Is it just me, or are there a LOT of third-string quarterbacks playing down the stretch of the NFL season? These are the guys who started or played significant time in this weekend’s games:

Commanders QB Josh Johnson, the ultimate journeyman, after injuries to Jayden Daniels and Marcus Mariota
Chiefs QB Chris Oladokun, after Patrick Mahomes and Gardner Minshew both tore their ACLs
Jets QB Brady Cook, with Justin Fields injured and Tyrod Taylor benched
Dolphins QB Quinn Ewers, with Tua Tagovailoa benched and Zach Wilson usurped
Vikings QB Max Brosmer, with J.J. McCarthy and Carson Wentz injured
Colts QB Philip Rivers, with Daniel Jones and Anthony Richardson injured

That’s almost 20 percent of the league! I know it’s Week 16 and QB injuries happen … but that seems like a lot! As a fan of watching bad quarterback play, what a feast.

– Rodger Sherman

The Bears really have a QB

Bears 22, Packers 16 (overtime)

The Chicago Bears have been unable to find a successful quarterback for 40-plus years. That’s not how pro sports are supposed to work. Franchises are not supposed to have characteristic flaws that haunt them through the decades. But no matter the coach, no matter their record, the Bears have never found a QB, as if “proximity to Portillo’s” and “passing” are inversely proportional. Even when they’ve made the playoffs — even when they’ve made the Super Bowl — their passing game has been uncertain. In 2021, I ranked Bears quarterbacks, most of whom were bad. They’ve had so many bad quarterbacks even since then.

But in the 2024 NFL Draft, they had the No. 1 pick and took Caleb Williams, a man who can do this.

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Chicago trailed 16-6 to Green Bay with two minutes left, but won 22-16 in overtime thanks to two spectacular Williams highlights — a fourth-down fadeaway to Jahdae Walker, who had never caught an NFL pass, and the touchdown above, a 45-yard walk-off game winner in overtime.

It was the throw of the year. Not an exaggeration — Pro Football Focus gave it the highest grade possible, the first such for any pass all season. With pressure coming from the front, Williams backpedaled and threw a ball 57 yards through the air that hit a receiver who was likely interfered with. It wasn’t the longest throw of the season, per NextGenStats, although Williams did that too: a 62.1-yarder off a flea flicker against the Cowboys.

This is the allure of Williams, a quarterback who famously won a high school championship on a Hail Mary from basically the same spot on the field. He’s never been a perfect player. He’s undersized, he doesn’t always make the right play, he’s inconsistent, and people have questioned his leadership skills. He remains below league average in most passing stats, including yards per attempt, touchdown rate, and passing success rate.

But one thing has always been clear: Williams is a damn playmaker. He can make throws that just about nobody else on the planet can.

He’s a microcosm of the Bears. Their underlying metrics are not particularly good. They’ve won seven one-score games, and needed this miracle to beat a Packers team deploying backup QB Malik Willis most of the game. They’re 14th in the league in point differential, and 16th in DVOA.

But the games they’ve won have been bangers. The Bears have won two games on field goals with no time on the clock, and now four with go-ahead touchdowns in the final two minutes or overtime.

I can’t say the Bears are primed for a deep playoff run. Friday Night Lights was a TV show and not a strategy for winning the Super Bowl.

But it feels more fun to be a Bears fan right now than at just about any point in the last 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 years. That’s the magic of a guy who can make any throw.

… and none of it mattered

Steelers 29, Lions 24

Football is a reminder that chaos always wins. Its rulebook is hundreds of pages long. Players are assigned highly-specified roles that they practice with military precision. And then they play high-stakes games like Steelers-Lions — probably the most important game of the week in terms of playoff leverage — and it ends like this:

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Let’s break down what happened here, moment by moment.

It is fourth down with eight seconds left. The Lions must score or they lose. Furthermore, if they lose the game, they almost certainly miss the playoffs. They must run a play that results in a touchdown. They must get the ball into the end zone.
They must get the ball into the end zone. They must get the ball into the end zone. They must get the ball into the end zone.
Amon-Ra St. Brown, one of the best receivers in the NFL, runs a comeback route and catches the ball at the 1-yard line, slightly outside of the end zone. Alas.
Furthermore, St. Brown very clearly commits offensive pass interference, shoving Jalen Ramsey backwards at the top of his route to create the separation needed to catch the ball. The penalty occurred just a few plays after his teammate, Isaac TeSlaa, was also called for a pass interference penalty (this one completely bogus) that wiped out a St. Brown touchdown.
Two officials throw their flags. “I saw a penalty.” “I ALSO saw a penalty.”
Damn. These officials are really on top of this play. Surely they will continue to accurately assess every action on the field as it happens, clearly communicating with the players and fans what’s going on.
After catching the ball at the 1-yard line, St. Brown does not make a millimeter of forward progress. He is, in fact, driven backwards by Ramsey and Joey Porter Jr.
Neither of the officials who eagerly threw their flags on the pass interference penalty seemed to notice that St. Brown’s forward progress has been stopped, that he is being driven backwards, and that they should blow their whistles to kill the play. Knowing the game is essentially over because of the OPI call, they have mentally gone home, hung up their whistles, and snuggled under a zebra-striped blanket.
St. Brown continues to be driven backwards. By the end of the play, he is in the fictional town of “South Detroit” hypothesized in the song “Don’t Stop Believing.”
After losing at least 250 yards, St. Brown is thrown to the ground. On his way down, St. Brown manages to flip the ball to quarterback Jared Goff. Honestly, pretty impressive thing to do while being tackled by two NFL defenders.
Goff, who has a total of two rushing touchdowns in five years as Detroit’s starting QB, makes the most athletic play of his life. He grabs the ball, sprints towards the end zone, leaps at the 2-yard line, takes a hit in mid-air, and tumbles into the end zone.
Goff’s miracle run is partially aided by the fact that the Steelers all assume the play is over. Several Steelers who have stopped playing football snap into action mid-play like when my sleeping dog hears me jingle her harness.
The officials do … nothing. At this point, something has happened — either St. Brown was stopped, or Goff has scored a touchdown.
Tony Romo breaks the play down accurately. “There’s so many things on this level that I just saw. It could be offensive pass interference, and then they actually did score. When did the whistle get blown. HUUUARRRRCKCKK?! It’s too much for me, Jim.”
After a two-minute referee conference, crew chief Carl Cheffers (say that five times fast) emerges. He starts his announcement by saying “the ruling on the field is a touchdown. …” You didn’t need to do that, crew chief Carl Cheffers! That was mean! You made every Lions fan happy for 3.5 seconds knowing you were just going to make them sad again! You could’ve just said “offensive pass interference, the game is over.”

All in all: One of the most iconic plays in NFL history that did not count and never needed to happen at all.

When whistles matter

Seahawks 38, Rams 37

The first entry in this newsletter was about a one-of-a-kind game-winning highlight based on remarkable skill of the players involved. The second was … almost that, except it didn’t technically happen. This is about the weirdest type of football score: A play where a guy just sorta picks up a ball everybody else forgot about.

The Game Of The Year was probably Thursday night’s bout between the Rams and the Seahawks — the two best teams in the league, forced to overtime after the Seahawks completed a 16-point fourth quarter comeback, and capped it with a walk-off two-point conversion:

But for me, the highlight of the game was the first of three successful two-point conversions. The Seahawks ran a screen, but Sam Darnold’s pass was deflected and apparently incomplete. The play was blown dead by officials, and everybody walked off the field. But replay revealed that Darnold’s pass had actually traveled backwards, making it a live ball rather than an incompletion, and that therefore running back Zach Charbonnet scored when he picked up the ball in the end zone.

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First of all: This unlocks an entire new section of the playbook based around throwing the ball backwards off your opponents. Risky, but if executed well, the payoff is priceless.

As many NFL rules experts noted, this play was ruled correctly. The pass was indeed backwards, and a player can recover a fumble after the whistle if it’s considered to be part of “the continuing action” of the play before the whistle. NBC rules analyst Terry McAulay has been tweeting about this play for three days now:

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The play highlights the surprisingly loose legality of the whistle in football. You’d think there would be an entire section on whistles in the rulebook — after all, the NFL rulebook has a 300-word section on “game socks and/or leg coverings” — but not really! Oddly, the rulebook specifies that if there is an “erroneous whistle,” the play is dead immediately. However, if the official whistles non-erroneously that the play is dead, it’s still possible for a player like Charbonnet to pick up a loose ball and gain possession.

🔢 A little playoff sit-rep.

The AFC playoffs are essentially decided: The Patriots, Bills, Jaguars, Texans, Broncos, Chargers, and Steelers are all in, although there’s still a small chance the Ravens overtake the Steelers for the AFC North lead. Nobody has clinched the division yet.
Six of seven NFC playoff spots are pretty much sealed: The Eagles, Bears, Packers, Seahawks, Niners, and Rams have greater than 90 percent odds to make it. The seventh spot is reserved for the NFC South champ, which is still a toss-up between the Bucs and Panthers.

🐈‍⬛ Panthers 23, Buccaneers 20: About the NFC South: Carolina continued its miraculous streak of alternating wins and losses for a ninth week. The NFL doesn’t keep records on this, but thanks to Bill Barnwell for digging up the 1994 Colts’ 12-game back-and-forth streak, which is probably the record.

🐈 Jaguars 34, Broncos 20: Are the Jags gonna win the damn AFC Championship? They snapped the Broncos’ 11-game win streak and have now won six in a row, with Trevor Lawrence accounting for 10 touchdowns (8 passing, 2 rushing) in his last two games. I often lock in my quarterback takes during NFL Draft season so I remain convinced Lawrence is a generational golden god and it’s finally his time to shine.

👴🏻 Monday Night Football tonight: Philip Rivers and the Colts vs. the 49ers. I stand by my opinion that Rivers should not be allowed to play in an NFL game considering he cannot move or throw a football, but I will be watching.

🎄 We’re getting three Thursday NFL games because it’s Christmas! All three of them are likely to feature those third-string quarterbacks we mentioned earlier (Johnson on the Commanders, Brosmer on the Vikings, Oladokun on the Chiefs) … which means I will be SEATED.

OK not to be annoying or anything but my YouTube channel has 2,991 subscribers. You’re allowed to be annoying when you’re close to hitting a milestone. When a receiver has 994 yards and it’s the fourth quarter in Week 18, you get to call a few pass plays even if the game is out of hand. Go subscribe.