This week in the NFL was -- compared to most weeks -- tame. There wasn’t much that went truly and horribly wrong, and, for the most part, football was the most memorable thing that happened. Still, there’s no such thing as a week in which everything goes right.
The Jaguars: It amazes me that the Jags are allowed to continue calling themselves a professional football team. If I were one of the 31 NFL owners not named Shad Khan, I would have initiated a vote to revoke Jacksonville’s status as a full-time member of this league. I understand that the Jags managed to beat the almost equally terrible Bills in London this weekend, but they did so while reminding everyone watching exactly how incompetent they are.
Ryan Mallett: Career backup quarterback Mallet was released this week following his missing the Texans’ flight to Miami this weekend. By all accounts Mallett claimed he was late as a result of traffic on the way to the airport, but it's likely that no one is losing sleep about the cutting of a questionably skilled backup who was unlikely to see any more major playing time. The Texans remain a mess and will likely be in search of a new head coach at the end of the year. At 2-5, the Texans’ season is already looking like a bust. Meanwhile, Mallet is stuck looking for a job.
The Colts and Saints:A year ago, if you’d told me there was a game between the Colts and the Saints in the middle of the season, I would’ve said it would be one of the best games of the year with a possible shootout between Drew Brees and Andrew Luck. This year, however, such a game is just a display of ineptitude. There’s obviously still hope for a brighter future for Luck, but at 36, Brees’s best days seems to be in his past.
San Diego: In one of the least surprising moves of the last decade, the Chargers officially declared their intentions to leave San Diego in search of a better situation in Los Angeles. The NFL will still have to go through an extensive process to approve the move for the 2016 season, but all indications are that the League would like to have two teams in the L.A. market in the next few years. The last two decades have demonstrated a couple things to football fans: a team can be bad in a major market (i.e. Jets, Dolphins), and a good team can exist in a smaller market (i.e. Packers, Broncos) but when you combine a bad team and a small market, you have an unsustainable situation.
As much as this year has been an incredible mess, filled with blunders, goofs and downright incompetence, it is nice to have a simple week where the actual sport is the focus. Next week will no doubt be filled with more hilariously unfortunate situations, because this is the NFL and two weeks of peace and quiet is truly insane.
