Can Williams clean up his mistakes? Is Nix the real deal? Ben Solak sizes up four first-year QBs, Daniel Jones' future and big Week 11 trends.
Ben Solak joined ESPN in 2024 as a national NFL analyst. He previously covered the NFL at The Ringer, Bleeding Green Nation and The Draft Network.Every Tuesday, I'll spin the previous week of NFL football forward, looking at what the biggest storylines mean and what comes next. We'll take a first look at the consequences of"Monday Night Football," break down a major trend or two, and highlight some key individual players and plays. There will be film. There will be stats .
This is sick, and it's why Williams was drafted first overall in April. He has every single club in his bag, every single arrow in his quiver. He is a special thrower of the football. But Williams also creates his own pressure problems, and he has been doing so since college. Ever a big-play hunter who believes he can escape the first defender at every turn, Williams has the third-longest time to throw after a pressure in the league. Instead of getting a rid of the ball when pressure arrives, Williams tries to escape., this is not a tenable approach. At USC, Williams regularly out-quicked or out-muscled Pac-12 defenders in the pocket.
Barnwell makes sense of Week 11: Are the Bills just better than the Chiefs? Can any NFC team catch the Lions?Williams has made plenty of the prototypical rookie errors in his season with the Bears. He'll spray on routine throws, get stuck on reads that he should have eliminated pre-snap and snowball bad plays into worse ones.
And so is the film. Daniels' elusiveness and acceleration are well known and need no demonstrations, and at LSU, he threw a beautiful deep ball up against the sideline. But in the NFL, Daniels has shown an ability to throw receivers open in the middle of the field that was not often displayed during his time with the Tigers -- and it has been critical to the success of the Washington passing game.
It is worth remarking that Daniels' offense does have a pretty hefty set of training wheels attached to it. This is to be expected from a Kingsbury offense and is not at all a referendum on Daniels. But it is important when we contextualize his play against that of other rookies. Almost 40% of Daniels' dropbacks this season have come with either a screen or play-action fake; onlyare seeing fewer true dropbacks than Daniels.
Other than that, I'm shrugging my shoulders. It'd be nice to see more downfield completions as the season goes on, but I'm not expecting it, as the Patriots have no field-stretching receivers nor the O-line to sustain long dropbacks. I know that Maye can uncork it based on his college film, and I'm confident that aspect of his game will return to the offense once the Patriots can actually sustain it.
With the extended dropbacks come more vertical routes, which Nix is hitting all over the field. He had the beautiful nine ball to Sutton to score against the Chiefs, the terribleWhile Nix dinked and dunked plenty during his time in Oregon, he does have the ability to drop vertical routes into buckets, and the Broncos are increasingly unlocking that as the season goes on.
Now, it isn't inherently bad to be getting a lot of dropbacks in these softened game states. In fact, it's good! Nix is getting reps, and the reps are clearly helping. But when we control for non-blowouts, we find that Nix is cellar-dwelling in just about every quarterbacking metric we have.
This isn't amazing news, as Nix has lost trust, but it can be good for his long-term growth. The Broncos have a base offense that works and can slowly return responsibilities to Nix's plate as he grows in confidence and processing speed. But we shouldn't expect to see the dominance of Daniels or the steady performance of Maye anywhere in Nix's game anytime soon.Nix has checked all the boxes he promised -- accuracy, decision-making, some creativity and plenty of poise.
I can see that future for Jones on a team with far better offensive infrastructure than he ever enjoyed with the Giants. I've heard the Jets mentioned, but I don't really like how that feels;will pull their weight, but what about the offensive line? Who is the playcaller? I'm also keeping my eyes on the Steelers , Titans and Browns.would have the opportunity he has now in Minnesota until weeks before the season began.
The Lions put 645 yards on the Jaguars. They held the ball for 39 minutes. They scored 5.8 points per drive, which is the second most in a regular-season game in the past 45 years. They had seven consecutive touchdown drives to start the game and settled for a field goal on the eighth drive only because backups were in. This was the Lions' fourth game this season with more touchdowns than incompletions, and they are the first team since at least 1933 to have four such games in one season.
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