A handful of final thoughts and takes heading into the main NFL Week 4 slate with reactions from Thursday night.
Even though the weekly NFL Winners & Losers column covers so much ground and intends to be thorough and all-encompassing, the news cycle never slows, some hot takes don’t quite fit that space and then Deshaun Watson goes out Thursday night and improbably wins a third straight game in the year 2026.
That necessitates the need for some final thoughts before the weekend — three of them to be exact.
And we start with a leftover peeve from Week 3 that we hadn’t addressed yet …
1. Enough With The ‘Noble’ Act Of Avoiding Late-Game Touchdowns
The Jacksonville Jaguars were obliterating the New England Patriots last Sunday, already up 22 points early in the fourth quarter on the way to a 35-6 win when Trevor Lawrence riled up countless fans who either were counting on him in fantasy football or had other investments on the proceedings.
On third-and-4 from the Patriots’ 16, Lawrence found daylight on a scramble and had a clear path to the end zone, but he stopped at the 1 and took a knee … with 8:06 left on the clock.
This kind of move is usually reserved for the final minute or so of a game for a team already ahead, with the recognition that while scoring again to extend a lead would increase the team’s win probability, not scoring and running out the clock would guarantee the victory.
Announcers typically trip over themselves to assign valor and nobility to such altruistic and unselfish acts, stopping just short of suggesting that player be nominated for a Presidential Medal of Freedom. It’s all so very silly, but this has happened so many times now — the act followed by the overwrought fawning response as if the player had indeed just donated a kidney to save a life — that it’s now ironically become more glorious to not score than to pad the stats.
And it’s really gotten out of control.
There’s so few scenarios where it actually impacts win probability. If a team was up one point with less than a minute to go and its opponent had only one or no timeouts, then yes, going down inside the 5 and running out the clock makes more sense than scoring to go up 8 and giving the ball back to the other team.
That’s about it.
Examples To Show How Little The Decisions Matter
A recent example was two weeks ago in USC’s win at Rutgers. The Trojans were up 42-35 with a little more than a minute remaining, facing a third-and-3 deep in Scarlet Knights territory. Running back King Miller broke through the line with no defenders in his path to the end zone, but he chose to go do down around the 10-yard line.
Even when the thinking is that going up two scores in the final minute or so still allows the opponent the chance to score, recover an onside kick and score again, that’s like a .005% chance of happening (a non-scientific approximation on our part based on watching football for four decades).
USC ran out the clock and won, so sure, it accomplished its intent. But also scoring a touchdown to go up 14 points with 50 seconds left against Rutgers would have surely meant a win as well, and given the scrutiny on Trojans coach Lincoln Riley he might have benefitted from the optics of beating lowly Rutgers by more than one score.
The bottom line is it’s not really making a true difference either way, and in this era where the NFL is partners with companies that promote fantasy sports and gambling (especially DraftKings and FanDuel that deal largely in player prop bets), all this does is cause ancillary issues.
Just score the touchdown and trust a 10-point or 14-point lead is going to stand up in the final 27 seconds, goodness gracious.
More Thoughts On The Situation with Lawrence
But getting back to Lawrence, this was the single worst application of this silly act yet and hopefully it was egregious enough to raise the question of “What are we doing here?”
There were still more than 8 minutes left in the game! Did Lawrence think the Jags were going to run out the final 8 minutes of the clock by not scoring? Lol, good grief.
Jacksonville running back Bhayshel Tuten instead scored on the next play, dashing Lawrence’s hopes for a Nobel Peace Prize for his selfless act of honor, and to his credit the QB acknowledged his faux paus afterward.
“If you do the analytics, people will probably be all over it online, I’m sure,” Lawrence said afterward.
No analytics needed here, Trevor!
Alas, Fanatics Sports & Casino refunded bettors who wagered on Lawrence to score a TD at any point in the game, while other sportsbooks did not offer such relief to furious gamblers.
2. Deshaun Watson Did It Again
With respect to the Las Vegas Raiders’ 3-0 start and the Houston Texans’ and Los Angeles Chargers’ 0-3 starts, the single most surprising team so far this NFL season is the 3-1 Cleveland Browns.
The Watson-led Browns did it again Thursday night, besting the Pittsburgh Steelers 27-24 for their third straight win.
Watson, written off by … (doing the math, one moment) … literally everybody who follows the NFL and booed by Cleveland’s own fans in the preseason, completed 24 of 33 passes for a season-high 268 yards, 1 TD, 1 INT and a lost fumble.
It wasn’t his cleanest game, but Watson finished it strong by leading the game-winning field goal drive in the final 1 minute, 42 seconds by completing 4 of 5 passes for 45 yards to set up Andy Szmyt’s decisive 56-yarder with 10 seconds left.
More to the point, he’s thrown for 855 yards, 6 TDs and 2 INTs overall with 127 rushing yards. Since a season-opening loss to the Jaguars, Watson has led the Browns to consecutive wins over the Buccaneers, Panthers and now Steelers.
In case anyone has forgotten, what makes this all so improbable is that Watson hasn’t been a good quarterback since 2020! The last season he was even partially active, he went 1-6 as the Browns starter with just 5 TDs and 3 INTs.
In 19 starts with Cleveland prior to this season — the extent of his return for that absurd trade with the Texans and the fully-guaranteed five-year, $230-million contract that followed — Watson had all of 19 passing TDs and 12 INTs. When he wasn’t suspended or injured, he had been downright bad and ineffective going back several years now.
And suddenly … this.
The broadcast team of Al Michaels and Kirk Herbstreit put the Watson situation in full context in the clip below:
3. Nothing Says Misguided Desperation Like Trading For J.J. McCarthy
When the trade was first announced earlier this week, one would be excused for misreading the terms and thinking that the New York Giants received a fifth-round draft pick for doing the Minnesota Vikings the kind and generous favor of taking QB J.J. McCarthy’s not-insignificant contract off their hands.
Even in that scenario, it looked like a bad move for the Giants.
But no, in actuality the Giants gave the Vikings a fifth-round pick for McCarthy. Incredible.
McCarthy is the latest incarnation of Zach Wilson, a quarterback drafted way too high in the first round who made it immediately obvious that he was a draft bust and not equipped to be a factor in the NFL.
Wilson, the No. 2 overall pick in 2021 by the New York Jets, went 12-21 as a starter there with 23 TDs and 25 INTs in those 33 starts (even worse than we actually recalled!) before getting flipped to the Denver Broncos for a late-round pick swap. He was the third-string QB for one season there, then signed for $6 million (grand larceny) with the Miami Dolphins, attempted all of 11 passes there, and signed this year with the New Orleans Saints for $1.4 million (still a heist).
Eventually, NFL teams will accept that there is nothing to salvage from Wilson and stop contributing to his retirement fund.
As for McCarthy, the No. 10 overall pick in 2024 by the Vikings …
He only got 10 starts for Minnesota, which seemed more than enough as he finished last season with 11 TDs and 12 INTs while contributing to the Vikings going from a 14-3 playoff team to out of the postseason. McCarthy also revealed there is one way to stop star wideout Justin Jefferson (having McCarthy or Max Brosmer throwing him passes!).
McCarthy’s performance was bad enough to get Vikings general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah fired after the season, and a year after opening as Minnesota’s starter McCarthy went through a charade of a “quarterback competition” before being relegated to third-string duty this year behind newly acquired Kyler Murray and veteran journeyman Carson Wentz (his backup in 2025).
Why The Giants Even Make The Move To Add McCarthy
The Giants understandably don’t feel content, in the wake of Jaxson Dart’s season-ending injury, with Jameis Winston as the only QB of note on the depth chart. But viewing McCarthy as the answer to any problem seems the result of a lack of studying.
Perhaps it makes a modicum of sense on the surface given that he’s a mobile QB and could run a lot of the stuff the Giants had in the playbook for Dart, but then again … McCarthy was so bad last season the Vikings knew that he could never again be an option for them and it was only a matter of time until he was off the roster.
The irony is that the 2025 Vikings would have been gleeful if they could have swapped all of their QBs for Winston, who at least has been a successful starter in the league and still has a big (if unpredictable and often inaccurate) arm. That the Giants are worried about Winston and think McCarthy might be a potential solution is … well, it’s something alright.
