NFL Panic Meter: The 4 teams we’re actually worried about after one week

If you look closely at the NFL standings after Week 1, you will find that, somehow, half the teams won and the other half of the teams lost, meaning exactly 50 percent of all teams are winless and 50 percent are undefeated. Deep insights here at Oliver Fox NFL Analysis Inc. 

That gives us a rather wide berth to discuss potential frauds who were heroically exposed as such by valiant, undefeated titans like the New York Jets and the Pittsburgh Steelers. The Los Angeles Rams are tied for the worst record in football, the entire NFC South lost and the Dallas Cowboys couldn’t cover a swing pass to Devin Singletary to save their lives. It’s chaos, so how worried should we all be? Well, two paragraphs into making the same dad joke about how half the teams won and the other half lost, I’m finally ready to tell you. It was an excruciating wait, I’m sure.

The Arthur Smith Face Panic Meter is here to evaluate losing teams

For the panic meter, I’m reviving a gimmick my friend Sam and I used to use in college on my old podcast: the Arthur Smith Face Panic Meter, a reference to the greatest sideline camera cut ever before an Atlanta Falcons fourth down attempt:

We will thus be ranking teams by how many Arthur Smith Faces out of five they should be panicked, which is highly scientific and widely accepted by the academic community. Feel free to use this scale for all your panic meter purposes. Let’s go!

Los Angeles Rams

• Reason for panic: got mollywhopped by the San Francisco 49ers in Australia after contentious jet lag strategy and Myles Garrett is now on IR
• Panic meter: 2 Arthur Smith Faces out of 5

I had way too much fun with the Rams/49ers jet lag battle, a skirmish decided by the finest minds in medicine, media and a two-year effort to send staffers back and forth to take their vitals like they were preparing to invade the Island of Tasmania. There were five-too-many media members talking about how sophisticated the Rams’ strategy was and eighteen-billion-too-many articles like mine discussing it … but it was just that funny.

Ultimately, the Great Jet Lag War was decided on the field, and the Rams looked like complete crap for 60 minutes. They couldn’t move the ball with any kind of consistency and their vaunted defense was getting diced like … uh, some Australian food that needs to be diced. I was going to say sushi but that wouldn’t really have fit. In any case, they got cooked, and the prohibitive Super Bowl favorites are now on notice. Myles Garrett, their bigger-than-big trade acquisition, is now on IR with a knee injury. Red alert?

Eh, red-ish alert, but I’m not going to sound the air-raid sirens just yet. This team is too talented and that game was too weird to immediately freak out about their chances. Kyle Shanahan frequently does this to Sean McVay, and the Rams will be favored in almost all of their games going forward. The risk is the quality of this division; even with preseason injuries, the 49ers look ready to play and the Seahawks defense looked just as good as last year. It’s not going to be some walk in the proverbial park.

Dallas Cowboys

• Reason for panic: got outplayed up and down the block by the New York Giants
• Panic meter: 3 Arthur Smith Faces out of 5

This one was slightly more concerning because I can’t chalk it up to jet lag. The offense wasn’t bad, and Dak Prescott still has a range of elite receivers to throw to while Javonte Williams continues to impress … but the Cowboys do not appear to have fixed their main issue from last season: a defense that looks like they don’t know what their doing.

I will see those four Devin Singletary swing passes for the rest of the week, replaying in my head like some kind of broken film strip — they ran the same route four times in like six plays, got chunks of yardage each time and scored the game-clinching touchdown on it. It was unconscionable, and several other Giants receivers were suspiciously wide open in places they simply should not have been. New defensive coordinator Christian Parker is probably not having a good Monday.

Looking unprepared on defense is liable to get you over the midpoint of Arthur Smith Faces, since it suggests a type of organizational issue that won’t just be solved by conditioning and game reps. There are quality players on this defense, but they need to work together and make fewer mistakes to get back below the panic zone.

Los Angeles Chargers

• Reason for panic: never really had a chance against the Arizona Cardinals despite being 8.5-point favorites
• Panic meter: 4 Arthur Smith Faces out of 5

I don’t know what it is about this loss that is giving me so much anxiety. On paper, there’s a lot of things to handwave: a new offense needs time to install, this is your classic Week 1 overreaction, just a fluky, Chargers-esque loss that we can all forget about. But I’m not going to be able to do that.

The offense looked shaky, sure, but it also felt like the whole team lacked the sort of oomph you need to bring lesser teams like the Cardinals to heel. They weren’t imposing, they didn’t inspire any kind of authority or assert themselves at all. Vegas and the analytics models believed in this team, and 8.5 is a gargantuan number. But nothing visually told me this team could survive in the AFC West.

Cleveland Browns

• Reason for panic: looked like the single worst football operation in NFL history
• Panic meter: 5 Arthur Smith Faces out of 5

Is “panic” even the right word? Maybe this is more of an existential panic, a sort of shadowy and demonic presence of the Arthur Smith Panic Face that you always felt existed but never could quite place. Well now we’ve placed it: the Cleveland Browns suck.

They were just powerless at all levels of play on Sunday. Deshaun Watson threw a horrendous interception and tried to throw another one but it was dropped; they were overmatched in both trenches, and could not do anything defensively against a Jacksonville Jaguars team that is talented, sure, but these aren’t the 2007 Patriots. 

The decision to continue to play Deshaun Watson is incredible to me; other than blatantly trying to tank, which could be happening, playing Watson is evidence that the Browns have zero zilch nada confidence in either Shedeur Sanders or Dillon Gabriel to be anything at all in the NFL. I’m not saying they’re wrong for that assessment, but this is the roughest possible experience for their fans. Nobody has it worse right now … other than Los Angeles Clippers fans. Man.

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