Week 18 NFL Awards: Interceptions, fake-fake punts, and Kelee Ringo's broken brain

In a way, Week 18 is just a celebration of the whole football season. There were a few super important games on Sunday, but for the most part, it was just guys playing ball with mega-low stakes.

When that’s the case, you get weird stuff. You get backups who aren’t used to playing and coaches who are willing to let it loose a little more often than normal. It’s a beautiful way to end the regular season before we get into the pressure cooker of the playoffs. 

These are the players, coaches, and teams that really made the most of Sunday in Week 18.

Yoink of the Week: Carl Granderson

Sometimes interceptions just fall into a defender's lap because they’re in the right place at the right time, or you’re the New York Jets and you’re so bad that a defender is never in the right place for an entire 17-game season…

OR you’re an edge rusher who reads a play from the get-go, and you can pluck a ball out of the air. That last one was Carl Granderson on Sunday.

We had better get a Mic’d Up from that game, and he better be saying ‘Yoink’ as he grabs that. That is as pure a yoink as you will ever see: He’s bumped to the outside, steps around the tight end, gets horizontal while jumping backwards, and rips the ball out of the air with late hands… What a play.

Openest guy of the Week: Alex Pierce

When you see busted coverage, your heart either sinks to five inches below your belly button, it comes out of your throat, or you feel nothing at all. You just have to hope that a quarterback falls into the third category.

Riley Leonard, the Colts’ rookie quarterback who was starting his first professional game, did fall into that category. On the third play of the game, he hit Alex Pierce for a 66-yard touchdown while the Texans' defense was away making a sandwich or something.

It would be cool if we were able to get a ‘Riley Leonard pupil-cam’ so we could see exactly how much and how fast his pupils dilated when he saw Pierce break open like that. 

Correction: 

I wrote this, and then Lamar Jackson threw two touchdowns to Zay Flowers when the Steelers’ defense might as well have not even been on the field. Zay Flowers actually wins this award twice.

Correction to the correction:

Aaron Rodgers just hit Calvin Austin for a touchdown after Chidobe Awuzie slipped. Austin wins the award. Final answer. No takesies-backsies. 

Bag fumbler of the Week: Shedeur Sanders

If you’re playing the Bengals defense, you walk on the field knowing that you’re going to embarrass a group of 11 grown men. We’re talking 250-ish passing yards, two or three touchdowns, and maybe only getting sacked a few times. 

This was the perfect spot for Shedeur Sanders to make a statement going into the offseason that he should be taken seriously as an NFL quarterback.

He did not do that. Not even a little bit.

Sanders was 11-of-22 for 111 yards, zero touchdowns, and he was sacked six times. He was an absolute hindrance to the Browns' offense (which is really saying something) against the worst defense in the  NFL. 

The plus side is that now anytime a weirdo Shedeur-stan tries to hype him up over the next nine months, you can just send them this tweet:

Congratulations: you have a solution to deal with future weirdos. You’re welcome.

“Play until the whistle” of the Week: Max Brosmer

The quarterback situation in Minnesota was pretty terrible this season. It went from J.J. McCarthy to Carson Wentz, back to McCarthy, to Max Brosmer, back to McCarthy, back to Brosmer, back to McCarthy, and then finally back to Brosmer. 

On Sunday, Brosmer played his swan song against what was left of the Packers' second (maybe third?) string defense… and it was pretty even. 

The play that encapsulates the entirety of the Vikings' season happened at the beginning of the fourth quarter. Minnesota had a first and goal from the Packers' yard line. Brosmer confidently stepped back to pass… and then he tripped on his left tackle, got back up thinking that the play was over, got absolutely smoked in the back, and fumbled.

Kudos to him for getting backup;  that’s good and all… but yikes. You’ve got to play until the whistle, buddy. 

Him of the Week: Trey McBride

There’s no Monday night football game this week, so I’m going to take it upon myself to do a variation of The Himmys that they do every week. Luckily, Trey McBride made it easy by simply yelling into a parabolic microphone. 

Potty mouth alert:

Yeah. If you hurdle a guy like Luke Duke sliding over the hood of the General Lee, you get to yell whatever you want. Is it necessarily the most “Him” thing of all time? No, not really. But he called dibs on it. Far be it from me to not respect dibs.

Also, it’s Trey McBride: he rocks, but he’s on a garbage pail team. Those kinds of guys never really get their due. He deserves this for the season that he had.

Adjustment of the Week: Josh Johnson

The Commanders’ first drive was a 17-play drive that went 79 yards and ended in a doink. It was long, and nothing came easily to Josh Johnson and that offense. Then they made an adjustment: Throw the ball at the Eagles’ backup cornerbacks. 

It turns out that Quinyon Mitchell, Cooper DeJean, and Adoree’ Jackson might be the three most valuable players on that defense because once the Commanders saw Jakorian Bennett, Mac McWilliams, and Kelee Ringo… Woof. The game was over.

Those guys are simply unable to both play football and obey the rules. It was either get burned in coverage or hold onto the receiver. They chose the latter. 

Ringo, McWilliams, and Bennett combined for five defensive holding and defensive pass interference penalties for a total of 93 yards.

Then, later in the game, the 39-year-old Josh Johnson really felt himself. He chose violence and wanted to embarrass Ringo by simply running into the endzone on Ringo’s side of the field. If that seems like that should be easy to defend, that’s because it really should be. 

He was soooo close to doing the right thing, and then his brain short-circuited (probably because he was being mentally assaulted all game) and just… turned all the way around and ran away for some reason. Was he scared? Did someone in the stands call his name? Did he catch a whiff of a pie on a windowsill and float to it like a cartoon?

Whatever the case, the Commanders made one hell of an adjustment to put a defensive back group of very, very sub-par players on a poster, and it worked out perfectly.

Worst Future Job ever of the Week: The Falcons

On Sunday evening, news came out that the Falcons fired both Raheem Morris and Terry Fontenot, their head coach and general manager. 

That means that they have to hire two capable people who are willing to work with a team that has a 37-year-old quarterback, a 25-year-old injured quarterback who is going into his third season, and they don’t have a first-round draft pick. 

If you’re hiring an HC and a GM, their first question should be, ‘What’s the state of the franchise?’ 

The Falcons have to answer: ‘The most important player on our roster is hurt, not young, and doesn’t have experience. The guy behind him is old and on his way out… Oh, and we don’t really have much of a way to build the future because the guy we fired traded it away.’

That’s not how you get capable people to take the job. That’s actually a really good way to get some real ding-dongs to take it; you’re going to be getting some foolhardy people who think really highly of themselves, and they’re going to fail... But at least the Falcons got out ahead of everyone and opened up their jobs first. That's nice of them.

Play Call of the week: Two fake punts

One of the best things about these meaningless Week 18 games is that coaches make decisions knowing that they have nothing to lose. 

Someone must have told Shane Steichen that his job was safe because late in the first quarter, the Colts found themselves in a fourth and five from their own 29-yard line and Steichen called a fake punt. 

It worked. Rigoberto Sanchez hit Mo Alie-Cox for a 16-yard conversion. It was awesome…. But the punt team stayed on the field and lined up in punt formation on first down.

No one, including the Texans, had any idea about what was happening. They had some mixture of personnel on the field when they lined up and got called for Defensive Too Many Men on the Field. 

That’s the kind of thing that doesn’t even work in video games. Somehow, Shane Steichen’s strategically perverted brain made it work. I would love to talk to anyone in that stadium to hear their (probably) very confused side of the story. 

I can’t imagine seeing a punt team on the field on a first down in the first quarter. That’s bonkers... It’s genius if it works, but it’s bonkers.

Normal Guy of the Week: Blake Grupe

The assumption here is that you’re a normal person and not an NFL-caliber super athlete. If you’ve ever wanted to know what it would look like if you tried to tackle an NFL player, Blake Grupe, the Colts’ kicker, has you covered.

At five feet and seven inches tall and 156 pounds, Grupe doesn’t look like he belongs on a football field… but he is on the field… and sometimes kickers have to try to tackle. The problem is that when a kicker needs to tackle, the situation is already about as bad as it could be: the returner has a full head of steam and has made it by all of the guys who are actually built for contact. 

Luckily for Grupe, Jaylin Noel is the Texans' returner, and he’s only five feet 11 inches tall and 201 pounds. He made it all the way past the Colts’ front line on one of his returns, so Grupe pulled up his big boy pants and tried to lay a hammer down…

It’s like he wasn’t even there. He bounces off Noel and does a full 360 in the air. It was like a semi driving down the highway and hitting a raccoon…. Just absolutely no effect on any part of the play. 

Now you don’t have to think about what you would do if you were on the field. You’re not Vince Papale… you’re a dweeby pipsqueak who will get rocked. If this doesn’t convince you: go hang out next to the train tracks and try to high-five the train as it comes by. Same result.

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