Regardless of your affiliation in the NFC East, this week was terrible. Every team lost its game, and every team took an absolute beating while it happened. So yeah, the other guys lost, but your loss was abysmal.
For New York, the Giants were on the TV screen. For Dallas, you saw the Cowboys get humiliated, and their playoff chances get wrecked. For Washington, you saw the Commanders get humiliated, and your quarterback get re-hurt. For Philadelphia, you saw the Eagles get humiliated and Zach Ertz’s career end.
There were some splashes of fun, but as a whole, it was an unenjoyable 60 minutes of television. If you didn’t watch it, here’s what you missed.
Question: What does Mike Kafka think he’s doing?
Sometimes an interim head coach comes in, owns the place, gives his team a bump, and then earns a head coaching job the next season. In 2023, the Raiders fired Josh McDaniels and promoted Antonio Pierce; they immediately beat the Giants 30-6 and won five of their last nine games.
Since Kafka took over in New York, the Giants have gone 0-3. Hard Knocks showed Kafka giving the team a speech in their meeting room after their 33-15 loss to the Patriots. He said, “The reality is, we have four f-----g opportunities left with just this group right here… I promise you, I’m going to give you everything I got to go 4-0, one week at a time. We’re going down swinging. Aggressive. I f-----g love this team. The results haven’t been what we want...”
Okay, that's all normal stuff to say to be real with your team and try to help pick them up off the mat… But then he continued.
“I f-----g love this team. I promise you we’re going to get to where we want to go. Recharge this bye week, come back, and go f-----g dominate. If you ain’t about that f-----g life, then get the f--- out.”
Uhhhh. Okaaaay? Listen, I know the Giants are a terribly run organization, but I’m pretty sure they don’t want their interim head coach to tell players to ‘either buy into this losing effort, or get out of the building.’ That seems like a stretch, even for a team with Joe Shoen and John Mara’s brains leading the way.
Answer: The Cowboys are the softest.
During Hard Knocks, we got to listen to one of the more prolific conversations that you’ll ever hear between CeeDee Lamb and George Pickens. Does it matter who said what? You decide:
“I can’t feel my s--t.”
“I can’t feel my s--t.”
“My s--t frozen.”
“I can’t feel my fingers.”
“I can’t feel my feet.”
The weather around the country was weird last week; no one is going to deny or argue with that. What people will deny or argue with is the definition of cold … and the problem with Lamb and Pickens is that they’re practicing at The Star in Frisco, Texas.
The bigger problem is that last week in Frisco, the low temperature was roughly 40 degrees … and they were practicing in the sun.
There’s not a whole lot that us regular people can find in common with professional athletes, but we all feel the weather. 40 degrees is simply not cold enough to complain about, let alone not be able to freeze your body or not be able to feel your appendages. If you’re feeling chilly, put on a sweatshirt and get over it.
Question: What do the Commanders have left?
The majority of this episode focused on Zach Ertz, and rightfully so. He’s been one of the best and most consistent tight ends in the NFL for the past 13 seasons, he was pivotal in the Eagles’ 2017 Super Bowl win, and he’s a great teammate, and he’s a Hall-of-Fame dude.
We saw his coaches gassing him up left and right, the team celebrating him and calling him old, and then a whole bunch of highlights.
Then we watched the game. We all knew what was coming, and it sucked even more than you thought it would. He was mic’d up, and you could hear the panic set in through his voice … it just really, really, sucked to watch.
That was the Commanders’ second injury of the game … a game in which they lost in a 31-0 shutout to a very bad Vikings’ team.
Their part of the episode ends with the players looking all kinds of dejected, getting on the bus. It looked a whole lot like a team that just had its heart ripped out and thrown in a garbage disposal.
Somehow, Dan Quinn is going to have to rally these guys for their Week 15 game against the Giants. I know I just dumped on what Kafka said, but it’s hard to imagine that Washington has any juice in that game.
Question: Should you do Pilates?
The Zach Ertz part was pretty somber given everything that happened, but the other star of the show was DeVonta Smith.
His part starts with him getting to the gym at 5:45 a.m. (which is something he always does) to do Pilates. I’ve done Pilates exactly one time in my life, and it was the most physically exhausting hour of my life. Watching Smitty struggle on the torture rack machine was very relatable.
It’s pretty easy to poo-poo other types of exercises that are different from simply lifting weights and running… but then you see one of the best wide receivers in the world on a reformer, and all of a sudden, you kind of want to join a gym that costs $400 a month. Should you? Probably not. Will you? Probably.
Apparently, Pilates gives him confidence too. Later on in the show, he said that he thinks he’d be able to survive if he simply jumped off an airplane as it was crashing. I don’t see a reason why anyone should doubt him; he can do anything.