FMIA Week 17: Lamar Jackson, Ravens in league of their own; was Taylor Decker eligible?

1. I think the NFL cannot allow this David Tepper incident from Jacksonville to be minimized. It appeared that Tepper threw the contents of a drink cup either at a fan or a group of them from his box at the Panthers-Jags game on Sunday. Tepper comes from a world of high finance where there aren’t cameras following one’s every move. So when you buy an NFL franchise, you’re going to get shadowed. People will watch you. They’ll know who you are. Tepper’s going to have to learn to deal with it and not be a hot-tempered lout. Roger Goodell needs to fine him significantly for the tossed drink—unless there’s something about the video we don’t know—and soon. This week.

2. I think it’s hard to imagine Lamar Jackson not winning his second MVP now.

3. I think these four things are evident after Sunday’s games:

• The Bears are 7-9, and I think Justin Fields has done enough to earn the 2024 QB job. I’d like to see GM Ryan Poles turn that first overall pick (from Carolina) in 2024 into either three high picks or Marvin Harrison Jr. and one first-round pick
• Tyrod Taylor, 34, will be a solid NFL backup for as long as he can throw a football.
• James Conner, he of the one-handed catch in the end zone to shockingly tie the Eagles at the Linc, is one of the great players we don’t appreciate enough.
• On my Offensive Rookie of the Year bingo card, I never thought with one week to play I’d have the 177^th pick in the draft a whisker ahead of the second. But I do. Precocious Rams wideout Puka Nacua (101 catches, 1,445 yards) trails only CeeDee Lamb and Tyreek Hill in receiving yards after another great game against the Giants. C.J. Stroud’s very deserving of the award, and shouldn’t lose it because a concussion robbed him of two games. But Nacua’s been so good, with only four games under 50 yards receiving and seven over 100. Good race.

4. I think the Lions are pretty darned happy Jacksonville opened the 2022 NFL Draft by picking Travon Walker. Delirious, I’d say.

5. I think there is no ceiling for NFL TV ratings, apparently—up 8 percent over last year, and the highest since 2015. Each of the three Christmas games outrated the telecast of the Oscars by 10 million viewers or more. And those three Christmas games all landed in the top 10 of this season’s highest-rated games.

6. I think Mike Florio’s right: There should be football next season on Christmas, even though Christmas is on a Wednesday. But I don’t need football all day. One game. Christmas night.

7. I think—no, I know—that I have an odd solution for it. Take two pretty good teams in the same division. Say, the Seahawks and Rams. Have them play their one required short-week Thursday game on Dec. 19. Then have them come back for their second meeting of the season the next week, on Wednesday, Dec. 25. You’ll say you can’t play back-to-back games against the same team. Why? Give me one reason why. There’s not a good one. The benefit to these teams, to me, is that the two road trips are relatively short, say two hours and 20 minutes, and then both teams have 10 days off before the final game of the season, at a time of year when the importance of rest is paramount. I think the players would be for it. Anyway, send me your thoughts on Christmas football 2024 if you have interesting ones (peterkingfmia@gmail.com).

8. I think year three is a good time to judge young football players. In fact, Jets coach Robert Salah said that early in 2020 first-round tackle Mekhi Becton’s career. Because of a couple of injuries, let’s give Becton a fourth year. He’s played 30 games now, including 15 starts this year at tackle, mostly on the left side. Becton leads NFL tackles this year with 16 penalties taken and 12 sacks allowed. He’s allowed a ghastly 50 quarterback pressures in 920 snaps played, per PFF. The Jets have seen enough of Becton, surely. I keep hearing of the prospect of the Jets chasing Davante Adams to add to the Aaron Rodgers Alumni society in 2024, but forget that. The Jets should go all-in on trying to lure free-agent-to-be Tyron Smith from Dallas. He’s 33, and he’s missed 34 starts over the past four years due to injury, but he’s been a brick wall in 12 starts at left tackle for the Cowboys this year. Because of his injury history, he won’t be a break-the-bank player—maybe two years, $30 million, with $18 million guaranteed—and the Jets could backstop him with a day-two tackle in the draft.

9. I think, as much as David Bakhtiari would be a good option in his prime to rejoin Rodgers as the Jets’ blindside tackle in 2024, Rodgers’ best football friend just isn’t a solid option at this point, except as a roster longshot. Bakhtiari is a solid guy and great teammate, but he’s been able to play one game in 2021, 11 in ’22 and one this season because of persistent knee issues.

10. I think these are my other thoughts of the week:

a. It was strange, and superb, to have Christmas weekend off with the family in California. Missed most of the first half of Ravens-Niners because “Elf” was the TV choice that evening with the kids. Went to a Warriors game. Played backyard soccer. Threw the football to the kids. All fun stuff.

b. Greatest bowl mascot in the history of the world:

c. The Pop-Tarts Bowl. The Tony the Tiger Sun Bowl. The (defunct) Poulan Weed-Eater Independence Bowl. The Bad Boys Mower Bowl. I don’t watch a snap of any of them, but I do love the names.

d. Football Story of the Week: Jourdan Rodrigue of The Athletic on the Rams’ pro scouting department, and how they unearth gems necessary to win for a team that is cap-strapped and playing without the normal complement of high draft choices because the team has traded them for years.

e. I like Rodrigue so much because she is superb at explaining how the sausage gets made in such a complicated game, particularly when, as Rodrigue reports, the team is anchored down by $80.3 million in dead money—more than a third of the salary cap.

f. How the Rams settled on starting guard Kevin Dotson—acquired in a low-round draft-pick swap with Pittsburgh—and how they picked up veteran cornerback Ahkello Witherspoon for just $1.08 million this year—were particularly telling. Dotson and Witherspoon buttressed need positions and have helped keep the Rams in contention.

g. Wrote Rodrigue:

Witherspoon, for example, was a player with whom [director of pro personnel John] McKay and the coaching staff had been familiar for years because he spent his rookie contract in the division with the 49ers before playing in Pittsburgh from 2021-22.

“I had probably evaluated him seven or eight times,” McKay said, “knew exactly what kind of player he was, what he could bring that we didn’t have. And then another benefit was that he had a lot of crossover (with our coaching staff).”

Defensive coordinator Raheem Morris noted the Rams’ own position group was a little “height-challenged” (his words; prior to Witherspoon the Rams didn’t have a cornerback above six feet) and opened a project with McKay to see if they could find a good addition within their salary cap constraints. Morris wanted to cover more aggressively than the Rams had in 2022.

“It’s a true collaboration and what is really helpful is those guys (in pro scouting) do a great job of diving deep, having a good feel for the landscape,” McVay said.

… It still took some time. Morris had to convince Witherspoon to sign a low-cost deal, after McKay and Witherspoon’s agent had an open conversation about the Rams’ 2023 financial limitations just hours after Witherspoon’s release from Pittsburgh.

“He’s such a good fit. I think the heartbeat of pro scouting is really being dialed in on your own team, your own ecosystem of what kind of human beings work in here, what kind of players work,” McKay said. “What works for our coaches, what do they want? When you have that kind of understanding, it makes bringing in players a lot easier … Ahkello has been all of that, and then more.”

Tommy Gilligan-USA TODAY Sports

h. One of the things I appreciate about how the Rams operate is they don’t make excuses about what they don’t have. They figure out ways to stay competitive with the flotsam floating around the NFL landscape. Good job by Rodrigue explaining it all.

i. New Year’s Advice of the Week: Neuropsychologist Julia DiGangi, writing in the Wall Street Journal, on why going all-in on New Year’s resolutions isn’t such a great idea:

j. Great headline: “For Happiness in the New Year, Stop Overdoing Everything.”

k. Writes DeGangi:

Each New Year, we pledge to transform our bodies, improve our careers, organize our homes and develop new hobbies. We dedicate ourselves to doing more—more exercise, more work, more activities and social engage-ments. On its face, striving for more sounds pretty good. But it also has a dark side that we need to resist.

As a neuropsychologist, much of my work focuses on how people respond to stress. I often find myself helping people understand the effects of self-defeating behaviors that I call the Overs. It’s a familiar list: overwork-ing, overachieving, overthinking, overexplain-ing, overgiving, overcommitting and overaccommodating.

All too often, however, the Overs themselves become a primary source of psychological danger in our lives. In my work with high-achieving individuals, they often agree that all their overfunctioning feels bad to them, but they insist they need to continue overdoing it in order to stay safe—or, as they put it, to stay “relevant” or “on top.” Regardless of the semantics, the underlying neurobiology is the same: Overdoing is a form of self-protection. The problem is, it becomes bad for us.

… So much about changing habits for the New Year is based on the conventional wisdom that you need to do more to be better. And yes, growth is desirable. But often we say we’re after growth when the truth is we’re running from fear. When we pay more conscious attention to how our brains drive our behavior, we have the opportunity to build what we’re all really after: an enduring sense of inner security.

l. Not certain I agree totally with DeGangi, but I do think one thing is important in life: That’s taking quiet time to either just be bored, or to do some menial task that can be fulfilling—doing dishes, folding the laundry—in a task-completion sort of way. Maybe not for everyone, but for me it gets my mind in a different place.

m. My wife and I are big crossword-puzzle people. I know I’ve asked this before, but I forget the answer. Why, in doing a challenging crossword, does it help to walk away from the puzzle for a day or two, then come back and look at the same clues again—only this time, you figure it out?

n. An example. The Dec. 18 New Yorker crossword was labeled “moderately challenging.” (Uh-oh.) And I’d look at it for a few minutes before bed. The first day, I got only six answers. (Six letters, “Four hundred metres on a track,” for instance. Easy. ONELAP.) Puzzled by “watering hole near a pool, perhaps” on night one. Two nights later, I got it: TIKIBAR. Next night: Angling for a deal, with a “G” in the middle: HAGGLING. And I swear, every night I add three or four, and now I’ve got only one major blank area, the lower right, that confounds me. (Seven letters, “Desertlike.” Clueless. All I can think of is ARIDDDD.)

o. Anyway, it’s a curious thing, how the mind works with crossword puzzles.

p. Steve Hartman is at it again. His piece from Friday night, from Marshalltown, Iowa, is one of his best. It’s about geese:

q. “Blossom welcomed Frankie with open wings.”

r. Retiree of the Week: Jeff Schultz, longtime Atlanta-based columnist and scribe, with a great farewell column at his latest employer, The Athletic:

s. In his farewell column after 42 years in the business, Schultz wrote:

There are so many gratifying days. But the time between the columns can wear on you. Going to sleep at night and waking up the next morning with the same questions — “What do I write about next? How do I serve my readers?” — is draining.

I’ve missed too many holidays and too much time with family and friends. My wife has tried to have too many conversations with me when I was on the phone or looking at my laptop. One year, I missed Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s. She should’ve left me. Even the dog should’ve left me. I would’ve left me.

“What are you going to do? You need to do something,” Arthur Blank said to me the other day.

“Arthur, I can’t work at the age of 81 like you,” I said.

“Okay,” he replied, “but when you wake up, you need to have something to do. You can’t let yourself get bored.”

Which is funny because the one thing I keep telling my wife is, “Let me get bored. I want to know what that feels like.”

t. Beautiful.

u. Observation of the Week by a 66-year-old man (who is me): I continue to be astounded at all times of day and evening how many people simply walking down the street in my neighborhood in Brooklyn are smoking marijuana. The smell is rancid. I guess that’s just a thing I’ll have to get used to.

v. Do I have to?

w. Podcast of the Week: David Remnick of the New Yorker Radio Hour with a smart 22-minute look at the U.S.-Mexico border crisis, including an insightful take on life at the border from New Yorker staff writer Dexter Filkins:

x. “There’s no way I could have imagined what I saw,” Filkins said. People from Mexico and South America, but there’s more. “About 4 million people have come into the country. They’re coming from everywhere in the world—Tajikistan, Burkina-Faso, China. The number are amazing, but also the diversity of people coming across.”

y. Sobering topic, but an important one.

z. Happy 2024. Hope it’s a rewarding one for all of us.

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