Week 16 Awards and Superlatives: Bullying, QB downgrades and the sole-lefty

We only get two more Sundays with full slates of football. You’re going to close your eyes, and when you open them, you’ll be in the middle of a dry January with only a couple of games on during the entire weekend. We need to cherish this as much as we possibly can.

A great way to do that is by awarding the excellence and buffoonery that we see on Sundays, so that’s exactly what we’ll do. 

First, it feels important to acknowledge the Saturday games: Every week, I award one Sunday game the “Game of the Year of the Week.” It would be disingenuous to award a Sunday game that award; that game was the Bears/Packers game on Saturday night. Sure, the Steelers/Lions game was good, but that game in Chicago was simply phenomenal. 

Anyway, here are the awards for Week 16

Downgrade of the Week: Mahomes to QB3

Backup quarterbacks are hot this time of year. If everything’s going well, you get a QB2 at the end of a game so the starters get rest… But not everything is going well for every team. 

On Sunday Night Football, we saw Snoop Huntley come in for Lamar Jackson, who went down with some kind of rib/back injury. Max Brosmer came in for J.J. McCarthy, who left with a hurt hand. Joe Milton came in for Dak Prescott because the Cowboys were getting blown out, and their season is over. 

The big news going into this week was Patrick Mahomes’ exploded knee and Gardner Minshew taking over for him. That lasted for all of one full quarter because he ended up hurting his knee early in the second quarter … which meant that it was Chris Oladokun’s time to shine.

With 1:53 left in the fourth quarter of one game, the Chiefs were playing with Mahomes. With 11 minutes left in the second quarter of the next game, they were playing with a 2022 seventh-round pick. The decrease in quarterback quality in roughly 21 minutes of football might never be seen again. 

Bully of the Week: Brian Burns

There are two types of Bullyball. There’s the kind where an offense runs the ball and humiliates a defense, which is the normal kind … and then there's the kind where a player will straight-up annihilate someone seemingly effortlessly. 

Last year, we saw it in the divisional round of the playoffs when Nolan Smith Jr. ran and smashed Elgton Jenkins.

On Sunday, Brian Burns was a bully. For some reason, the Vikings didn’t block him, and he blew up J.J. McCarthy for a strip sack… but it wasn’t a strip sack where he rips the ball away. Burns simply smashed McCarthy so hard that his hands exploded, and he dropped the ball. 

That right there? That’s Bullyball, but on a singular level. That rocks. 

Game plan of the Week: Giants

Jaxon Dart ended his game against the Vikings 7-of-13 for 33 yards, with an interception and five sacks. That’s, objectively, a really bad day.

Their first four plays of the game were runs for 35 total yards. Then they threw the ball, but there were offsetting penalties, so it didn’t count. The next five plays were three runs and two sacks. The next drive, there were eight runs before Dart had his first incomplete pass. They followed that up with another run, a sack, and a field goal. The next drive: sack, incompletion, incompletion.

His first completion didn’t come until there was 1:48 left in the second quarter, and it was for two yards.

Jaxson Dart has looked good at times, but he’s still a rookie. When things aren’t going well for a guy like him, you have to call something that’ll give him an easy completion. The Giants' season is over, and Tyrone Tracy getting seven straight carries isn’t helping anyone… or is it?

Dart’s addicted to taking the ball himself and ending up in concussion protocol. If there’s a way to stop him from doing that, it’s by scripting plays that get the ball to a running back. Was this a losing game plan? Absolutely. Did it save Dart from himself? A little bit.

Fun Haver of the Week: Joe Burrow

The big talk around the NFL world for the last couple of weeks was whether or not Joe Burrow is happy and having fun playing football. He’s on a team that’s only had real success one time, and a lot of that is due to the owners being really bad at their job and super cheap. 

Other than that, he’s been perpetually injured and had disappointing seasons. That all came to a head during some media availability on Burrow’s birthday, where he seemed especially bummed out and gave some weird answers about whether or not he wanted to play in Cincinnati. 

One thing that’ll turn your spirits around is winning and looking really good while doing it. The Bengals did exactly that.

Burrow was slinging the ball, and it looked awesome. He was 25-of-32 for 309 yards and four touchdowns. Anything that he wanted to do with the ball, he was able to do. He hit Ja’Marr Chase nine times for 109 yards, Tee Higgins three times for 53 yards and a touchdown, Chase Brown four times for 43 yards and two touchdowns, and Mike Geisicki three times for 35 yards and a touchdown. 

Also, his defense didn’t play like a pile of dirt either. You have to imagine that helps. 

Joe Burrow seems like a nice guy, and it’s tough to see a guy like that be all bummed out, especially on his birthday. No one knows if these next few games are going to be his last in Cincinnati, but if they are, it’s going to be cool to see him not be miserable and for him to keep having fun with Ja’Marr Chase. That’ll be fun.

Lefty of the Week: Ben Sauls

Here’s something controversial: Seeing Lefties do things left-handed is weird. It’s not bad or anything, it’s just weird. You see something done right-handed 99% of the time, and then you see it done the other way, and you think, ‘Whoa. That’s different.’

That’s especially true in football, and most of the time, you can only tell when it’s a quarterback because everything they do is backwards. Unfortunately, when the Dolphins benched Tua Tagovailoa this week, they benched the only starting left-handed quarterback. 

Fortunately, the Giants filled that void when they signed Ben Sauls, the left-handed(footed?) kicker.

Before he kicked, the broadcast mentioned that he was a lefty, but that didn’t really prepare your brain for what you were ready to see. 

It’s just like looking at one of those 3D art things: I know something is there, I know why it makes sense that something is there, but it’s impossible for me to make sense of it. How do you kick something with your left foot?

For that reason, Ben Sauls wins Lefty of the Week.

Roster of the Week: Cardinals

In 2020, it felt like every week, there was a team that marched out a team of create-a-characters. There were names that you never heard of, and you’d never hear of them ever again.

The Eagles had Travis Fulgham and John Hightower. The Texans had Keke Coutee and Chad Hansen. Washington had Isaiah Wright and Cam Sims. The Bears had Anthony Miller. The Browns had Rashard Higgins. It was a whole lot of nobodies at the skill positions. 

The Cardinals took that approach to their insanely injured roster and built their offense around it. On Sunday, Jacoby Brissett completed 31 passes. Eight of them went to Elijah Higgins, three went to Xavier Weaver, one went to Josiah Deguara, and one went to Steven Sims. This guy named Corey Kiner also had six carries for 32 yards. 

I have never heard of any of those people (aside from Brissett, obviously) in my entire life, and the fact that the Cardinals were able to get enough people to fill a 53-man roster should be applauded… so they win Roster of the Week.

Above average day of the Week: Jarrian Jones 

When I say that someone is having an above-average day, I’m saying that they’re having an above-average day compared to every other day in their life. The Jaguars’ Jarrian Jones had a day that was definitely above average for him.

There was one day in his life that absolutely plummeted his average: Sunday, November 3rd, 2024. The day of Saquon Barkley’s backwards hurdle… Jones was the guy who got backwards hurdled.

That day, his failure went everywhere: T-shirts, highlight reels, pictures, posters, the cover of Madden, the ESPYs, and just about everywhere you could possibly imagine (You’ve seen it. You know.) 

Jarrian Jones didn’t make a bad play; he just got absolutely punked by a running back having the best season a running back has ever had. It wasn’t his fault… but he still paid a price.

That day was an outlier for how bad it was for him, but you still have to count those when you’re averaging things. He could have ten thousand days that are 5/10, but he still had that day that was -1,000,000/10.

On Sunday, he was minding his own business on the sideline when the Broncos’ running back R.J. Harvey came running at him. Naturally, Jones jumped right over him… and he did it with the exact same form Barkley used a year ago. 

Now, the unfortunate part of this is that everyone is remembering how he got punked by Barkley. You have to imagine that he was probably hoping that no one would ever bring that day up again. 

The good part of the day for Jones is that he picked off Bo Nix halfway through the fourth quarter. That interception ended up being the nail in the coffin for a potential Broncos’ comeback.

So, good for Jarrian Jones. Compared to all of his other days, this one was not too shabby. If he wouldn’t have jumped over Harvey and reminded everyone of his past, it probably would’ve been a really good day. Regardless, it’s better than his average day. 

Legal Hit/Hospital ball of the Week: Montaric Brown/Bo Nix

Pat Bryant has been released from the hospital, so all of this is cool to talk about now.

Some quarterbacks are hospital ball throwers. It’s only Bo Nix’s second season in the NFL, so I don’t think it’s fair to him a hospital-ball guy just yet… But we’re getting close. 

He had a really bad one at the end of the game against the Jaguars. He was on his move to the right, and heaved a deep ball to Pat Bryant. The ball was high, and Bryant was going into coverage. That’s a really bad combination. 

Montaric Brown did exactly what he was coached to do. See, the body, hit the body, and force the incompletion. There was absolutely nothing illegal about the hit that he laid down, and it was awesome… It just sucks that Bryant was in the worst physical spot imaginable to absorb the hit.

However, on a day that referees made some very controversial calls, it’s great to see that they didn’t throw a flag on this play just because it was scary. They just let a defensive back drop a bomb into the ribs of a wide receiver who was thrown into danger.

This will be one of those that you see on the ‘2025 biggest hits’ video that you watch in June when you miss football. I can’t wait. 

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