NFL Week 15 Awards: Self-awareness, a human torpedo, and a clean(ish) hit

It’s a bummer that both Patrick Mahomes and Micah Parsons tore their ACLs… so we’re not going to think about it. We’re going to think about all of the other cool/fun/not terrible stuff that happened in Week 15, and specifically on Sunday.

The best way to do that is to give out the weekly awards, and the best place to start is with an objectively awesome heads-up play in a divisional blowout. 

Self-Aware Guy of the Week: Kyle Van Noy

One of the most heads-up plays of the entire season happened on Sunday. It wasn’t one of those where a quarterback scrambles for 30 yards because of man coverage or a running back slides down in bounds to kill the clock instead of scoring… Instead, it was Kyle Van Noy understanding that he’s 34 years old.

He picked off Joe Burrow, ran about 11 yards, then handed the ball off to safety Alohi Gilman like a reverse relay race.

At that point in the game, there were seven minutes left, the Ravens were up 17 points, and had shut down anything and everything the Bengals tried to do. It probably would’ve been totally fine if Van Noy just slid down like Michael Pierce did against the Browns last season.

But then you think about Thanksgiving night when the Ravens turned the ball over five times; the Bengals won 34-14. Van Noy certainly remembered that, and let the much younger and much faster Gilman finish the final 85 yards of the pick-six.

That was pretty sick. Do you practice something like that, or is it simply a ‘Oh wow, I really don’t want to run that far. Here. Who wants this thing?’

Slapstick Comedy of the Week: Woody Marks

Jumping into the end zone is cool. Jumping over someone into the end zone is even cooler. Jumping headfirst over no one and into someone into the end zone is just hilarious. On Sunday, Woody Marks did that last one, and it delivered.

Sure, the play is crazy. A jacked-up snap goes between C.J. Stroud’s legs, then Marks has the wherewithal to pick it up and run with it… But launching himself five yards into a defender’s face? That’s comedy, baby. 

To be fair, it probably wouldn’t be funny if Darren Hall got hurt. But he didn’t, so that means it’s cool.

Michael Myers of the Week: The Bills

You have to make sure that Michael Myers is dead, or else he’ll come back for a sequel, and then another sequel, and then a few prequels, and then like, five more sequels. 

The Patriots stabbed the Bills in the side of the head by getting out to a 24-7 lead at halftime. Coming out of half, the Bills scored 21 straight points: a 44-yard drive, a 70-yard drive after a Patriots three-and-out, and a 91-yard drive after a Patriots interception (read: arm punt). All of a sudden, the game is 28-24 with 10-ish minutes left in the game. 

By no means is it easy to stop the Bills' offense, and there’s a really good reason they’ve scored the most second-half points in the NFL (17.3 points per game); you can’t just say, ‘You should’ve probably stopped Josh Allen.’

But that three-and-out they had in the third quarter? Buddy… you had Michael crawling at you with broken femurs, and you had a jug of gas in your hand. Just dumb it all over him and light him on fire. You can’t drop a knife on the ground and walk away.

That’s not to say that Mike Vrabel is the kind of cat to pull up when he gets up; it’s more about the offense not executing (also maybe because of some bad ref stuff, but that happens to everyone).

After the game, Stefon Diggs said that the loss was good for them because they learned a lesson from it, which is a good message… but allowing a team to come back from down 21? We’ve seen that move, and the boogeyman keeps coming back.

Now, from a wider and pettier lens: this is terrific. It’s nice to know that the Patriots aren’t some world-ending juggernaut, and that the ‘Look at who they’ve played on their win-streak’ argument is still valid. 

Rookie of the Week: TreVeyon Henderson

The main reason the Patriots were able to get a big lead on the Bills is because of TreVeyon Henderson, and the main reason they were able to give the Bills a little bit of a scare at the end of the game was also because of TreVeyon Henderson. 

The dude ripped off a 52-yarder in the middle of the second quarter to go up 21-0, and a 65-yarder to retake a 31-28 lead in the fourth quarter. Those were his fourth and fifth 50+ yard rushing touchdowns of the season. 

He ended the day with 14 carries for 148 yards and two touchdowns. So yeah, 117 of those yards came on two carries, so the other 12 carries weren’t mega efficient… but everyone loves home run hitters, and Henderson is definitely that guy for New England.

Old Guy of the Week: Brandon Graham

Could the Old Guy of the Week go to Phillip Rivers? Probably. He came out of retirement at 44 years old and played a football game… but he (very predictably) didn’t play very well and lost.

37-year-old Brandon Graham, on the other hand, came out of retirement and played like a maniac. He was supposed to come back and give the Eagles help at defensive end… But since Jalen Carter is out with shoulder injuries, B.G. is playing almost entirely at defensive tackle.

He only played seven (of 42) defensive snaps, but he had two sacks. One of those sacks, he looked 10 years younger. He bullied Caleb Rogers for seven yards until he was able to turn and yoink Kenny Pickett to the ground. 

Getting two third-down sacks in a game where the defense gets a shutout and holds an offense to 75 total yards earns you an Old Guy of the Week… and it has nothing to do with my Eagles bias and B.G. being my favorite player on the team.

Overreaction of the Week: Tony Jefferson

There have been some questionable ejections this season. Hell, before the first offensive snap in the season opener, Jalen Carter got ejected for spitting on Dak Prescott even though #DakSpitFirst. A few weeks ago, we saw Jalen Ramsey get ejected for punching Ja’Marr Chase even though Chase spat on him. 

This week, we got a non-spit-related ejection… and it was very, very dumb.

The Chargers’ safety Tony Jefferson absolutely slobber-knocked Tyquan Thornton near the beginning of the fourth quarter.

So Thornton caught a ball in traffic, turtled up, lowered his head into contact, and Tony Jefferson got the boot? That seems dumb, and I think that it seems dumb because it is dumb. 

If you want to penalize the guy for a helmet-to-helmet hit, it would make sense; It’d be dumb, but it’d make sense. But to eject the dude for making a good semi-clean hit? That’s wack, and that’s a major league overreaction. He was playing football and punished a guy for coming across the middle. 

Now, Jefferson did give the entirety of Arrowhead the double-birds as he was walking off the field, which is probably going to cost him a decent chunk of cash… but that wouldn’t have happened if the refs had just been chill about everything. 

Bounce-back of the Week: Jalen Hurts

Jalen Hurts and the Eagles offense had the bounciest of bounce-backs against the Raiders on Sunday, and it came at the absolute perfect time. He had the worst game of his career on Monday night against the Chargers, where he had five turnovers, a completion percentage of 52.5% and an overtime loss. Then, he saw the Raiders…

They’re the NFL equivalent of a winless Pop Warner team being coached by a lame-dog septuagenarian who’s only there because his grandson was the quarterback. On defense, they have a hyper-aggressive Maxx Crosby who will wreck an offensive game plan… and 10 other guys who will wreck their own defensive game plan.

Hurts saw that and mentally abused them. He finished the game 12-of-15 for 175 yards and three touchdowns. It would’ve been even more, but the balls he was throwing put the Raiders' defensive backs into some kind of overstimulation-fueled dissociative state; they had three downfield defensive holding/pass interference penalties.

Hurts also had six carries for 37 yards, and three of those were for first downs. He hasn’t been doing that a whole lot this season, so seeing him dip his toes back in that water against a puppy dog defense was good to see. 

News Breakers of the Week: The Chiefs’ beat reporters

For the first time since 2014, the Chiefs are not going to the playoffs. I imagine that news is music to 96.875% of the NFL’s ears. It was certainly just straight-up news for Chris Jones, who learned about it mid-sentence during his post-game press conference. 

In his defense, why would he ever think that? He was drafted in 2016, so it’s something that he’s literally never been exposed to. That’d be like if you were talking about going on a surprise vacation and you said, ‘I think it’ll be a fun time. Are we going to Jonestown? We are? Okay.’

It’s not the first time a player, or coach for that matter, has learned they’re eliminated from the playoffs because of a press conference. It just happened to Marvin Harrison Jr. a couple of weeks ago:

Or that time Ron Rivera didn’t know that the Commanders could be eliminated back in 2023:

Now, MHJ’s Cardinals were 3-9, Riverboat Ron’s Commanders were 4-12, and Jones’ Chiefs are 6-8… what do these guys think is happening? If they’re completely aloof and naive, that’s one thing; and it’s a bad one thing… On the other hand, they could just think, ‘I’m going to come to work and put a helmet on every single day until someone tells me not to.’

There’s a difference between being a total ding-dong and being the epitome of a football guy. It’s safe to say Rivera is/was a ding-dong. The other two? Jury’s out. 

Good on the reporters for telling these guys things. They have vacations to plan, and those January and February resort reservations needed to be on the calendar yesterday. 

Burnt Toast of the Week: Dallas Cowboys

If there’s one thing the Cowboys have been able to hang their hats on over the past two seasons, it’s that they’ve had the best kicker in the NFL. Their offense will go through dumbfounding slumps and come back. Their defense will go from nasty to looking disgusting, but they’ve always had Brandon Aubrey to be a safety blanket of consistency. 

And then on Sunday night football, when nothing was going right for them, Aubrey missed two field goals. The first one was a 51-yarder to take a 17-14 lead in the second quarter, and the second one was a 59-yarder to get a 26-24 lead in the fourth quarter. 

The real kicker is that when you miss those long field goals, the other team has a hilariously short field. Those two misses cost Dallas six points, and the Vikings scored nine points off of them. In theory, that’s a 15-point swing because of a couple of misses…

In reality, the Cowboys’ defense never had a chance to stop the superpowered Minnesota offense being led by a specimen like Nine.

Aubrey did have a pretty slick fake field goal, though.

That was kind of cool.