1. Dog gone, July 20. Hours after selling the Washington franchise to the Josh Harris group for an American sports-franchise record $6.05 billion, Dan Snyder got one final good-riddance indignity from the NFL. Snyder was fined $60 million after a lengthy NFL investigation into sexual harassment and financial irregularities during his stewardship of the team.
As I wrote at the time: “The fine might make the NFL feel good because the league’s all about money anyway. But it was a nick-cut on the neck of a man who is singularly responsible for taking a flagship NFL franchise and turning it into a tarnished national embarrassment. One other thing: Snyder’s exit statement led the league in tone-deafness. The second sentence in it: ‘We are proud to have built the most diverse leadership group of any NFL team, including having the highest representation of women, underrepresented groups, and the first full time black female coach in league history.’ You built nothing, man, other than your investment portfolio.”
Now, Josh Harris, make a deal to move the franchise back into the District of Columbia, where it enjoyed its only greatness. Do the right thing. Bring it home.
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2. The Aaron Rodgers drama, Sept. 11. Nineteen minutes after leading his new team, the Jets, onto the field in New Jersey carrying a huge American flag, Rodgers crumpled to the turf with a torn Achilles on the fourth snap of his post-Green Bay career. Rarely has there been as audible a gasp nationwide over a sports happening as there was on this night. Now, the Jets hope Rodgers can be his old self when he opens the season as a 40-year-old dud (currently) with a bad offensive line and a team more reliant on a single person than any other team in football.
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3. The Damar Hamlin story, Jan. 8. Hamlin’s heart stopped on the field in Cincinnati Jan. 2, and the Buffalo safety had to be brought back to life by CPR. On Jan. 5, Hamlin woke up in a Cincinnati hospital and re-took his place in the land of the living. On Jan. 8, some incredible karma happened. In the Bills’ last game of the regular season, New England won the coin flip in Orchard Park and deferred. Buffalo would receive the opening kick. Standing at the goal line, Bills return man Nyheim Hines said to himself, “All right, Nyheim, let’s give ’em something to cheer about.”
Hines took the ball at the Buffalo 4. He told me after the game he felt he had Hamlin’s wings on his back. Hines ran 96 yards, untouched, for a touchdown at 1:03 p.m., and I’ve never seen a crowd go as berserk. Grown men wiping away tears in the stands.
Hamlin’s Twitter feed at 1:06 p.m.: “OMFG!!!!!!!!!”
Hines ran another one back 101 yards in the third quarter. The emotion in that place … sheer relief for Hamlin recovering in a hospital 425 miles away, sheer joy for the moment no one in the stadium would ever forget.
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4. Tom Brady retires, Feb. 1. A jillion things to note about the life and times of Tom Brady, far beyond his seven Super Bowls and league-record passing yards. This is probably my favorite factoid: In his last 14 seasons as a football player, from age 32 to age 45, Brady played 258 football games and missed none due to injury … while John Elway played 256 in his entire NFL career. One other fun Brady-Elway note: Brady threw 15 more touchdown passes after turning 36 than Elway threw in his career.
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5. Rise of the Rust Belt. This is the 90th season for the Lions in Detroit, and the 75th season for the Browns in Cleveland, and it is the first time each has won 11 games in the same year. Detroit won a division title for the first time since 1993. Cleveland made the playoffs for the third time this century. And this part of Rust Belt lore is pretty cool, too: The five rusty franchises stretching from the shores of Lake Erie (Buffalo and Cleveland) over to the old steel town of Pittsburgh and out west to Detroit and north to Green Bay all were either in the playoffs or in playoff contention entering week 17.
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6. A Corn Dog Super Bowl, Feb. 12. Eagles 27, KC 21, 13 minutes left, Super Bowl LVII. Andy Reid called Duo Left 35Y Corn Dog in Kansas City’s opening game of the NFL season. Then he didn’t call it for the next 1,241 plays, until the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl five months later. Then he called Corn Dog twice in four plays. Each resulted in a touchdown—the first to Kadarius Toney, the second, to win the game, to Skyy Moore. It’s a Reid weirdo special: jet motion from the wide side of the field to the tackle, then reversed back at the same breakneck speed, in hopes that the defense can’t catch up. It worked twice, to the shame of the Eagles D.
Where’d the name Corn Dog come from?
‘’Well,” said offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy, “we like to eat.”
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7. Happily ever after for Lamar, April 27. The debate over the Lamar Jackson contract stalemate with Baltimore was misconstrued for months. Many shouted, “How can all these teams not pursue a young former MVP in a league desperate for franchise QBs?” And it was true—Washington and Atlanta, in foresight and hindsight, should have tried to make something work with Jackson. But Baltimore had the right of first refusal on Jackson, and it was likely to match all but a gargantuan offer to Jackson. And did a team want to give a player who’d missed 34 percent of his offensive snaps over the previous two seasons a fully guaranteed contract? Seemed foolish.
I applaud Jackson here. For months, he’d sought a fully guaranteed contract. His union wanted it. But Jackson wasn’t the right person for such a deal because he’d missed so much time. After months of pushing, he realized it wasn’t going to happen, so he did a contract 71 percent guaranteed for injury and 52 percent ($135 million) guaranteed the day he signed. It’s fair to both sides.
Jackson, of course, has gone out and earned his $80 million in 2023 compensation ($72.5 million bonus, $7.5 million salary), leading Baltimore to the top of the AFC and being a prime MVP candidate entering the final week of the season. With his next free-agent bite at the apple coming at age 31, Jackson very likely will have at least one more huge payday coming.
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8. The downfall of Russell Wilson. In an early-morning meeting last Wednesday, Broncos coach Sean Payton told the 35-year-old Denver quarterback he was being benched for Jarrett Stidham for the final two games. Two points to be made here:
- Wilson alleged that Broncos GM George Paton asked or demanded that Wilson adjust the injury guarantee in his contract in midseason, to delay for a year major guarantees in his contract; if he didn’t, the quarterback would be benched. That’s outrageous. It’s the ultimate example of a bad-faith threat. The Broncos agreed to terms of a contract in 2022, and then, in middle of the 2023 season, when they’d just beaten Super Bowl champ Kansas City, they asked Wilson to change his contract to make it easier for Denver to cut him after the season. “It was a low blow,” Wilson said. The lowest. Mark Maske of the Washington Post reported Sunday that the NFLPA threatened legal action against the Broncos at the time, and that the threat violated the CBA. Of course it did. The Broncos backed down, but the NFL should discipline the franchise for this.
- It’s hard to shake the impression that Wilson’s play, despite being an improvement over his disastrous 2022 debut in Denver, wasn’t a fit with Payton’s offense. Denver had averaged just 20 points a game while losing three of four at the time of the benching, and the Broncos were 30th in total yards for the season. When Payton screamed at Wilson on the sideline at Detroit 16 days ago, it seemed clear the coach was upset about one or more cardinal rules of the offense Wilson hadn’t followed.
The upshot is that Denver will be moving on from Wilson in 2024. My bet is Payton, unless Stidham totally bombs in the season finale at Vegas Sunday, will be the opening day quarterback for the Broncos in 2024. Wilson? Way too early to tell, but I’m sure the Raiders, Steelers, Falcons and Patriots will kick his tires.
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9. Motion offenses rule the world. Orbit motion, jet motion, reverse motion (like the Corn Dog plays in the Super Bowl) … The Dolphins of Mike McDaniel and Niners of Kyle Shanahan entered Sunday 1-2 in the league in pre-snap motion plays (Miami 79.9 percent and San Francisco 79.3 percent, per Next Gen Stats), both with 11-4 records. The rebuilding Rams, 8-7 and on a playoff path, were third. I love the orbit motion. McDaniel’s mastering it, trying to give Tyreek Hill and even his tight ends a running start, almost like Canadian football, when the ball is snapped. No surprise here: Miami’s first and San Francisco second in the league in total yards.
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10. Brock Purdy sticks it, pleasantly, to us all, Oct. 8. In the span of 17 months, Purdy went from the last pick in the draft to inheriting the Niners’ QB job, to leading the Niners to the NFC title game, to suffering a serious elbow injury, to recovering and beating out the third pick in the draft and forcing the trade of Trey Lance, to leading an offense putting up 33 points a game on a 5-0 team, to the cusp of MVP contention. Now, Purdy probably won’t win the MVP after his four-pick debacle on Christmas night, but his approach to football will serve him well. As he told me after the 42-10 vanquishing of the Cowboys in week five:
“Every level that I’ve played at growing up it’s like you get to that level and at first you may think it’s a big deal but then once I start playing it’s like, ‘Man this is just football. Youth to high school, high school to college, and college to NFL. Just football. Yes, everyone’s better at every level but at the end of the day, man, you’re throwing a football to some guys trying to get open and catch it. And that’s really how I look at it. Try to keep it simple. This is a simple game.”
Read more in Peter King’s full Football Morning in America column.