So after nine weeks of the NFL season, give or take a shared and very valid dread at the condemned warehouse that is the Cardinals-Cowboys Monday night matchup, we can all agree that the only thing we can all agree on is that Dan Quinn really filled his trousers by not taking Jayden Daniels out of last night’s lost cause of a Seahawks-Commanders game. It is a rare point of consensus in a season that has mostly been unsettled and uneasy—it is indeed suboptimal to have your starting quarterback/franchise future mangle his elbow trying to make a play he doesn’t need to make late in a game his team is losing by four and a half scores.
But that’s the only thing on which there is anything remotely close to universal agreement; everything else in this year’s NFL can be considered day-to-day and highly questionable. Baseball fans can snark away in the direction of their Dodgers-shaped straw man, basketball fans can opt in to All Wemby All The Time, and college football will always be able to find that get-your-ass-off-our-campus energy every Saturday, but the NFL has no galvanizing player or team at this moment. The best teams are all vulnerable, and not just because the odd coach will occasionally forget that there aren’t any 32-point plays.
Take Chiefs-Bills on Sunday, for instance. This was a game between two Super Bowl contenders, provided you believe that the Chiefs are a Super Bowl contender until proven otherwise, and so about as significant as a Week 9 matchup can be. The game, which was a fairly thorough hammering disguised as a 28-21 Buffalo win, did not necessarily elevate the Bills to a Dodgers-level favorite, but did effectively undermine Kansas City’s role as the league’s once and future king. The Chiefs came in on a giddy three-game bender, with one of those wins a dominant performance over a fellow contender in Detroit (which we’ll get to momentarily), and they looked game enough for a quarter and a half in Buffalo. But that was it, and the story of the rest of the game was Kansas City slowly but carefully being dismantled by a team that had just lost two games in succession to a confusingly competitive Patriots team and a not-confusing-at-all Falcons side. Are the Bills good? Yes. Are they that kind of good? Is anyone?
And therein lies the challenge of trying to define the league this year. It is a grand parade of teams regressing, at different paces, toward variously unsustainable means; taken as a whole, it is like watching a marathon in which everyone is walking backwards while looking at their phones. No team makes for a credibly hateable powerhouse, and the eight teams with only two losses are far more ambiguous in their achievements than the eight with just two wins. The latter group of teams is all irredeemably awful, but the former is anyone’s guess.
The Patriots (7-2) have that new car smell and feel, but are barely removed being last year’s 4-13 team; their only true inspirations are quarterback Drake Maye and the shared mission to advance the shaming of Bill Belichick. The Bills (6-2) have always been the team on the come that never quite arrives; they look like themselves in that regard, and on Sunday they looked very good indeed. The Colts (7-2) just got worked by the Steelers on the strength of a terrible first half, and the Broncos (7-2) have run up their seven wins against teams with an aggregate record of 19-39-1, including wins over both miserable New York teams. That alone should be deemed an unfair advantage.
The same is true in the NFC, where the current iterations of the Eagles, Buccaneers, Seahawks, and Rams will remind you of nothing so much as moderately sturdy second-round losers in the making. The Eagles own players hate the offense they run, in part because their signature play is a fraternity pigpile but mostly because the unit is otherwise most noteworthy for leading all of football in three-and-outs. The Rams and Seahawks look good now based on lopsided wins against dead teams, but are nobody’s idea of champions, at least not in the traditional sense. The Bucs seem to be doing about twice as much as every other team in the league, but it’s unclear what that adds up to beyond “maybe something.” Plus, they’re in the NFC South, which is the Sun Belt Conference in a fancy suit. And the Lions, who had that champions-on-the-make feel all offseason, have already lost more games this year than they did in all of the last.
In other words, there’s oodles of good, but nothing good enough to be fearsome, let alone properly detestable. You must decide on your own whether this level of parity is actually a grave societal ill cleverly disguised as open competition. We are an odd nation in so many shame-generating ways, to be sure, but most strikingly in how we talk egalitarianism all the time but secretly gravitate toward the mighty and powerful. It’s a group personality disorder that explains most of the reasons why we are doomed, a contradictory wish to be both out there on the edge and safely on top.
The way this manifests in sports is a demand for identifiable monsters that can then be vanquished, even though nature, let alone the AFC, doesn’t really work like that. Everyone could agree on the loathsomeness of the Patriots when they were fully Brady-ed and winning, but who’s the enemy now? College football has Ohio State, but everyone else is either losing inexplicably or enduring hostile takeovers by cartoon politicians whose football knowledge could be rivaled by a nutria wearing a colored visor. Basketball is looking for a new evil empire, although the problem there may just be that nobody hates the Thunder enough yet. Hockey is … well, put it this way: The Maple Leafs are simultaneously dead last in the East and a point out of a playoff spot. And baseball is currently ruled by an evil empire that barely escaped losing to a team that finished last a year ago, which feels both not quite evil and not nearly imperial enough. Hell, they almost got to likable on the bases of Game 3 and Game 7 alone.
Frankly, it seems like the real thing to enjoy in the last half of the regular season is figuring out which NFL team is the most rather than least enshitted. There you can have not only the certitude that your selection is worthy but that it will remain so all the way until the indefensible lie that is Draft Night. Tennessee and New Orleans are a Mississippi River-adjacent axis of inertia. Cincinnati and Cleveland more than merely neutralize Ohio State. Las Vegas and Arizona populate a desert of dreams that were never born. The New Yorks are, well, exactly what their fans deserve. Oh, and there’s the hilariously isolated despair of Miami, which has just begun the exhausting process of dynamiting its entire football operation, which is always its own entertainment. It may help you crystallize your feelings to group these nightmares geographically as we have above, or you may opt to take their failings more individually. The choice is yours. The Race To Oblivion is as marketable as anything else.
Plus, you’ll remember these days with more fondness when the Chiefs get to the Super Bowl again, and all of NFL fandom is complaining about how nothing ever changes. People can’t just be satisfied with “We’re Number 32, With A Bullet,” but that is where the fun in football truly resides.
