“It’s Mike F’ing White. I said it on Monday, I’ll say it again and I’ll keep saying it: He’s a dog. He’s an animal. He’s a savage… Mike White is a stud.”***
-Jets RB Ty Johnson, referring to the team’s backup (not for long?) QB Mike White, who went 37 for 45 in his first ever NFL start, throwing 405 yards, 3 TDs, and 2 INTs, besting the supposed slugger to beat in the AFC North, the Bengals, 34-31 in a wild and unexpected Week 8 thriller. It was the first time a Jets QB had thrown for over 400 yards since Vinny Testaverde (All-Time Most Jets Name Ever) did it 21 years ago, and only the second time ever that a QB threw for more than 400 yards in his first start (the other being Cam Newton in 2011). It was the most completions by a QB in his first start ever. All by a fourth-year second and third string backup nobody had ever heard of, and if you had tried to Google him before the end of the game on Sunday you would have gotten nothing but White Lotus and Ned Schneebly results.
And not only did he win the game by stacking up these numbers, he did it by staging a late game comeback, down 31-20 with less than 8 minutes left in the fourth quarter, against a Bengals defense that hadn’t allowed any of the previous seven teams it had played to score more than 25 points. All with the help of a Jets team that had struggled to win just a single game so far this season with the number two overall pick at the helm. White got everybody involved — Michael Carter, Keelan Cole, Ty Johnson, Elijah Moore, Tyler Kroft (scoring the winning TD against his old team), Denzel Mims, Jamison Crowder, Braxton Berrios… a list that, with the exception of maybe the up and coming Carter, looks like a basement slush pile of spare parts and also-rans.
When Zach Wilson went down with a PCL strain in Week 7, the Jetsam… sorry, Jets… got some heat for not having an experienced backup on the roster, so they made an ineffectual jerkoff gesture toward acquiring one by picking up Joe Flotsam… sorry, Flacco… whose most recent “experience” was going 0-4 for them last year. Nevertheless, they were going to go ahead with White as their starter against Cincinnati. “We have faith in him,” declared coach Robert Saleh before the game. And boy howdy, did they. OC Mike LaFleur told White on Saturday “Prepare to let it rip!” which the QB clearly did (despite none of his passes traveling more than 15 yards through the air). Most teams would have gone run-heavy, tried to take the pressure off the kid by turning the game into a slog and probably losing 31-12. Instead, Lafleur, keenly aware that the Jets both had very little to lose as well as an unknown quantity behind center, just dink and dunked up and down the field all game long, Mac Jones style. Even after the Jets’ second and third drives ended in tipped pass interceptions, Lafleur kept his foot on the gas and White answered with a 107.9 passer rating.
The best part is that the Jets looked like they were actually having fun for the first time in years. Even the defense, 4th worst in the league in Defensive DVOA, got in on the party, forcing a crucial stop and a crucial turnover in the waning minutes of the game. Then, after scoring the comeback TD that put them ahead by 1, the Jets went for a two-point conversion to make it a three point difference — which they successfully converted by using the official Most Fun Play of the 21st Century; the hallowed, frisky domain of upstarts, scrappy backups (Nick Foles anyone?), and underdogs — the one and only Philly Special (re-dubbed the Grand Old Opry here, as it had been originally drawn up for use against the Titans). White handed it off to Moore, who went left and handed it to Crowder, who was in motion back to the right, and Crowder rainbowed it to White in the corner of the endzone. After catching the two-point score, White flailed with excitement on the ground, clearly having the night of his life.
As the Jets went into victory formation, the hometown crowd was chanting “Mike White!” at the top of their lungs, so loudly in fact that it took the hero QB several minutes to realize it was his name they were shouting. White will start again in Week 9, but it remains to be seen what will happen once Wilson is supposedly ready to return to action in week 10. It’s the NFL. Flukes happen every week. It is entirely possible that this was a singular devil-kissed Hallows Eve anomaly, and Satan himself is now in possession of yet another Western Kentucky White Boy’s soul; and Mr. White himself has already been transformed into 3 pennywhistles in a potato sack, crumpled over at the crossroads where the deal was struck (you can find it out on Hwy 9, where the Chick-fil-e and Hobby Lobby sit kitty corner from each other), doomed to dream eternally about the glory of his first and only decent NFL start. Or he could light up the Colts, another rising power in the AFC, in Week 9 and kick up an honest to gawd dustruffle of a QB controversy, which is clearly already a-brewin’. Yee haw, git yer fiddles boyzngalz!
Zach Wilson was the number two overall pick and unquestioned Jets starter from the moment he was drafted. He even avoided the same kind of farcical “competition” that Urban Meyer pretended to hold between Number One Pick Trevor Lawrence and… *checks notes* …uh, Gardner Minshew, who is no longer even on the team. Principle, precedent, and propriety (oh wait, who am I kidding, I’m talking about the NFL) would seem to point toward the starter, the assumed and hoped for “future of the franchise” (at least since the last “future of the franchise,” Sam Darnold, departed earlier this year), retaining his first-string status, regardless of how well his backup played while he was out. But then again, Wilson’s record is 1-5 with 9 INTs, tied for the most in the league until Mahomes (!!!) passed him for the lead in Week 8.
Jets fans aren’t going to have a lot of patience waiting around for Wilson to figure out that throwing it to the other team tends to lose games, especially if it seems like they have a better answer right in front of them. They have been forced to eat vomit pancakes for too long — decades, really — and now there appear to be just regular old pancakes on the table. I don’t care how much draft capital we have invested in the VomCakes™ guy, hook me up with that Bisquick kid! I don’t think any fan is calling this the greatest Jets game since Super Bowl III (but given that this franchise is the living embodiment of the Butt Fumble, who could blame them if they did?), but it has still managed to breathe life into a brittle, sluggish organization, reminding players and fans alike that football doesn’t just have to be an endless swamp full of sadness and suffering — it can be fun too.
So if White goes out there and takes it to the Colts — or even manages to pull off a dignified, competitive loss high on excitement and low on bonehead turnovers — Saleh is going to have a full-fledged riot on his hands if he tries to pull him for Wilson in Week 10. He’s going to have to build a moat around MetLife Stadium, because every Sal and Gary in Staten Island is going to try and storm it, looking to put his and the INT-chucking rook’s head on spikes. Who knows, Ty Johnson may even lead the charge.
I’m not sure anyone believes Mike White is the Jets’ savior just yet. But so far he’s fun, and in the end that may be even more important.
***Since this was written, of course, the Conquering Hero of MetLife Stadium decided to smash his throwing arm into DeForest Buckner while tossing his only TD pass during the first quarter of Thursday Night’s tilt with the Colts, knocking himself out of the rest of the game. Despite being in tremendous pain on the sideline, he appears to have escaped breaking anything and should be ready to play if necessary in Week 10. All the Sals and Garys in Staten Island breathe a deep collective sigh of relief.
“What I was thinking was just ‘Don’t mess it up. Keep it running smooth. Have fun.’ I had so much frickin’ fun out there.”
-Saints third-string QB Trevor Siemian to Peter King, about coming into the game after a season-ending Jameis injury and defeating the defending World Champion Bucs (with the help of a monster Defense and some uncharacteristic Tom Brady boners, of course).
Look, I hope you’ll forgive me for momentarily rhapsodizing about a backup Jets QB who no one will probably even remember a year from now. I’ve obviously digested far too many underdog sports movies, and as a barely average athlete in every sport I played as a kid, far-fetched fantastical triumphs were about all I had. Plus, The Shirlies have one more win than the lowly NYJ, so let a guy dream. Nevertheless, a backup QB performing competently against a defense that has little to no experience with or film on him is not exactly uncommon. The key seems to be, as Siemian says, “Don’t mess it up.” (Also, try to have Alvin Kamara or Zeke Elliott on your team.)
Yet Week 8 was something else. Three, count ’em, three backup QBs beat good teams on Sunday. I mean, Daniel Jones is supposedly a starter, and he couldn’t even finish off a freefalling Chiefs team that repeatedly punched itself in the face every time it took the field (to be fair, Jones had Devin Booker instead of Kamara or Zeke leading his backfield, but still, that game was his to lose). Now granted, you might say Cooper Rush has the seemingly unfair advantage of having a quintessential White Quarterback Name, but what has that ever done for Colt McCoy I ask you?
Still, we watch sports not just to see greatness in action, but also to see these inspiring stories of desperate mediocrity overcoming greatness! That’s how we would word the Hollywood pitch, no? Actually, if you tried to sell a producer the story of, say, the 2021 Atlanta Braves, they’d tell you to get the fuck out of the office and never come back. No audience would buy a fictional version of that. That’s why the real life version is so compelling, why no matter how rotten the NFL gets, it’s hard to stop watching. There are just so few places that these sorts of things happen with such regularity. Medical miracles are amazing and all, but slightly less fun to watch. Robots that can jump on tables and kick you in the face with 400 psi are cute and world-altering until they eventually decimate an entire police station looking for Sarah Connor.
And as the saying goes, on Any Given Sunday even Trevor Siemian can sorta almost look like he knows what he’s doing.
“Growing up you know, I always loved the running back position. And as I got older, you know, I always watched NFL Network as a kid, and they used to have like the running back to the 80s or the 70s and the 90s. I think he’s an icon for what he did for the game and how he was off the field so yeah. [I] got a lot of respect for Jim Brown.”
–Derrick Henry (*sob*) on being compared to Hall of Fame Mega-Beast Jim Brown. This was two days before Henry, a HOF Mega-Beast himself, incurred a foot injury that will require surgery and at the very least keep him out for the remainder of the regular season. The comparison is apt. Brown wasn’t a balletic Barry Sanders type, spinning between the tackles and breaking away like Carl Lewis, and neither is Henry. But he was big, as fast as a train once he got going, as impossible as a train to tackle, and utterly, supremely dominant. Nobody was anywhere near him, and everyone feared him. This is of course exactly how Henry could be described, except on top of everything he’s a complete anachronism. He’s doing all of this in 2021, in a league that is overwhelmingly geared toward the passing game and the most dominant type of RB is the speedy, bird-boned pass-catcher a la McCaffrey, Kamara, and Ekeler. But despite RBs like these having monster games and seasons under their belts (Kamara’s 6 TD Xmas game is probably worth a bust in its own right), no RB is anywhere close to matching Henry’s touches, yards, and TDs (after week 8, Henry had 72 more touches than the next person on the list, Najee Harris — which is like four games worth of touches for most RB1s). In perhaps the world’s least surprising stat, Henry was on pace to lead all three of those categories for the third year in a row, a feat that no one has ever pulled off. In fact the only man who even came close was Jim Brown (he did it two years in a row, and just fell short in the third).
A couple weeks ago I made the argument that despite my general position of rooting against him I hoped Mahomes would pull out of his 2021 tailspin, because the unstoppable version of him was so much more fun to watch. Well, maybe I was wrong about that. The Mahomes Mess just keeps getting messier, and man it is fucking glorious. Watching every other pass careen off some poor red-jerseyed sap’s facemask into a waiting defender’s grasp is really all I ever wanted in this world. But Henry — Oh Henry — what can I say, the NFL is just better all around when he is playing. How miraculous to watch opposing defenses stack the box with 8 dudes and still not be able to stop him from ripping off 200 yards and 3 TDs. To watch him get better and better as the game goes on, just grinding helpless, exhausted opponents into Pixie Stix powder. To watch the Titans come back in the fourth quarter, down two TDs, but running the ball like it’s 1973 and he’s OJ Simpson. Henry doesn’t cut and dart through holes nor does he really crouch low and seek contact. He seems to just run from Point A to Point B and good luck to anyone who tries to get in his way. They just bounce off of him or he swats them away like gnats — like Sauron just smashing and carving through swaths of dudes in the LOTR prologue.
Alas, like Sauron at the end of that scene getting his ring finger hacked off and losing all his armies and power, so too did Henry fall, an empty, smoking shell of his former self. In Sauron’s case, awesome; in Henry’s, it fucking sucks. A thousand years later, Sauron was able to come back more powerful than ever. Henry, given the history of the running back position and related injuries, possibly never will — at least not at his previous pace (unless he goes the 2012 route of his current replacement, AP, which hey, would anyone be surprised?).
With Henry, the Titans were a force to be reckoned with in the AFC, and capable of beating any team in the NFL. While they were probably not on any one’s short list of favorites to win the Super Bowl, if Henry had stayed healthy would any of us be all that shocked to see him hoisting the Lombardi in February 2022? Now it might be a wholesale miracle if Tennessee even manages to snag a wild Card spot. The same can be said for poor Team 14, who was pummeling everybody’s face in with Brady and Henry, and just had to spend $80 FAAB on a 36 year old who has probably spent the last nine months sitting on the couch using a big ol piece of seasoned bamboo to swat the shit out of some… uh, flies. Needless to say, watching Team 14 crush it week in and week out — while McCaffrey’s popsicle stick skeleton heals about as quickly as it took Sauron to regain power and while Rodgers, my self-absorbed, Napoleonic dickweed of a QB, jerks off to Joe Rogan-esque pseudoscience gibberish in his hermetically-sealed fuck-off palace, compares himself to MLK while simultaneously complaining about the “woke mob,” and slowly dies of Ivermectin poisoning — it stirred the ire and envy in my heart. But now it’s just sad. Maybe it’s because I have at best a 1.3% chance of contending, but it sucks to see a killer team go down so hard. I’m sure he will keep finding ways to win, but still.
The NFL is better when Henry and the Titans are rolling. Astral Geeks is better when Team 14 is leveling whole armies with a giant mace and an evil ring.
Who knows where the ring is now.
If found, please return to Mt. Doom.
Or just give it to me. I’ll make sure it gets where it needs to go.
(If ya dig that, check out this spooky gorgeous cover by Lera Lynn)
Speaking of evil magic rings and Mike White-style deals with the devil, that’s what it’s going to take to get The Shirlies into any kind of winning shape. We managed to knock off three wins in a row after our ignominious 0-5 start, but this week in addition to having to play a lefty Hawaiian dwarf (okay fine, he’s 6’1″, but he seems small by how overwhelmed he always looks) with a broken finger in place of the COVID-addled Packers QB (aka State Farm Presents: Alex Jones Crossed with Jason Lee’s Character from Almost Famous), I’m also facing my nemesis Lady Balls and Jonny-Jon Taylor, who has already put up 37 points. Bad things always happen to my team when I play Les Couilles de La Femme, so I see that streak ending right frickin now.
But it’s not just Astral Geeks where I am flailing. I am in the bottom half of three out of four leagues. In the Mixtape Superflex league I am dead last and will remain there for the rest of the season, Tha Gimp thrashing about in his box, just waiting for the samurai sword to slice through the wood and put him out of his misery. It’ll be a Festivus Miracle if I manage to win another game in that league. I’m 2-6 and have the second least amount of points out of 12 teams (to be fair, I also have the fourth most Points Against, and as I am also facing Taylor and 30-point Wentz in that league it appears that trend will continue).
It’s a lost season. So be it. Don’t worry, I’m still gonna Dan Campbell the shit out of every week, regardless of the odds, regardless of the outcome.
Love that guy. That’s no secret. If you don’t I gotta ask if you even love football (I mean you’ve read this stupid blog this far, so I guess you probably at least like it). Campbell and his 0-6 Lions went into the Week 7 matchup with the Rams, ready to pull out every special teams trick in their arsenal to gain an edge in a contest where they knew they were outmatched in every category, and dang-nabbity-flibbit, it almost worked! After the Lions scored a touchdown on the opening drive of that game, they kicked a surprise onside kick and recovered it, which turned into a field goal, putting the Lions up 10-0 right off the bat. Later in the game, the Lions pulled off two successful fake punt fourth down conversions.
But in the end they still lost 28-19. They just couldn’t go toe to toe with what is probably the best team in the NFC (and maybe even the entire league) for a full four quarters, no matter how badly the coach and the players wanted it. Ex-Ram, unsuccessful revenge-gamer, and high-powered turnover-machine Jared Goff is no Mike White or Cooper Rush after all. He’s still trying to figure out where the sun sets, not to mention which direction his old buddy Aaron Donald is coming from to snap his fucking spine in six places. And the defense gives up plays like this on a regular basis. It’s a shit show and passion will only get you so far in unshowing it.
Poor Detroit. Poor Dan Campbell. They got humiliated far worse by the lowly Eagles in Week 8, 44-6. To be clear, Boston fucking Scott and Jordan Howard (remember him?) are the ones that trampled all over them and made their lives miserable for 60 full minutes. The Lions are now 0-8, and I do really feel for them. My worst fantasy team fucking suuuuucks butthole and I still have 2 more wins than they do. But does that mean either of us are going to give up? No! Or at the very least Probably Not!
As Campbell told his players after the Rams loss: “If this does not continue to sting and burn and taste like you-know-what, then you got a problem. You cannot allow yourself to go numb. You can’t. Cuz I’m not. All it does is just piss me off even more. And it just motivates me to want to get out of this mess.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself. I’m gonna keep trying, even though I dug myself a pretty deep hole so far. Again to be fair, I’ve had some rotten luck. Rodgers’ first game. Rodgers, uh, being “immunized” with spirulina smoothies and leeches instead of getting vaccinated. McCaffrey’s hamstrings being made of Laffy Taffy, Elmer’s Glue, and a few rusty screws. Chris Carson being Chris Carson and disappearing for half the season. AJ Brown forgetting that he is one of the best receivers in football until like, two days ago. AB probably still playing with sheets of skin falling off the bottom of his feet every game (don’t Google it if you don’t know what I’m talking about) and it finally fucked up his ankle. I drafted JuJu, Gallup. Both fucking worthless. And this is just in Astral Geeks. I also drafted Wilson all over the place. And Dobbins. And Mostert. Every one of my rosters is a Civil War infirmary that just caught on fire. I blew a bunch of FAAB on schnooks like Damien Williams, who may have never lost his job to (the admittedly far superior) Khalil if he hadn’t been out for a week on the COVID list.
Yet you know, I’m far from the only one who’s had to deal with bad breaks and injuries. But I am somehow the one who seems to be consistently licking the dark brown slime off the bottom of the barrel this season. The old cliche is that you can’t win your league in the draft, but you can damn well lose it. And the reality is I just drafted poorly (I also played waivers pretty badly, but it all starts at the beginning). I just flat out picked all the wrong players. I picked many of the same ones across all my leagues which can account for the throughline of suckiness, but even so I also diversified at essential positions. Still all wrong. I had the first pick in Astral Geeks and stared for weeks and days at McCaffrey, the consensus number one, and in the end I couldn’t say no to those projected points, even though I knew with something close to total certainty that exactly what happened would happen. I considered taking Cook or Henry or even Aaron Jones first, but I couldn’t do it. Then later on I waded into the dreaded RB Dead Zone, even though I was warned over and over what would happen.
I used all the wrong approaches. I was trying to implement strategies similar to ones that worked in the past and they blew up in my face. Last year, I won the regular season on the strength of drafting three RBs in the first three rounds, loading up on middle round WRs that popped, and grabbing castoff eventual MVP Rodgers in the 10th round. When my first round pick Saquon got knocked out for the entire season, I still had Aaron Jones and Chris Carson as my RB2 and RB3. This year, I went for three RBs in 4 rounds, taking Mike Davis (fucking ugh) in the 4th after McCaffrey and Carson as my 1 and 2. My others were Singletary and Tony Jones. I thought I had a good skeleton of RBs to hang everything else on when the inevitable mines hit, but I clearly did not. To be fair, a lot of my picks, like Mostert and Montgomery and Pitts etc. were sniped during the draft, but those wouldn’t have done me much good either. I also skipped all the early QBs, but was afraid to wait until Stafford, because I kept missing him in mocks. So I took Rodgers in the 6th when I would have done better taking one of the earlier ones when everybody else was (doing so in the fourth certainly would have made a huge difference). I thought AJ Brown in the third would be a killer WR1. Until recently he has not been. I thought Antonio Brown had a not insignificant chance of being the number one receiver on the Bucs and my number two. I wasn’t necessarily wrong about the latter. He has been great like Julio is great, and shitty in the same way. He can win you a week or lose you a week, and then he is out for three weeks with COVID in his ankle.
In other cases, drafting my first ever superflex league, I just blew the whole fucking thing. Didn’t focus enough on 2nd and 3rd QBs until it was too late. I figured I could take Dak early then load up on the other positions and have an advantage there, and ended up with Zach Wilson and Bridgewater. After the preseason I figured Zach would be… well, I admit I thought he might be pretty good. Reader this may surprise you, but he was not. Teddy almost made up for it in his first three games, but by the time I switched over, things were already spiralling out of control for my team and then Teddy reverted to his old mediocre check-down self. I didn’t have two kickass QBs to lean on while the rest of the team fell apart, and despite having tried to get an advantage at W/R/T positions, somehow when either Cook or Carson were out, and Mostert disappeared right away, I was left scrambling for RBs and have been ever since (AJ Dillon, Singletary, and Kenyan Drake have all tromped out there with consistently humiliating results — now it’s Boston Scott’s turn). So the two most scarce positions were wiped out pretty much right away and I had no chance. Gimpdom Ariseth.
So why am I telling you all this? Well, usually once a year I pen some hoity-toity emotional treatise on the nature of loss and losing and being a loser, but that usually comes after some heartbreaker in the middle of a decent, relatively hope-filled season or my requisite first round playoff exit. I’m neither feeling that deep or that hurt at the moment, because I’ve been around long enough and also it’s just too much losing to deal with at once. This isn’t some valiant battle fought and lost by a few bad breaks or a 6 TD Kamara bonanza. This is relentless Jared Goff-esque futility. It feels like it should be more existentially devastating to be the compost bucket in every league, and maybe it will be eventually. But I can’t give in to the Campbell brand of teeth-grinding, tear-spilling despair. I’m at a different stage of grief. Not sure which one. I said “So be it” above, so maybe Acceptance of the Things I cannot Change? But maybe also bargaining? I’m looking for the Wisdom to Know What I can Change in the future. I’m trying to figure this shit out so it doesn’t happen again.
My instincts usually have a pretty good track record. This year they showed me up when I dared to ignore them and they thwarted me when I followed through on them. My radar is all out of whack, and it may be too late for it to come back online. The bad luck and injuries only exacerbated the problem. You have to be ready for those things, as they are inevitable; construct a team that can ride it out (same as you can’t really piss and moan about losing on a shitty ref call, because shitty ref calls are a given, and you have to be good enough to transcend them).
At the same time as you have to be prepared for the worst, you gotta take risks and hang your ass out there. A combination of slow and steady and go for broke. Sometimes that means plummeting from the trapeze and splattering all over the concrete. As Liz Loza told Chris Harris earlier this week, she’d rather end up in last place swinging big than end up somewhere in the middle having taken no chances during the season. That said, it was probably more bad calls than swinging big that landed me here.
But I’m sure gonna go down swinging, I promise you that. Even if I’m pounding at my sealed-in basement box, wrapped up in latex and chains, waiting for a chance to strangle that motherfucking Zed once and for all.
Watch out for that first quarter onside kick, y’all. It’s comin’.
Till then,
County Clare Ayes, Pulled Pork, Canada Goose
tg
GO PACKERS!!!!
ASTRAL GEEKS FFL 