Kirk Cousins was a mirage, Matthew Stafford is alligator blood and 9 things we learned in Week 14

Week 14 was backdrop to the last bye week on the NFL slate. It also featured a handful of teams who didn’t bother showing up to games on their schedule.

Kirk Cousins continued his descent into the great Atlanta Falcons pit of regrets. The Chicago Bears bucked the recent trend of teams performing well one week after firing a maligned head coach by getting thoroughly outclassed by the San Francisco 49ers. Matchups between the New Orleans Saints and New York Giants, as well as a battle for the AFC South basement between the Jacksonville Jaguars and Tennessee Titans were close, but mostly unwatchable games.

Fortunately, I was watching anyway. So what did we learn across a smattering of action and a desert of poorly orchestrated football? Let’s dig in.

[Please bear with me for any Twitter embed issues. Our editing software has become a whole problem on that front the past couple weeks. Rest assured, if there’s a play alluded to in the text it’s worth clicking through to see if it didn’t make it into the article itself.]

1. Malik Nabers is stuck in football purgatory

Ladd McConkey is the NFL’s leading rookie receiver. He’s surrounded by average-to-below-average targets. But since he’s got a great defense and a surging young quarterback, he’s thriving. In Week 13, the Los Angeles Chargers beat the Atlanta Falcons despite funneling nearly 80 percent of their passing offense through the rookie wideout.

This should be New York Giants star Malik Nabers’s lot in life. The second wideout drafted in April is a dynamic player with game-changing capabilities. But instead of torching cornerbacks with deep routes and waltzing into the end zone, he’s been reduced to this:

Malik for 2️⃣

📺: FOX pic.twitter.com/4iNThF1ZgM

— New York Giants (@Giants) December 8, 2024

Nabers has been saddled with three quarterbacks his rookie season. Daniel Jones was bad enough to be benched, then released just so there’s be no chance the Giants would have to pay him in 2025. Tommy DeVito was bad, then hurt, and is currently both. That brings us to Drew Lock, who started his Sunday with incompletions on his first eight passes and finished his day with a passing chart that looks like a toddler’s attempt at pointillism.

Nabers averaged nearly 18 yards per catch in his final season at LSU. His average catch as a Giant has come just 6.8 yards downfield. He wasn’t targeted deep a single time in three of his previous four games before Week 14. With the big-armed Lock behind center, he managed to add three more deep targets… only one of which was catchable.

A run through Nabers’s route charts shows a litany of short passes and the occasional deep route that goes nowhere. There are two factors contributing to this. The first is the list of quarterbacks we’ve already discussed.

The second is the fact that defenses have the choice to double him, Wan’Dale Robinson, Darius Slayton or Daniel Bellinger. Nabers draws the short straw nearly every time and, thus, the team’s most targeted player on third down is Robinson — a receiver whose 1.19 yards per route run rank 92nd among 130 wideouts with at least 100 routes this season. Nabers YPRR, by comparison, is a heady 2.09 (32nd).

There is, at least in theory, balm in Gilead. New York’s failures are pushing it closer to a premium draft pick. The Giants can sell a veteran quarterback on the promise of winging deep shots to Nabers and his absurd catch radius. But for now, the rookie is stuck running routes in double coverage and getting open in places his QB can’t find him.

2. Aaron Rodgers maintains the right to poison the New York Jets in a new and exciting way

2024 was not supposed to be a lost season for the Jets. Their quarterback was a four-time MVP, finally healthy after missing all but four snaps of the 2023 season. A top three defense returned alongside a lineup with exciting young skill players. New York entered the season with top odds to win the AFC East.

That did not happen. Rodgers played like a 41-year-old coming off a torn Achilles. His posturing contributed to the firing of Robert Saleh, the head coach apparently vital to keeping the defense rolling. He pressed for the in-season addition of Davante Adams at the cost of future draft picks. He stirred up a typical amount of trash with his weekly Pat McAfee appearances, including one that followed a report the Jets were looking to part ways with their opinionated, but no longer very good, quarterback.

Sunday’s performance in Miami Gardens was proof Rodgers could still find a way to make life worse for the Jets. Namely, by winning games and taking their future draft stock.

.@AaronRodgers12 to @tae15adams CLASSIC TD!!!#NYJvsMIA on CBS & @paramountplus pic.twitter.com/16PssHpjr0

— New York Jets (@nyjets) December 8, 2024

For moments, Rodgers looked like the kind of player worthy of being dealt for multiple second round picks. Week 14 marked his first 300-plus yard passing performance since 2021. He completed 60 percent of his passes that traveled at least nine yards downfield and led New York to its most total yards of the season (402).

This drove the Jets dangerously close to a win and potentially two things they don’t want; a worse draft pick and a difficult decision to make on whether to bring Rodgers back for 2025.

waaay down the field to @tae15adams 🙌#NYJvsMIA on CBS & @paramountplus pic.twitter.com/F6S1TVyXHc

— New York Jets (@nyjets) December 8, 2024

Fortunately for New York’s long term hopes, a 52-yard Jason Sanders field goal in the waning seconds and a lost overtime coin flip managed to doom the team to 3-10 on the season. And yes, there’s something to be said when a one-touchdown game stands out as a statement performance from Rodgers. But the message was clear; the veteran quarterback remains good enough to win a few games — maybe enough to take the Jets out of draft position to select his successor.

No team wants to lose games, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a benefit. The silver lining of this latest New York season was it wasn’t a halfway failure. A sustained losing streak pushed the franchise closer to the top of a two-quarterback draft that could provide salvation even if this wasn’t the process in which Jets fans had placed their trust.

Instead, the punchless team that flailed to a Week 13 loss to the Seattle Seahawks despite an early 14-0 lead looks capable of playing spoiler over the final quarter of a schedule that includes winnable games against the Jacksonville Jaguars, Los Angeles Rams and a home rematch against the Dolphins.

With that, Rodgers could find one more point of light to extinguish in a season he’s dragged into his darkness. New York won’t make the playoffs in 2024. This season will go down as a failure. The only way it could get worse is with a few meaningless wins that hinder the team’s ability to meaningfully improve in the near future.

If Rodgers keeps playing the way he did in Week 14, he might just get there.

3. Kirk Cousins embraced all the wrong parts of the Atlanta Falcons

The Falcons have gone from a two-game lead atop the NFC South to second place over the course of a four-game losing streak. The culprit behind the slump? The veteran quarterback who was supposed to unlock the potential of the elite playmakers at every position. Instead, Cousins has been predictable and exploitable, setting up a smorgasbord for opposing defenses along the way.

From Kirk Cousins is embracing all the wrong parts of the Falcons:

The issues are myriad, but many stem from the combination of last year’s injury and the fact he’s now 36 years old. He’s been a sitting duck in the pocket, and while that hasn’t resulted in more sacks — his 5.7 percent sack rate is actually better than it was most years in Minnesota — it’s created an impetus to make poor decisions and rushed throws downfield.

You can see that in the clip above. With the walls crashing around him, Cousins has the veteran gravitas to move up in the pocket but rushes the throw, blanking Josh Metellus waiting underneath in the process. This isn’t new; even when Cousins is nimble enough to escape pressure he’s seemingly doing so at the cost of his own sanity.

welcome to la, marcus maye

📺 | @nfloncbs pic.twitter.com/Azos8sSToq

— Los Angeles Chargers (@chargers) December 1, 2024

Scrambling was never something on which Cousins could reliably lean, but it was a tool he could unleash in a pinch. That hasn’t been the case in 2024. Per Pro Football Reference, he’s scrambled for a gain just twice in 13 games this season. So while Atlanta’s line has done a good job protecting him he’s been unable to maximize that relative lack of pressure.

Further complicating things is his inability to work efficiently out of play action sets. Cousins used fake handoffs to start more than 31 percent of his pass plays in 2023 — a season in which he put up a Pro Bowl pace over eight games. In 2024, that’s down to 14 percent, per NFL Pro.

He’s got one of the league’s top tailback tandems in Bijan Robinson and Tyler Allgeier, so we know it’s not an issue with shoddy runs and defenses that won’t be fooled. The Falcons are clearly concerned about Cousins’s ability to drop back in space, scan the field, step up and exploit the gaps created when a safety or linebacker crashes a split-second too early toward the line of scrimmage.

That leads us to our second problem. Cousins isn’t finding space downfield.

His on-target throw rate is roughly on par with where it had been as a Viking. His tight window rate, however, has shot up from 13.8 percent to 20.8 percent this fall. He’s traded easy throws for tough ones. The combination of increased coverage and whatever zip may be missing from his passes as a man in his late 30s overcoming a significant injury has created a vortex that’s turned him into a turnover machine.

Opponents have figured this out. They don’t need to blitz him, because if one member of a four man rush can beat his blocker that’s capable of doing enough to throw Cousins into panic mode without an easy way out. A 31 percent blitz rate in 2023 has dipped to 20.3 in 2024. Over the last four games, two teams (the Chargers and Saints) blitzed him less than 13 percent of the time despite a deluge of passing downs for a trailing offense.

https://twitter.com/Saints/status/1855716646893076870

That creates more defenders in the second level, more of the tight window throws that don’t have the same success they used to and, crucially, more opportunities to create turnovers against an offense punching way, way below its weight class. By those powers combined, you get plays like this.

THE HONEY BADGER TAKES WHAT HE WANTS.

📺 FOX pic.twitter.com/EW3gy44UtU

— New Orleans Saints (@Saints) November 10, 2024

4. Jags-Titans was an insult unto the football gods

The early slate of games Sunday was, to put it generously, bad football. Three of the six showdowns were blowouts. One of the three remaining tight games involved entirely too much Drew Lock.

But even Lock managed to avoid the worst game of Week 14. Behold, a battle between Mac Jones and Will Levis that could be used as a vital teaching tool for preaching quarterback draft abstinence.

.@ArdenKeyEl applies the pressure and @otisreese7 comes up with his first career INT

📺: Watch #JAXvsTEN on @NFLonCBS stream on NFL+ pic.twitter.com/8GrhwRmGwu

— Tennessee Titans (@Titans) December 8, 2024

Mac Jones completed the only two deep balls in Sunday’s game. One was to rookie wideout Brian Thomas Jr. The other was to Chidobe Awuzie, who does not play on his team.

WELCOME BACK @ChidobeAwuzie

📺: Watch #JAXvsTEN on @NFLonCBS stream on NFL+ pic.twitter.com/A9mMi4kEeH

— Tennessee Titans (@Titans) December 8, 2024

Jones was every bit the quarterback the New England Patriots gave up on, floating passes downfield and checking down into low-risk, low-reward plays entirely too often. He had one move he spammed repeatedly against the Titans; a short throw to his right that made up 57 percent of his completions and 35 percent of his total yardage.

Despite this infuriating level of predictability, the Titans were unable to turn this flaw into a victory. They lost 10-6 on a day where Will Levis came out and immediately left six easy points on the field.

Titans go for it on 4th down and Levis misses a wide open tight end #85 pic.twitter.com/onMypSqCzL

— Fitz (@LaurieFitzptrck) December 8, 2024

Levis was the opposite of Jones, a low yield passer limited to short throws to his left. Tony Pollard ran for 102 yards on 21 carries and handily outgained his quarterback’s average yards per touch (4.9 to 4.3). Somehow, things could have been even worse for the Titans:

.@JoshHinesAllen brings the BOOM 💪#JAXvsTEN on CBS pic.twitter.com/H4CcSEzngX

— Jacksonville Jaguars (@Jaguars) December 8, 2024

There’s more to unpack here, but… why? The only winner Sunday were the Giants and Las Vegas Raiders, each of whom saw their 2025 NFL Draft position rise by virtue of the Jaguars’ third win of the year. For Jacksonville and Tennessee, Week 14 was a test of their fans’ loyalty and a reminder to the rest of the world that we don’t have to watch the games each Sunday.

5. Jameis Winston is a beautiful disaster (but we knew that already)

Behold, the duality of Jameis Winston. Here he is, expertly avoiding pressure in the pocket and using the threat of his legs to create leverage for Jerry Jeudy to effectively run free to the end zone.

a familiar spot for @jerryjeudy#CLEvsPIT on CBS and NFL+ pic.twitter.com/cmSzFUvb2G

— Cleveland Browns (@Browns) December 8, 2024

And here he