When we’ve thought about Brady, we might’ve thought about things like perfection, flawlessness, a general inability to commit an oopsie with the pigskin. 

Not so much this year. 

Although Tampa Bay might still win the NFC South on accident, Raymond James Stadium hosting a playoff game wouldn’t be indicative of how disappointing of a season Brady and the Bucs have had. 

On Sunday, however, things seemed to be looking up. The emperor found a new groove, as the Bucs offense moved the ball with a new kind of ease, one that had been totally absent for the entirety of this season. Brady had time to throw. Byron Leftwich called a ton of play-action plays, which was not only refreshing, the Bucs looked like a new offense! Combined with Tampa Bay’s defense not allowing Cincinnati’s high-flying offense to do much of anything, the Bucs led 17-3 at halftime.

It’s about to get all stupid up in here.

First, the Bucs failed a fake punt because Giovani Bernard, who the fake punt was designed for, didn’t look like he knew he was getting the ball snapped to him, which isn’t optimal. This feels like a good place to suggest that teams need to stop getting cute on special teams, especially when they’re winning; the cons greatly outweigh the pros. Just ask the Vikings. Or Scott Frost.

Then, Brady couldn’t stop making mistakes. He turned the ball over on four consecutive drives; one was a bad throw into tight coverage, one was a waffler as a result of getting hit, one was a sack fumble, and one was a plain drop by Brady on a handoff to Leonard Fournette. Three of the four turnovers (plus the botched fake punt) happened on Tampa Bay’s side of the field, and the Bengals scored 24 points off of the five mishaps en route to their tenth victory of the season. Unless the Bucs win their final three games, Brady will finish a season with a losing record for the first time in his career, which is a little weird to think about. 

As for the Bengals, they extended their winning streak to six and are quietly 10-2 since starting 0-2?! Three of their four losses have been by a combined eight points?! I feel like we should be talking about this more? Maybe it’s because we’ve seen them make the Super Bowl and we’re already bored of them? Whatever it is, they have the tools for a deep playoff run. I think recognizing that would be a pretty swell idea.

Chargers 17, Titans 14: Where normal football catches are not allowed

When a pass sails out of bounds with no player being able to get two feet in-bounds for a catch or interception, it ends up being an incomplete pass almost every single time.

Almost every single time. 

On a weekend full of outliers and rarely-seen occurrences, there was another one at SoFi Stadium on Sunday. As Justin Herbert lofted a deep ball towards Mike Williams in the end zone, Williams could only stand and watch as the pass spiraled over his head and into the waiting hands of Titans rookie cornerback Roger McCreary. 

Now, if McCreary had hung on to the ball, he would’ve landed out of bounds, and the pass would’ve been ruled incomplete. Most other defensive backs likely would’ve done exactly that. The only problem is that McCreary isn’t like most defensive backs.  

It’s about to get all stupid up in here. 

Instead of landing with the ball out of bounds, McCreary intelligently pitched the ball to safety Joshua Kalu for the assisted interception. It was a feat of incredible concentration and intelligence by both McCreary and Kalu. The only other time I can remember this happening was in 2010, when Oklahoma State defensive back Broderick Brown jumped approximately 75 inches in the air for his own assisted interception against Oklahoma. 

Surely, McCreary made that up on the spot, right? Who ever thinks about doing that until that extremely specific moment arises? McCreary does! He called it an “unselfish moment”. Someone’s in the holiday spirit! That’s nice list material right there. 

However, Williams, the king of contested catches, wasn’t going to be outdone by a rookie. When his team needed him the most, Williams delivered in the only way he knew how: with a defender draped all over him. In a tie game with under 40 seconds remaining in regulation, Herbert looked in Williams’ direction despite Titans defensive back Greg Mabin covering Williams like a pig in a blanket. It’s unlikely that Williams catches this frozen rope. 

It’s about to get even more stupid up in here. 

The catch put the Chargers in field goal range, where Cameron Dicker, appropriately nicknamed “Dicker the Kicker”, drilled the game-winning kick. With their final three opponents being the Colts, Rams and Broncos, the playoffs seem well within reach for the Bolts. As for the Titans, who’ve now lost four in a row, their measly offensive performances combined with Jacksonville’s recent success has them in danger of missing the playoffs for the first time since 2018. 

The Texans had their second consecutive out-of-body experience and almost beat the Chiefs. The Bills and Dolphins played a spectacular game in front of a Buffalo crowd that couldn’t stop throwing snowballs. Detroit’s miraculous playoff chase resurrection continued against the Jets (what a day for cat species!). The Eagles edged the Bears in a game that featured a Jalen Hurts touchdown where the Chicago defense forgot to defend the entire middle of the field and Justin Fields put on another spectacular Michael Vick impersonation, only for it to not count. The Giants squeaked by the Commanders with a Kayvon Thibodeaux masterclass along with some extremely questionable officiating and are now in the driver’s seat for only their second playoff appearance since 2011. 

12 of the 15 games played this weekend were decided by one possession. Three of them ended in walk-off touchdowns. Three teams came back from being down at least 17 points. The Browns scored 13 points and won by double-digits, while the Cowboys scored 34 points and lost. 

The Buccaneers might win the NFC South with 10 losses and host the Cowboys in the playoffs, who could finish in second place in the NFC East with 12 wins. Although the chances of this happening are low, the Jaguars, Lions, Giants, Jets and Panthers – all of whom finished with five of the six worst records in the NFL last season – all have paths to the playoffs in late December. 

For as stupid as this sport may be sometimes, this is why I write these columns. This is why I stay up way past my bedtime. This is why we love football.