Oh man, it’s almost Thanksgiving. Good food and terrible football on the television. Can’t beat that combination! In honor of the holiday, here are the NFL things i’m thankful for this year:
Lamar Jackson, proving all us white people wrong
The NFC East being full of nothing but bum teams, the way it should be
Knowing Kirk Cousins is going to do something to ruin the Vikings this year
Adam Gase pulling his “football Devin Nunes” routine for another season
Three awful games on Thanksgiving that still have insane amounts of fantasy purpose in everyone’s final week before the fantasy playoffs
The Bengals quarterback situation. Shine on you crazy diamonds!
1: Baltimore Ravens
Lamar Jackson is the new god we live under. When John Lennon wrote the song Imagine, he couldn’t have imagined Jackson throwing five touchdowns on 15 pass attempts.
2: San Francisco 49ers
There are wins. There are big wins. Then there are STATEMENT wins. The 49ers didn’t just beat the Packers, they absolutely drug them on national television. When this defense plays with a lead, they are hard to beat. They attack relentlessly, from the start of the game to the finish.
3: Seattle Seahawks
This team did what it does best: wins ugly. Even on days when nothing else is working, they find a guy to step up. This week, it was Rashaad Penny, who gashed the Eagles defense when the Seahawks were struggling to move the ball through the air.
4: New England Patriots
Tom Brady looks done. He can’t throw a long pass anymore, and has been relegated to throwing 5 yard crossing patterns over and over again. Him and Philip Rivers might not retire after this year, but maybe they both should.
5: New Orleans Saints
The Saints have been winning every week so quietly, you almost forget about them as a contender. They do have issues, though, as now the entire left side of their offensive line is down for the season with injuries, leaving backups in place to try to cover for Drew Brees. A good defensive coordinator is going to blitz the Saints straight to hell that way.
6: Green Bay Packers
If the Packers can’t run the ball, the rest of the offense doesn’t work. Aaron Rodgers doesn’t have a ton of options at wide receiver, and if a team like the 49ers is able to come in, stop the run, and put a lockdown corner on Davante Adams, then others are going to follow the blue print and really give the Packers problems.
7: Minnesota Vikings
I’m still half convinced that this team is gonna screw around and go 1-4 the rest of the way, but right now Kirk Cousins and Dalvin Cook have this offense pointed in the exact directions they envisioned it when they signed Cousins last year.
8: Buffalo Bills
I’m gonna keep doubting this team even when they end up 12-4. Josh Allen is a super fun bad player. He isn’t very good, but he is incredibly entertaining and when things break right, he’s one of the most infinitely watchable quarterbacks in the NFL.
9: Kansas City Chiefs
I refuse to believe that this team isn’t going to get hot at the right time and burn right through the AFC on their way to the Super Bowl, but the defense is such trash right now and there is no real way to fix it in season. If only they had recognized that their defense was Arbys level awful last year and done something about it.
10: Houston Texans
He can’t stay healthy to save his life, but when Will Fuller is in the lineup for this team, they are completely different. He forces team to play deep at safety so they can try to cut him off as he races down the field every play, opening up DeAndre Hopkins on the other side of the field, and keeps the secondary from over loading the line to stop the run.
11: Tennessee Titans
No, seriously. There is just an absolute dildo factory of teams hanging around the 6-5/5-6 mark in the NFL and you have to put them all somewhere. The Titans at least do enough every week to stay in games, and this is around the time of the year when Derrick Henry starts ruining fantasy seasons by putting up 200 yard games every week.
12: Los Angeles Rams
Yes. The third place team in the NFC West is still better than the first place team in the NFC East.
13: Indianapolis Colts
I’m at the point in the season where I’m actively wondering where this team would be if Andrew Luck played this season. Jacoby Brissett has been fine, and he’s playing on an absolute bargain contract right now, but it’s glaring that Brissett isn’t relying on TY Hilton and doesn’t even bother trying to hit Zach Pascal with passes in a game as big as the Texans game was.
14: Cleveland Browns
Yes. The third place team in the AFC North is better than the 2nd place team in the AFC North AND the first place team in the NFC East.
15: Dallas Cowboys
So much for that Dak Prescott midseason renaissance that people were ruining their underwear over. The Cowboys are 4-0 in the NFC East, and 2-5 against the entire rest of the NFL, which says everything it needs to say about the state of that division.
16: Pittsburgh Steelers
I’m only putting them this high because barely beating the hapless Bengals is still better than…
17: Oakland Raiders
…getting the unholy shit kicked out of you by a Jets team that had not only given up on their coach a month ago, several were planning to enter the clergy so they would never have to play sports ever again.
18: Carolina Panthers
Someone is going to trade for Cam Newton this offseason. Someone is going to get badly burned by this move. The wide receivers of every team that doesn’t trade for him will be thankful knowing that they won’t be forced to catch passes at their ankles all day and won’t get murdered in the middle of the field when Newton badly leads them with an errant pass.
19: Philadelphia Eagles
I know Mitch Trubisky gets all the bad press as a shitty number two draft pick, but can we remember for a moment that Nick Foles is the reason the Eagles have a Super Bowl ring and the team has looked horribly overmatched offensively when Carson Wentz is in the game? Wentz might just suck, too.
20: Chicago Bears
Yea, they won, but who gives a damn. They scored 19 points against a Giants defense that gets scored on more than a couch on a porno set. The only other team to score fewer than 27 points against the Giants this season is Washington, and they are a disaster of a team.
21: Jacksonville Jaguars
Look, they are probably out of it. Can we have our Gardner Minshew back now??
22: Tampa Bay Buccaneers
I hope this iteration of the Buccaneers lasts forever. Just good enough to be high scoring and entertaining every week, but just bad enough to never be a serious threat for a playoff spot.
23: New York Jets
It says a lot about how incredibly shitty the AFC is this season that a 10 win team in the NFC might make the playoffs, but this Dr. Moreau experiment gone wrong of a team can definitely still make the playoffs if they get to 8 wins.
24: Arizona Cardinals
They are the only bad team who should be tanking for something other than a quarterback. They are in a good spot on offense, even though their running situation is seriously screwed. They should actively try to lose their last 5 to give themselves a shot at really getting a game breaker on defense through the draft.
25: Tottenham Chargers
This is probably it for Philip Rivers. He can’t throw the ball like he used to, and it’s getting to the point where he really can’t throw at all. It’s really a shame that when he retires, it will be an opposing teams fans cheering for him, since the Chargers have no fans of their own.
26: Denver Broncos
Ya know, they allllllmost tricked us into thinking they were competent a few weeks ago. But no, a team with Brandon Allen at quarterback is sufficiently bad enough that we should not have to even bring up this team’s name for the rest of the season.
27: Miami Dolphins
Remember those two weeks where the Dolphins kinda/sorta put it all together and looked like a football team? Yea, neither do I.
28: Detroit Lions
There is a certain quarterback out there in free agency that could have saved the Lions season when Matthew Stafford. But instead of bringing in Colin Kaepernick, the Lions stuck with human glob of sour cream, Jeff Driskel, and in turn ended their entire season.
29: Atlanta Falcons
They could have fired their coaching staff 6 weeks ago in an attempt to recover this season. They didn’t, and now they look like a bunch of country fried idiots, getting the crap kicked out of them by the Buccaneers.
30: New York Giants
I’ll always appreciate the stupidity of New York fans, especially when it comes to over reactions. Giants fans were ready to put Daniel Jones’ face on the dollar bill after just a week or two. Now, Eli Manning’s dumpy faced stunt double is looking downright Davis Webbish out there.
31: Washington Haskins
The fact that Case Keenum had to take the final snap of the game because Dwayne Haskins was busy taking selfies with fans in the stands is the most Washington thing to happen this year.
32: Cincinnati Bengals
That was some damn fine tankery by the Bengals on Sunday. In a game they had won, they managed to lose to Devlin Hodges of all people. Right now, the Bengals are the Scorsese of tanking, while the Dolphins are the “Whoever directed Dude, Where’s My Car?” of tanking.
Fancy Boys Club 