NFL Week 14 awards: Snow game chaos, tanking excellence and ref malpractice

Sunday was a do-or-die week for a handful of teams in the NFL. We saw the Bengals get their hearts ripped out, the Chiefs hand a win to the Texans, and the Ravens get jobbed. You can get an analysis of all that somewhere else. We’re here to celebrate football and to acknowledge the best performances, the worst calls and the most egregious plays and decisions of the weekend. As always, we start with the Game of the Year of the Week.

Game of the Year of the Week: Bills-Bengals

We’ve been getting absolutely treated this season with chaotic games, where defense is optional, and offenses are being run at an incredibly high level. This week, that game was between the Cincinnati Bengals and the Buffalo Bills. Did we mention it was played in Buffalo, and it was a snow game. What a masterpiece.

In the first three quarters of this game, there were only two punts. It felt like it would be one of those games where the team that wins is the team that has the ball last. Until the fourth quarter. The Bills scored, and with 7:33 left in the game, the Bengals had a 28-25 lead. Joe Burrow and company just had to move the ball down the field, kill some clock and score. They had done that on five of their seven previous drives and made it look easy, so there’s no reason to think they couldn't do it.

Then, on a first-and-10 from the Bills’ 33-yard line, Burrow threw a dinky little pass to Ja’Marr Chase. Christian Benford was coming in on a corner blitz, high-pointed the pass, and ran it back for a 63-yard pick-six. 

Now the Bills have a 32-28 lead with 5:19 left in the game. Clock be damned, the Bengals had to go downfield and score. Jordan Phillips hated that plan. On the Bengals’ first play, he tipped Burrow’s pass straight up into the air so that A.J. Epenesa could come down with another interception. Both teams scored one more time, because of course they did, and the Bills walked away with a 34-39 win. It was awesome… unless you’re a Bengals fan. You probably hated it if that’s the case.

Bloodbath of the Week: Commanders

Injuries happen. It stinks, but it’s a fact. Some teams try to cut down on them, while other teams say, ‘Yes, but Jayden Daniels said that he wants to play.’ You’ll never guess which team the Commanders are. 

In Week 9 (that was five weeks ago), the Commanders were down 38-7 to the Seahawks with 7:39 left in the game.  Jayden Daniels got sacked and dislocated his elbow. It was gross and completely avoidable by simply not having your injury-prone quarterback in the game when there’s no coming back.

Later on, Dan Quinn said that he was upset with himself for having Daniels in the game at that point. He learned from his mistakes, right? Wrong.  Earlier this week, the Commanders announced that Daniels was going to come back and play. Again. Five weeks after his elbow got ripped off his body. The general consensus was, ‘OK. Cool. But why?’

The Commanders had a 3-9 record and a 1% chance to make the postseason. Playing your franchise guy in the meaningless snaps of a game is bad, but playing your injured franchise guy in an entirely meaningless game is worse.

As anyone and everyone predicted, Daniels reinjured his elbow. He threw an interception and very dumbly decided to become a defender. Isaiah Rodgers took offense to that and threw Daniels about five yards directly onto that elbow/arm. Daniels left after that. He was 9-of-29 for 78 yards on the day.

If that wasn't bad enough, later on in the game, Zach Ertz’s knee turned into jelly. He’s 35 years old, and 35-year-olds don’t come back from that kind of thing. If this is the end of his career, it’s been an absolute blast. It stinks that he had to spend his latter years in Arizona and Washington, but no one will ever be able to take away his game-winning touchdown in Super Bowl LII. 

Back to the Bloodbath: The Commanders lost 31-0. That’s their eighth straight loss, and now they are officially mathematically eliminated from the postseason. 

Misery of the Week: Indianapolis Colts

We live in a world where an injury to the 2024 second-overall pick and reigning Offensive Rookie of the Year, who took his team to the NFC Championship game, wasn’t the most impactful quarterback injury of the day. 

Instead, it was the sixth-overall pick from the 2019 draft, a guy who has won one playoff game in his career. But his injury was more significant. 

Late in the first quarter, Daniel Jones threw what looked like a pretty basic pass. He wasn’t getting much pressure (because of an illegal block), he took a deeper drop, slid to his right and delivered a ball to Alec Pierce. His leg looked a little wonky when the ball left his hand, but it wasn’t anything crazy.

It turns out that the wonky leg was because he tore his Achilles, and now he’s done for the year. Not only does that totally suck for the Colts because they were having a really good season, and now they have to start Riley Leonard, who was the 189th pick in the draft, but also because they just traded away their next two first-round picks for Sauce Gardner.

It sure seemed like they were going all in on Daniel Jones for the near-ish future. Well, now they’re right back to where they were after Andrew Luck retired: a team that’s a quarterback away from winning. 

Rookie of the Week: Nick Emmanwori

It’s going to be hard for anyone to overtake Carson Schwesinger for the Defensive Rookie of the Year, but if there is someone, it’s the Seahawks’ Nick Emmanwori. The dude made an amazing case for himself on Sunday when he had six tackles, two tackles for a loss, one sack and one interception. He also blocked a field goal, because why not?

He saw that he was going to play against a Kirk Cousins-led offense and took advantage of it. If there’s an offense that’ll let you flex, it’s that one, and he deserves to get his kudos for being a wrecking crew.

Pipsqueak of the Week: Grant Delpit

The Browns played the Ravens in Week 2. Before that game, Cleveland’s safety Grant Delpit went on record saying that it was “not hard” to tackle Derrick Henry. With that kind of stank, you’d think this guy can not just tackle anyone, but do it with violence and confidence. 

Fast forward 12 weeks, and the Browns are playing the Titans and rookie quarterback Cam Ward. Delpit had an amazing opportunity to sack Ward, and it went just about as pathetically as humanly possible. 

Have you ever had a ladybug land on you and then you kind of freak out and launch it against a wall way harder than you actually needed to? That’s what Cam Ward just did to Grant Delpit. To watch a grown man shrug off and emasculate another grown man like that… It was disgraceful. Shout out to his teammates for picking him up off the ground. They’d have been right to just leave him there. 

Assault of the Week: Jalen Pitre

The Sunday Night Football game was three hours of 11 guys on defense beating the life out of the 11 guys on offense. The one play that personifies the entire game was at the end of the third quarter, when Houston’s cornerback, Jalen Pitre, unleashed the fury of a thousand suns square into Rashee Rice’s left shoulder. 

To quote Jim Ross: “GOOD GOD ALMIGHTY. GOOD GOD ALMIGHTY, THAT KILLED HIM. AS GOD IS MY WITNESS, HE IS BROKEN IN HALF.”

It was just a textbook defensive play. Pitre allows Rice to touch the ball, comes in like an ICBM looking to ruin a day, and explodes into his shoulder, decleats him ala Charlie Brown, walks to the Kansas City sideline, and rightfully talks his talk. What an unbelievable play. 

Backup QB of the Week: Brady Cook

For the sake of interest, I’m going to avoid giving Matthew Stafford his 60th Old Guy of the Week award of the season. Instead, we’re going to pivot to the best backup quarterback of the week. 

Now, you get to decide what you think “best” means. In this case, “best” is going to mean which backup quarterback did the best job at living up to their role as a backup quarterback. That quarterback is Brady Cook, the Jets’ third-string QB.

Justin Fields got benched a couple of weeks ago for Tyrod Taylor. That left Fields as QB2. Unfortunately, he was ruled out of the Week 14 game because of a knee injury. That left only Taylor and Cook. Wouldn’t you know it? Taylor left the game in the first quarter, which forced the Jets to throw their UDFA quarterback from Mizzou straight into the fire. 

He ended the day going 14-of-30 for 163 yards, throwing two interceptions, fumbling twice and getting sacked six times in the Jets’ 34-20 loss to the Dolphins. He looked exactly how a third-string quarterback for the New York Jets should look. There was no thought of, ‘Why have the Jets been keeping this guy on the bench?’ It was all, ‘Oh yeah, He’s so much worse than everything else they’ve thrown out there.’ 

This NFL season has been chock-full of weird stuff, so it was really nice to see this play out exactly how you thought it was going to play out. 

Disaster of the Week: NFL referees

Sunday was a bad day for the officials in the NFL, and it’s getting harder and harder to tell the total dumb-dumbs who say "The NFL is rigged" that they’re total dumb-dumbs. The Steelers/Ravens game had two moments. The first was when Aaron Rodgers caught his own deflected pass, but a Ravens defender also caught that pass at the same time.  The refs ended up ruling it as not an interception because Rodgers’ knee was down when he touched the ball —or something like that. They never really gave anyone a good explanation of it, which is becoming more common on mega-impactful plays. 

Regardless, it was sketchy, dumb and frustrating. However, that one paled in comparison to the call at the end of the game. 

With 2:47 left in the game, the Ravens were down 27-22. They had the ball on the Steelers’ 13-yard line. Lamar Jackson threw to Isaiah Likely. Likely caught the ball, took two steps, and then had the ball knocked out of his hands. It sure looked a whole lot like a touchdown. But then it was overturned because the ref said he never completed the catch.

In the pool report after the game, some clown in charge of the whole thing defended the ruling, “The control is the first aspect of the catch. The second aspect is two feet or a body part in bounds, which he did have. Then, the third step is an act common to the game, and before he could get the third foot down, the ball was ripped out. Therefore, it was an incomplete pass.”

They’re saying he needed a third step? What? Since when do you need a third step in the end zone? 

All of those are touchdowns from this year, and all of them were sick. Are we just making up fake additions to rules now? Get out of here.

Tank job of the Week: The Browns

Sunday was a must-lose game for the Browns. The Titans had a 1-11 record, which gave them a pretty solid hold on the first overall pick in the 2026 draft. A head-to-head loss on Sunday was going to go a long way in the Tankathon standings.

The problem for the Browns was that Shedeur Sanders was having a pretty solid game. He was 23-of-34 for 364 yards, three touchdowns and an interception. With a little over a minute left in the game, Sanders threw his third touchdown pass to bring the Browns within two points of the Titans (31-29).

It was at this point, the two teams made a deal: The Titans win a game to help build Cam Ward’s confidence, and the Browns lose a game to make sure they stay in the bottom five of the League. Instead of running a real play on the two-point conversion, the Browns took Sanders off the field and ran a play that they might have practiced once. 

That’s a chef’s kiss. There was absolutely zero chance that play would’ve worked, but Cleveland ran it to make sure the game didn’t go to overtime. No notes. 

Dumb Eyes of the Week: All of us

Maybe you’re dumb. Maybe you’re not. If you are, that’s totally fine. Life can be a little more exciting if you’re dumb. For example, on Rashid Shaheed’s 100-yard kick return: It’s already a super awesome play, but when he crossed the 50-yard line, it looked like he was going to get annihilated by someone, which would’ve been awesome. 

Then you realized that you have a dumb brain, and that was actually just the sky cam that he was running under. We’d better get a video of this return from one of those Mercedes-Benz Stadium camera angles. We know that they have the capability to do it, but they only use it for Bijan Robinson runs.

An open letter to the Atlanta Falcons: You made us (read: me) think that Shaheed was going to get hit by a human torpedo because the Sky-Cam operator is way too cavalier a pilot. In order to make it up, release the Bijan angle. It’s the least you can do.