Jeff Carlisle covers MLS and the U.S. national team for ESPN FC.
The holiday season sees players on the U.S. men’s national team in wildly different parts of their respective campaigns. The halfway mark of the European club season has just about arrived. Some competitions — like the Premier League — power through the festive period, while others are about to take a short break. Meanwhile, Major League Soccer has gone into hibernation, with Liga MX about to conclude its Apertura campaign.
There is no rest, however, for the players, especially with a certain AC Milan attacker showing not even the flu can slow him down.
Throughout the season, ESPN will be monitoring the progress of the player pool, delivering insights into those whose form or fitness has made them particularly intriguing. We call it the USMNT’s countdown to the 2026 World Cup.
ESPN will count down to June 11 every week. When the U.S. team is announced for this highly anticipated World Cup on home soil, no names on that 26-man roster will come as a surprise. Only 183 days to go.
The past few months have been a bit stop-start for Pulisic. There was the hamstring injury in October that saw him miss about a month, as well as another muscle injury that forced him to miss the 1-0 win against Lazio on Nov. 29. Then there was his recent illness, which Pulisic said left him feeling “dead” just a day before Monday’s match with Torino.
Pulisic went on to deliver his own version of the “Flu Game,” albeit one without as much at stake as the Michael Jordan-inspired version. And he was immense, entering Tuesday’s match in the 66th minute and scoring less than a minute later. He then tallied the game winner 10 minutes later to lead Milan to a 3-2 win and move back atop the Serie A standings, and Pulisic’s seven goals in 2025-26 are tied with Inter Milan‘s Lautaro Martínez for the most in Serie A.
The impulse to protect Pulisic in bubble wrap between now and June is strong, but so long as he maintains his current health and form, USMNT fans will be content with him tearing it up for Milan. And as much as U.S. manager Mauricio Pochettino abhors the whole starter/reserve characterization, Pulisic’s current level makes him one of the few surefire starters in the USMNT lineup.
For most players, progress is usually of the sawtooth variety: a few ticks up, followed by a step down. So it has gone for Banks. The 19-year-old suffered through a difficult outing in Augsburg’s 3-0 defeat to TSG Hoffenheim on Nov. 28, but enjoyed a bounce-back performance the following week in a surprising 2-0 victory over Bayer Leverkusen. Through it all, it’s fair to say Banks has become a mainstay in the Augsburg lineup, having started the club’s past nine league matches.
How does all of this factor into the USMNT picture?
Banks is certainly helping his cause, and while the Bundesliga‘s winter break is slated to begin on Dec. 21 and last until around Jan. 9, he’ll have plenty of opportunities to impress prior to the next international window in March. Banks will have some players to climb over, even with Celtic‘s Cameron Carter-Vickers sidelined with an Achilles injury, but Pochettino is known to be an admirer, meaning Banks’ window of opportunity remains slightly open.
Some good news has finally made its way to Sargent. The Norwich City striker scored on a fantastic diving header against Watford. Although the Canaries ended up losing, 3-2, it was Sargent’s first goal since an Aug. 30 brace against Blackburn Rovers. This comes on top of Sargent notching an assist in the previous week’s 3-1 win over Queens Park Rangers, breaking a 13-match winless streak.
To be clear, Sargent’s dry spell means he remains in the basement when it comes to the USMNT depth chart. The likes of AS Monaco‘s Folarin Balogun, PSV Eindhoven‘s Ricardo Pepi, Coventry City‘s Haji Wright, and Derby County‘s Patrick Agyemang are all positioned above Sargent at the moment (more on that in a moment). But the Norwich forward needed to start somewhere, and last weekend’s goal is as good a place as any.
The in-form XI
History was made in the UEFA Champions League on Tuesday. After squandering some opportunities, Balogun scored the only goal of the match in his side’s 1-0 win over Galatasaray. The tally marked the third consecutive game that Balogun had scored in the Champions League, a first for an American. He now has 10 goals on the season for club and country.
Balogun wasn’t the only American to find the net either. Pepi also scored, albeit in a losing effort as PSV fell to Atlético Madrid, 3-1. While the competition for spots on the USMNT remains fierce, Balogun continues to keep his competitors at arm’s length, and his work rate and mobility — in addition to his finishing — should help him stay there.
When it comes to Juventus midfielder Weston McKennie, you can count his club manager, Luciano Spalletti, among the converted.
“It’s a strong person who makes a strong footballer. McKennie has this attitude, this way of meeting you halfway, like he’s saying: ‘You ask, I’ll do,'” Spalletti said prior to last weekend’s match against Napoli. “He starts and becomes effective; you can tell he faced his fears when he was young because to become brave, you have to face what scares you. He tries plays that wouldn’t normally be a part of his repertoire, but he still tries them.”
Spalletti is the fifth permanent manager McKennie has had since he arrived in Turin in 2020, and it seems like the U.S. midfielder has rarely been given the benefit of the doubt. Some of that was down to McKennie’s inability to maintain the requisite fitness, but this campaign has seen him conquer those concerns. He remains Juventus’ Swiss Army knife, and even popped up for the opening goal in Juve’s 2-0 win over Pafos in the Champions League.
The question remains: Where does McKennie fit into the national team? He’s logged plenty of minutes at wing back for Juve this season, but that position is relatively well stocked for the U.S., with Sergiño Dest, Tim Weah, Alex Freeman and Max Arfsten all vying for minutes. That leaves either the central midfield role alongside Tyler Adams, or does he occupy one of the more attacking midfielder spots in tandem with Pulisic?
For now, the attacking midfield spot seems a good fit for McKennie. While he is definitely a two-way player, his skill set tilts more on the attacking side of things, and he showed well alongside Malik Tillman in the 1-1 draw against Ecuador last October. But the competition for that spot is stiff. In addition to Tillman, there is Borussia Mönchengladbach‘s Gio Reyna, América‘s Alejandro Zendejas and Real Salt Lake‘s Diego Luna all competing for time.
Much will depend on how aggressive Pochettino wants to be in a particular match going forward. If he wants more creativity on the field, he could slide McKennie back into midfield. If he opts for a more defensive stance, Tanner Tessmann could be the man to partner Adams with McKennie further forward.
There are scenarios where McKennie could be the man to come off the bench. Given his willingness to sacrifice for the team, the possibilities are endless. What’s known is that McKennie’s performances at club level have him firmly in the World Cup roster mix.
Entrenching generative AI into Adobe’s creative software ecosystem is paying off, according to the company’s latest earnings. While its share price has fallen by more than 37 percent this year at the time of writing, Adobe is reporting a bump in annual profits driven by record revenue of $23.77 billion for 2025 — an 11 percent increase year-over-year that it’s largely attributing to AI.
“Adobe’s record FY2025 results reflect our growing importance in the global AI ecosystem and the rapid adoption of our AI-driven tools,” said Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen in the press release. The company is now targeting to increase annual recurring revenue (ARR) by 10.2 percent in 2026 by “advancing our innovative generative and agentic platforms and expanding our customer base,” according to Narayen.
Adobe has gone all-in on AI over the last two years, launching its own family of Firefly generative AI models for image, video, and audio applied across its creative apps and marketing solutions. AI-influenced ARR now makes up more than one-third of Adobe’s overall business, according to its earnings report.
According to Narayen, one of Adobe’s top accomplishments this year was “establishing ourselves within leading AI ecosystems with partnerships and integrations across AWS, Azure, Google Gemini, HUMAIN, Microsoft Copilot, OpenAI, and others.” In other words, if Adobe can’t compete with AI rivals head-on, it’s betting on third-party integrations to help it survive generative AI’s relentless conquest of the creative industry.
Bunnie Xo and Jelly Roll‘s love story began in Las Vegas.
Asshe recalled on Bussin’ With The Boys, she metthe singer in August 2015 when he performed at the Las Vegas Country Saloon. This was before Jelly Roll was famous. At the time, he was living in a van, and he estimated about 20 people were at the show.
Instead, their spark took center stage.
“When I met him, I tell everybody it’s the most f–king cliché s–t, but literally my soul was like, ‘There you are,'” Bunnie said on the podcast in 2023. “And he’s not my type. I’m not his type. He loves Taylor Swift. That’s his type.”
Still, a romance didn’t form right away. Bunnie was in an unhealthy relationship, she continued, and Jelly Roll was doing his own thing. But in October 2015, they reconnected. And as Bunnie put it, she was “just smitten.”
After her ex went to prison, she added, she told a friend to give Jelly Roll her phone number. Bunnie said the musician would call and text her for advice on his daughter Bailee from a previous relationship.
However, Bunnie noted her bond with Jelly Roll shifted from platonic to romantic in July 2016 when he returned to Vegas to film some videos and they slept together.
“We’re like s–t-faced drunk,” she remembered. “I’m trying to get it up, get it in, get it on and get it out, and this guy was like, ‘What’s your five-year plan?'”
So, they discussed their goals, and Bunnie recalled Jelly Roll saying, “OK, cool. Let’s do it.”
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The Minnesota Vikings and Dallas Cowboys meet up for “Sunday Night Football,” with the Cowboys desperately trying to keep their playoff hopes alive.
Matt Bowen, Joe Fortenbaugh, Pamela Maldonado, Eric Moody, Ben Solak and Seth Walder looked at the early Week 15 odds and identified which ones are worth jumping on now before potential shifts later in the week.
Note: Odds by DraftKings Sportsbook and subject to change.
Moody: The Patriots are slight underdogs at home, which is surprising to me. New England has won five consecutive games in Foxborough and beat the Bills earlier this season. The Patriots have been a juggernaut offensively, ranking eighth in total yards and seventh in points per game. Their defense has performed similarly, ranking in the top 10 in both total yards allowed and points allowed. The Bills are 5-15 straight up in their past 20 road games against the Patriots.
Solak: The Bills had a strong offensive day against the Cincinnati Bengals, but we’re far too quickly forgetting that it took a 67-yard pick-six for the Bills to regain control of this game, and then another pick-six for them to build a truly unrecoverable lead. I expect public money to be all over the Patriots this week, and enough sharps should be there that this closes with the Patriots actually favored.
Bowen: I’ll take the six points with the Lions in this one. Look for Jared Goff to target the deep in-breakers versus Rams split-safety coverages. Catch-and-run throws. Detroit creates enough explosive plays to cover Sunday in L.A.
Last week: Bears +6 at Packers (Packers won 28-21)
Lions at Rams total points OVER 55 (-108)
Maldonado: This looks aggressive, but the matchup calls for it. The Rams are a scoring machine, and their pace forces opponents to keep up. The Lions are functional enough offensively to land where they need, even on the road. Matthew Stafford creates explosive plays, Jared Goff plays catch-up and the game naturally tilts into a high-scoring script. Once the line becomes available, the Rams’ team total over is worth consideration.
Fortenbaugh: The lookahead line here was Jacksonville -9.5, so this is a pretty big adjustment based on Week 14’s results … which featured the Jaguars smoking the Indianapolis Colts and the Jets getting thrashed by the Miami Dolphins. This Jaguars team is good, but they haven’t laid more than six points in a game all season and haven’t laid 11 or more points in a game since December 23, 2007, when closing -14 at home against the then-Oakland Raiders. This is strictly a numbers play for me, as I’m old enough to remember Jacksonville losing 35-7 at home against the Los Angeles Rams back in late October.
Solak: The Broncos are still struggling to run the football in J.K. Dobbins‘ absence, and the defense has shown a few cracks over recent weeks as opposing offenses become more specific with who they target in man coverage. The Packers are closer to full strength at wide receiver with Jayden Reed back in the fold, and the defense shreds against opposing offenses that can’t run the rock. Good matchup for Green Bay here.
Last week: Seahawks -7.5 at Falcons (Seahawks won 37-9), Colts-Jaguars under 48.5 (Jaguars won 36-19)
Walder: Forgive me for not buying into J.J. McCarthy just yet after one good game against the worst passing defense in the league in terms of EPA per play. And similarly, I’m not throwing in the towel on the Cowboys’ ability just because they lost by 14 to the Lions. Dak Prescott is the league leader in QBR this season and ought to receive MVP consideration, and DT Quinnen Williams looks like his old self now that he’s in Dallas. He has recorded a 15% pass rush win rate at defensive tackle as a Cowboy, which would rank third at the position for the season if he had kept that pace over the whole year. I like Dallas to clear this spread and then some.
This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.
Reinforcement learning (RL) is the next frontier, Google is surging, and the party scene has gotten completely out of hand. Those were the through lines from this year’s NeurIPS in San Diego.
NeurIPS, or the “Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems,” started in 1987 as a purely academic affair. It has since ballooned alongside the hype around AI into a massive industry event where labs come to recruit and investors come to find the next wave of AI startups.
I was regretfully unable to attend NeurIPS this year, but I still wanted to know what people were talking about on the ground in San Diego over the past week. So I asked engineers, researchers, and founders for their takeaways. The list below of responses includes Andy Konwinski, cofounder of Databricks and founder of the Laude Institute; Thomas Wolf, cofounder of Hugging Face; OpenAI’s Roon; and attendees from Meta, Waymo, Google DeepMind, Amazon, and a handful of other places.
I asked everyone the same three questions: What’s the buzziest topic from the conference? Which labs feel like they’re surging or struggling? Who had the best party?
The consensus was clear. “RL RL RL RL is taking over the world,” Anastasios Angelopoulos, CEO of LMArena, told me. The industry is coalescing around the idea that tuning models for specific use cases, rather than scaling the data used for pre-training, will drive the next wave of AI progress. What’s clear from the lab momentum question is that Google is having a moment. “Google DeepMind is feeling good,” Hugging Face’s Wolf told me.
The party circuit was naturally relentless. Konwinski’s Laude Lounge emerged as one of the week’s hotspots — Jeff Dean, Yoshua Bengio, Ion Stoica, and about a dozen other top researchers came through. Model Ship, an invite-only cruise with 200 researchers, featured “a commitment to the dance floor that is unprecedented at a conference event,” one of the organizers of the cruise, Nathan Lambert, told me. Roon was dry about the whole scene: “you can learn more from twitter than from literally being there … mostly my on-the-ground feeling was ‘this is too much.’”
Here’s what attendees had to say about NeurIPS this year:
What was the buzziest topic among attendees that you think more people will be talking about in 2026?
Which labs feel like they’re surging in momentum, and which ones feel more shaky?
What was the best party you attended or had FOMO over?
Yes, some people thought keynotes were parties. I guess academia lives on at NeurIPS after all.
– Liverpool have opened talks regarding a move for Borussia Dortmund center back Nico Schlotterbeck, according to TEAMtalk. The Reds have tracked the 26-year-old’s situation for over a year but, despite him entering the final 18 months of his contract, it will take an offer worth in the region of €50 million to signing him as Real Madrid, Barcelona and Bayern Munich are also interested in his signature. Meanwhile, Fotomac claims that Liverpool are preparing an initial offer of €28m plus up to €15m in add-ons to sign versatile Galatasaray defender Wilfried Singo.
– Santos forward Neymar is set to consider a move back to Europe or MLS if he doesn’t stay in Brazil, according to AS. Due to a host of injuries, Neymar, 33, played only 19 of the 38 rounds of the Brasileirão, which started in April, and scored eight goals as he helped the side avoid relegation. But with the next domestic season starting in mid-February, and knee surgery to undergo in the coming weeks, the superstar is still hopeful of being included in Brazil’s final squad for the 2026 World Cup in the summer. And that means he could seek a new club if he doesn’t renew his expiring contract beyond this month, with Lionel Messi‘s Inter Miami linked.
– Manchester City are lining up a move for Newcastle United full back Tino Livramento, TEAMtalk reports. City manager Pep Guardiola sees the 23-year-old as the complete package, capable of being deployed in an inverted role, and has plans to sign him as a long-term solution at right back. City are reporter to be weighing up an offer worth in excess of £65 million, which could also include goalkeeperJames Trafford in a player-exchange deal.
– Inter Miami has made an offer to keep hold of 38-year-old strikerLuis Suárez, reports AS. Suarez would likely need to agree to a lower salary should he remain in MLS, but Uruguayan Primera Division side Nacional would also reportedly like to welcome him back for a third and final time to finish his career at the club where he made his professional debut in 2005.
– Galatasaray are interested in Atalanta wingerAdemola Lookman, says Nicolo Schira. The Turkish Super Lig giants are keen to land a forward in January and have added the 28-year-old Nigeria international to their shortlist. Lookman has recently found form with two goals in his last three matches across all competitions, and was on the radar of Internazionale and Arsenal during the summer transfer window.
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OTHER RUMORS
– Wrexham and Birmingham City could challenge Crystal Palace and Hull City to sign University College Dublin (UCD) midfielder Adam Brennan, 18, who has contributed to 13 goals in 28 league matches so far this season (Football Insider).
– Liverpool want winger Mohamed Salah to stay at the club until the end of his contract despite him being left out of their Champions League squad to face Internazionale. (Athletic)
– Bournemouth would prefer to keep winger Antoine Semenyo until the summer amid interest from clubs in the Premier League. (BBC)
– Bayern Munich are confident that 39-year-old goalkeeper Manuel Neuer will sign a contract extension and could move on Alexander Nubel, who is currently on loan at VfB Stuttgart. (Christian Falk).
– Real Madrid could sack manager Xabi Alonso if he doesn’t secure a positive result in the Champions League against Manchester City on Wednesday. (Marca)
– On-loan Atalanta midfielder Yunus Musah would prefer to stay and fight for his place rather than return to AC Milan in January. (Calciomercato)
– Aston Villa and West Ham are among the teams looking at Manchester United forward Joshua Zirkzee. (TEAMtalk)
– Juventus are preparing an offer worth €25m to sign Marseille defender Leonardo Balerdi. (Ekrem Konur)
– A deal worth €3m has been agreed by Lens to sign RB Leipzig midfielder Amadou Haidara. (Fabrizio Romano)
– The representatives of Nice winger Jeremie Boga have offered him to clubs in the Serie A as he is keen to leave in January. (Nicolo Schira)
– Leeds United and Nottingham Forest are keen on Hibernian midfielder Josh Mulligan. (Daily Mail)
– A loan move for Borussia Dortmund striker Fabio Silva is being considered by Real Betis, Sevilla and Valencia. (Rudy Galetti)
Specifically, her and fiancé Matt Rutler‘s 10-year-old daughter Summer Rain, who the “Beautiful” singer said prefers to see her with no makeup.
“Summer’s favorite side is ‘no makeup mama,'” Christina shared on the Dec. 9 episode ofThe Jennifer Hudson Show. “As soon as I’m done shooting, she’s like, ‘OK, can you take that off now? It’s time to be cozy.'”
The 44-year-old continued, “She loves my freckles and I cover them a lot. She’s like, ‘Am I going to have freckles one day?'”
And Summer hopes to take after her mom in more than just her appearance. As Christina noted, “She’s such an artist.”
“She paints, she draws, she makes beautiful masks and pieces,” the Grammy winner continued, adding that Summer has also “taken an interest in acting.”
As for her and ex-husband Jordan Bratman‘s 17-year-old son Max Liron? According to Christina, he’s a little bit more “tough” to impress.
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Bill Barnwell is a senior NFL writer for ESPN.com. He analyzes football on and off the field like no one else on the planet, writing about in-season X’s and O’s, offseason transactions and so much more.
He is the host of the Bill Barnwell Show podcast, with episodes released weekly. Barnwell joined ESPN in 2011 as a staff writer at Grantland.
In an NFL season in which so many teams are tightly packed at the top of their respective conferences and divisions, every week of football in December is going to drive massive changes in the league’s playoff picture. Thursday’s win by the Lions over the Cowboys kept Dan Campbell’s team in the race with its divisional rivals for a wild-card spot, while Dallas saw its own push into the postseason derailed. The Cowboys’ playoff odds were more than cut in half, per ESPN’s Football Power Index (FPI)
There were more significant swings on Sunday, especially in games where teams with realistic playoff aspirations were pitted against one another. With three potential playoff teams on bye and two more still to meet when the Chargers and Eagles play on “Monday Night Football,” there were four matchups between true playoff contenders on Sunday. (Sorry, Bengals.) They were all interesting in their own ways.
Today, I’ll break down the big stories from those four games and what the outcome means for both teams involved. That starts in Jacksonville, where a Colts team saw its chances of making an impact in 2025 and potentially 2026 disappear in a matter of moments. Not only did Indy lose the division matchup, it also lost quarterback Daniel Jones to an Achilles injury. A team that had visions of running the AFC playoffs through Indianapolis as the 1-seed might not make it to this season’s postseason at all.
Jaguars’ playoff odds change: 84.0% to 96.7% (up 12.7%) Colts’ playoff odds change: 72.6% to 51.3% (down 21.3%)
The Colts were already in free fall, having dropped out of the top spot in the AFC after losing three of their past four games. Their offense, one of the best in recent history over the first half of the season, had fallen back to earth. Cornerback Sauce Gardner — whom Indy traded two first-round picks to acquire at the trade deadline — was sidelined by a calf injury. The organization surely felt lucky that its new star defender hadn’t suffered an Achilles injury as feared when he went down in last week’s loss to the Texans.
Unfortunately, the Colts weren’t as lucky this week. Already playing with a fractured fibula in his left leg, Daniel Jones went down Sunday with a torn Achilles on his right side. Jones has hit injured reserve in the past after tearing his ACL and battling neck issues with the Giants, and now his 2025 season is over after 13 games. He had seemingly established himself as the quarterback the Colts have been desperately trying to find since the unexpected retirement of Andrew Luck just before the start of the 2019 season. Now, what felt like a relatively settled situation turns into yet another offseason of QB uncertainty for GM Chris Ballard and the Colts’ front office.
The Colts were surely going to bring Jones back in 2026 after the end of his one-year deal, either by using the franchise tag or signing him to a new contract. Those negotiations suddenly seem more difficult for all parties involved. Would the Colts really commit what projects to be a $46.1 million franchise tag to Jones if they aren’t sure whether their quarterback will even be ready to start the 2026 season on the active roster? Could they really commit on a long-term deal to a passer who has been able to complete only one full, healthy season as a starter since joining the league in 2019 without knowing how he looks after the injury?
Jones already made life-altering money during his time with the Giants and would have had a meaningful market if the Colts had decided to let him leave this offseason. The 28-year-old was looking at a minimum of $46 million more in guaranteed money from the franchise tag, if not more on a long-term deal. Now, that’s up in the air. The Colts could get creative and offer Jones something less to try to find common ground on a deal, but that could allow Jones to hit the open market. At that point he might prefer a deal with a team like the Vikings, who presumably regret letting Jones walk out the door this offseason.
And of course, the Jones injury leaves the Colts in an impossible position. Their backup, 2023 first-round pick Anthony Richardson Sr., is on injured reserve after suffering a fractured orbital bone in a freak warmup accident. Their new quarterback is undrafted Notre Dame product Riley Leonard, who went 18-of-29 for 145 yards and an interception Sunday. Leonard had a short rushing touchdown, but he was lucky to get away with a couple of other would-be interceptions and took a sack in the end zone for a safety.
Jones had been struggling a bit in recent weeks, surely owing in part to the fibula injury, and Leonard will play a little better when he gets a full week of practice and preparation as the starter. But even the Jones we saw over the past month would have been a significant upgrade on what the Colts will have at quarterback with Leonard moving forward. Richardson still hasn’t been cleared for football activities, and he was one of the least effective passers (era-adjusted) in league history over his first two seasons with the Colts.
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Daniel Jones suffers Achilles injury vs. the Jaguars
Daniel Jones exits the Colts’ Week 14 game vs. the Jaguars with an Achilles injury.
At this point of the season, with the trade deadline past, there aren’t going to be many teams willing to just float a quarterback to the Colts out of the kindness of their hearts. The Colts have Brett Rypien on their practice squad and will likely promote the 29-year-old to be the backup, but there aren’t many potential starters freely available around the NFL. The best options are veteran journeymen Trevor Siemian (on the Titans’ practice squad) and Mike White (Panthers), neither of whom has crossed paths with coach Shane Steichen in the past. They wouldn’t be able to immediately step in and run the offense with any sort of mastery, although they could be upgrades on Leonard.
The obvious veteran lurking at the bottom of a roster who would make sense is Russell Wilson, who was inactive as the third-string quarterback for the Giants last week. Wilson is owed $444,444 in base salary over the rest of the season, so the Giants wouldn’t be saving a ton of money by waiving the veteran, but this would be doing a player who is on his way out a favor. Wilson wasn’t great in New York and would also need to learn what the Colts want to do on offense. Still, it would be worth a flier for Indy if the Giants did release the 37-year-old.
Of course, the solution for the Colts will probably be to phase out the quarterback as much as possible and rely heavily on Jonathan Taylor and their defense to win them games. We saw the limitations of that strategy Sunday. While the Colts were already trailing 14-7 at the end of the first quarter when Jones suffered his injury, they were still close enough to the Jags to continue running the football and keep things competitive. It just didn’t work.
Taylor finished with 74 rushing yards on 21 carries, averaging 3.5 yards per carry. On the first drive after Jones’ injury, the star back lost a fumble, giving the Jags a short field. Jacksonville scored on the next play to go up 21-7, and while the Colts responded with a 14-play drive, it ended with a field goal. Taylor was then stuffed on fourth-and-1 after a Bhayshul Tuten fumble, and the Jaguars scored again to go up 18 points at halftime, with Indy never really threatening to make the game competitive after the break.
The Jags obviously benefited from facing a third-string quarterback making his pro debut, but they dominated this game on both sides of the ball. There were still the sadly familiar signs of sloppy play on offense, but the unit was playing well enough to allow for a meaningful margin of error. In some games, a false start at the 2-yard line and a drop by Tim Patrick in the end zone on consecutive plays would be enough to turn a touchdown into a field goal and sink the Jaguars in a close game. But here, Trevor Lawrence just threw a touchdown to Patrick on the next snap.
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0:25
Trevor Lawrence evades pressure, throws TD pass to Tim Patrick
Trevor Lawrence finds Tim Patrick for a touchdown to extend the Jaguars’ lead vs. the Colts.
Lawrence played his best game of the season by a considerable margin, going 17-of-30 for 244 yards, throwing two touchdown passes and running for three first downs. His 82.8 Total QBR was his best mark in more than a year. With the Colts leaning heavily into man coverage even without Gardner in the lineup, Lawrence made them pay with shots downfield, going 8-of-15 for 168 yards and a touchdown against man coverage. He hit deep shots past each of Indy’s starting corners, though the highlight had to be Lawrence’s 26-yard completion to Patrick. Lawrence outran a slot blitz to his left and smoothly found his receiver for an explosive play.
The Jags had a margin of error earlier in the year because of their defense and their newfound propensity for creating turnovers. Jacksonville racked up 14 takeaways through its 4-1 stretch to start the season. Over the 3-3 stretch that followed, it mustered only four, and the defense dropped from sixth in EPA per play to 19th. Injuries in the secondary didn’t help matters, while midseason trade acquisitionGreg Newsome II struggled to grow comfortable in his new digs.
Over the past two games, though, the Jaguars have gotten back on the turnover train, with two in the win over the Titans and three more against the Colts. Leonard was responsible for only one of those giveaways, as the Jags picked off Jones early in the game before his injury. With the Jets, Broncos, Colts and Titans on the schedule between now and the end of the season, the Jags might feel like they can continue to create takeaways in bunches on the defensive side of the ball.
Sitting atop the AFC South at 9-4, the Jaguars are in a favorable position as they try to claim just their third playoff berth since 2008. They’re a game ahead of the Texans, and the two teams split the head-to-head. The Jaguars currently have a slight lead with their record on common games, but the Texans will have a chance to make that up between now and the end of the season. The Jaguars are also 4-1 in division matchups, while the Texans are 3-1, but that could also even out. This could come down to a fifth or sixth tiebreaker, but the Jags still have that one-game lead. Both teams will be favored in three of their final four games and be underdogs on the road in their toughest remaining contests (Jags against Broncos, Texans against Chargers).
The Colts, meanwhile, are now underdogs to even reach the postseason at all. Leonard’s first career start will come next weekend in Seattle, where the Seahawks just devoured fellow undrafted third-stringer Max Brosmer in what might end up being his only pro start. They host the 49ers the following week, then finish up with games against the Jaguars and Texans. Having started 8-2, it’s entirely possible that the Colts fail to even finish with a winning record, let alone a postseason berth.
And then, of course, the decision to trade so much for Gardner at midseason would be even more painful. The deal strongly pushed the Colts toward sticking with Jones, given that Indy shipped off its next two first-round picks to acquire the corner. The Colts couldn’t possibly have foreseen both Gardner and Jones going down with injuries in consecutive games, but relying on a QB with Jones’ injury history was always a risky proposition. Now the Colts are facing another season around .500 and an uncertain path forward under center.
Steelers’ playoff odds change: 32.5% to 68.6% (up 36.1%) Ravens’ playoff odds change: 60.9% to 28.9% (down 32.0%)
In some ways, this game defied our expectations, especially about the quarterbacks. Aaron Rodgers seemed to respond to a week of biting criticism with an immediate riposte, going deep to DK Metcalf on his first snap of the game for a 52-yard completion. He hit all three of his deep shots Sunday for 121 yards.
Lamar Jackson ran seven times for 43 yards and a touchdown. The Ravens as a whole ran for 214 yards on 40 carries, highlighted by a 55-yard scamper by Keaton Mitchell, who would later leave the game with a knee injury. The Ravens had a 43% success rate on their carries, and they held the Steelers to 34 rush yards on 17 attempts.
By the end of the game, though, this mostly came down to what we could have anticipated. The Steelers ran out of steam on offense in the fourth quarter, going three-and-out on each of their final three possessions. The Ravens continued to move the ball, racking up 46 yards or more on each of their fourth-quarter possessions, but an offense that was so good at scoring touchdowns in the red zone last season couldn’t punch the ball in this time around. The Ravens made three trips to the red zone on those drives and managed two field goals, failing to score at all on the third try when Isaiah Likely couldn’t haul in what should have been a pitch-and-catch touchdown from Jackson against soft coverage.
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0:39
Isaiah Likely’s go-ahead TD gets overturned on review
Isaiah Likely appears to score a go-ahead touchdown, but it’s overturned because the referees say he lost control of the ball.
The Likely non-catch was controversial and will linger in the heads of Ravens fans for a long time if they don’t make it to the postseason, but it was one moment in a sequence of unfortunate red zone events for the Ravens. They went 2-for-6 converting red zone trips into touchdowns Sunday and left opportunities to score on the field.
On their first attempt in the fourth quarter, Jackson & Co. faced a third-and-4 from Pittsburgh’s 10-yard line. The Steelers blitzed, and halfback Rasheen Ali — nominally the team’s fourth option at the position — whiffed on his pass protection attempt, forcing Jackson to scramble to escape pressure from Patrick Queen. When he reset, Jackson saw an open Rashod Bateman running a shallow route for what should have been an easy first down, but the pass bounced off Bateman’s hands for an incompletion, forcing the Ravens to kick a field goal.
A fourth-and-1 conversion by Henry got the Ravens into the red zone on the next possession, but he came off the field for the ensuing three-snap sequence. Ali ran for 2 yards on first down. The Steelers brought the house on second down, and while Jackson eluded an unblocked Queen again for a moment, the pressure forced him to one-hop a checkdown under duress. On third down, nobody got open, and while Jackson avoided a sack, he threw another pass into the ground, setting up another Tyler Loop field goal.
Even after Likely’s drop, the Ravens were in favorable position to score their much-needed touchdown. A pass to Henry set up a third-and-2 from Pittsburgh’s 5-yard line, leaving the Ravens with two shots to pick up 2 yards against their archrivals. They just didn’t execute. Henry lost 3 yards on third down when the Steelers crashed down and attacked the mesh point on a slow-developing gap run, with a completely unblocked Alex Highsmith blowing up the run in the backfield. The Ravens were also flagged for illegal formation on the play, which was just a complete mess.
On fourth-and-5, Jackson tried to work a juke route to Zay Flowers with a corner route over the top from Likely, but he came off of it almost immediately and never really seemed to land on something he liked. DeAndre Hopkins was open briefly in the back of the end zone, but Jackson was already off the veteran wideout, too. He seemed to get caught between scrambling and waiting in the pocket before attempting a throw to a covered Mark Andrews, who wasn’t able to bring in the ball.
All this from a team that converted 74.2% of its red zone possessions into touchdowns last season, the best rate of any team in the NFL and the fourth-best rate by any team in any season over the prior decade. The Ravens are picking those up 44.9% of the time in 2025, which is 30th in the league, and that’s all the way down to 36.4% in the games they’ve lost. There have been other issues — the defense was a mess early in the season, and the run game has struggled to stay on schedule — but one of Baltimore’s biggest strengths last year has become one of the weaknesses that might cost it a trip to the postseason.
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0:24
Steelers sack Lamar on final play to secure AFC North-leading win over Ravens
Steelers sack Lamar on final play to secure AFC North-leading win over Ravens
This was obviously an enormous victory for the Steelers, who now hold the head-to-head tiebreaker over the Ravens and will host the rematch between the two in Week 18. The Bengals blowing their lead in Buffalo and losing helped; their playoffs odds dropped to 3.4%.
And at the very least, we saw some signs of life from a Steelers passing attack that had looked physically and mentally exhausted in recent weeks. Rodgers had his best game by Total QBR since Week 7 against the Bengals, going 23-of-34 for 284 yards with a touchdown pass and even scrambling for a score without turning the ball over once. It would be tough to count on that every week moving forward, but even knowing Rodgers has that sort of game in him this late in the season feels like a pleasant surprise for the Steelers. Maybe the fans who chanted “Fire Tomlin” will let their coach stick around for next week’s home game against the Dolphins.
The Steelers also have a much easier schedule moving forward than the Ravens, who have three of their final four games on the road. The Ravens travel to play the Bengals, Packers and Steelers, while their lone home game is against the 11-2 Patriots. Baltimore is out of the wild-card picture, so its only path to the postseason is through the AFC North title. John Harbaugh’s team technically still controls its own destiny and could clinch the division by winning out, but Sunday’s loss was a major step backward.
Texans’ playoff odds change: 54.0% to 81.8% (up 27.8%) Chiefs’ playoff odds change: 40.4% to 14.2% (down 26.2%)
What seemed impossible is quickly becoming a reality in Kansas City. The idea that the Chiefs would outright miss the playoffs with a healthy Patrick Mahomes would have gotten you laughed out of any football conversation over the summer. Now, after a brutal home loss to the Texans on Sunday, the Chiefs’ chances of making the playoffs for the 11th consecutive season are on life support. It will take something truly spectacular for them to land even a wild-card spot in January.
I’ve written about how bad luck and timing have hurt the Chiefs this season, but when it comes to their Week 14 loss, they have nobody to blame but themselves. It wasn’t a great matchup given that the Texans were fielding the best edge duo in football against a pair of backup Chiefs tackles, and the matchup got only worse when Wanya Morris was injured on the opening snap and replaced by undrafted free agent Esa Pole for his NFL debut. But the line didn’t singlehandedly decide this game the way it might have in the Super Bowl losses to the Bucs and Eagles.
Instead, the Chiefs beat themselves. Although this was one of their best defensive performances of the season, especially when Chris Jones and the D-line got pressure on C.J. Stroud, they did make some mistakes. The Chiefs allowed a pair of third-and-16-plus conversions. They gave up a touchdown to Dalton Schultz early on, only to be bailed out by an illegal shift penalty. Mike Edwards missed a tackle on Nico Collins that turned a 10-yard completion into a 53-yard catch. A few plays later, with the Chiefs double-teaming Collins and Schultz in the red zone, nobody covered Woody Marks out of the backfield for a 9-yard score. Losing top cornerback Trent McDuffie in the first quarter hurt. But even allowing for those issues, the Chiefs defense played well enough to win.
The offense was far sloppier, culminating in a horrible callback to the 2023 offense at the end of the game, with Rashee Rice dropping a would-be conversion on fourth down to end one drive and Travis Kelce dropping consecutive passes on the ensuing possession — the latter of which bouncing off him and into the hands of Azeez Al-Shaair for a back-breaking interception. Noah Gray had two drops earlier in the game, while Kareem Hunt‘s drop on what should have been an easy third-and-2 completion ended what could have been a touchdown drive with a field goal to tie the game. Tyquan Thornton had a deep shot hit him in the hands in the end zone, but he wasn’t able to hang on.
It wasn’t just the drops, though. The Chiefs finished the game averaging minus-0.36 EPA per play, the third-worst offensive performance of the Mahomes era behind a five-turnover day against the Broncos in 2023 and last season’s Super Bowl loss to the Eagles. Mahomes had one of his least productive games as a pro, going 14-of-33 for 160 yards with three picks and a minus-16.3% completion percentage over expected (CPOE), per NFL Next Gen Stats. He finished 2-of-12 for 40 yards and an interception when pressured and was just 6-of-22 for 105 yards when he held the ball for 2.5 seconds or more.
Mahomes scrambled for a team-high 59 yards, but even his best plays weren’t perfect. The star QB hit Hollywood Brown with a catchable ball on a third-quarter post route for 35 yards, but a better throw would have produced a touchdown. Instead, even while throwing from a clean pocket, Mahomes’ pass was underthrown and forced Brown to make a shoestring catch. It was a C-plus throw from a quarterback who we know to be capable of much better. That drive ended in a touchdown, but it took a subsequent fourth-and-1 conversion to get there.
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0:41
Woody: ‘Stick a fork in the Chiefs, they are done!’
Damien Woody explains how the Chiefs’ season is essentially over after Sunday night’s loss to the Texans.
The Chiefs wouldn’t be so fortunate later in the game, failing on a pair of critical fourth-down attempts in the fourth quarter on Mahomes incompletions — including a fourth-and-1 in a tie game inside their own territory. Our analytics model liked the decision to go for that fourth-and-1, and my colleague Seth Walder gave reasonable answers for why it might have been right, even given what happened next. Chris Jones nearly sacked Stroud on third down on the ensuing Houston possession, which would have pushed the Texans to the fringes of field goal range; if he got his man and the Texans punted, nobody ever would have talked about that fourth-and-1 call again.
I don’t want to play victim of the outcomes, but while I’m in favor of the Chiefs going for it in just about every situation imaginable, this one felt like a genuine shock and a mistake to me. Coach Andy Reid used a timeout before making his choice, which was damaging under any circumstance. Game flow can lie or trick you, but this felt like a game where the team that made a mistake on offense first was going to lose, and the Chiefs were running a much greater risk of being that team by attempting a fourth-and-1 without much reward in return. From the 41-yard line, with the Texans needing to advance the ball to get in field goal range, I wouldn’t have minded. But from their own 31-yard line, with the Texans already in range to take the lead if they stopped the Chiefs on downs?
Reid’s playcall might have worked, as JuJu Smith-Schuster came open immediately on a shallow crosser, but Mahomes didn’t fire into that initial window. Rice was bumped on his route following Smith-Schuster by Al-Shaair, throwing off the timing of the play and giving Derek Stingley Jr. time to recognize the concept and drive on Rice, breaking up the attempt.
Rice simply wasn’t good enough in a critical game, as he battled drops and caught four of the eight targets thrown his way for a total of just 34 yards. Eight targets to Chiefs tight ends produced two catches, 14 receiving yards and four drops. The only player who caught a Mahomes pass between the hashes on Sunday was … Mahomes, who brought in his own tipped pass for a loss of 10 yards.
One of the things I was hoping to see from the Chiefs during the game was more work from under center on the ground. They came into the game as the league’s second-best rushing attack by EPA per play on under-center runs, while the Texans were one of the league’s worst defenses against those rushes. It didn’t happen. The duo of Isiah Pacheco and Hunt carried the ball 21 times, and 15 of those runs were from the shotgun or pistol. Those gun runs produced an average of 2.5 yards per carry. The six under-center runs were up at 3.8 yards per attempt, which isn’t great but still about 50% better than the alternatives.
It could have been a more substantial win for the Texans, who left points on the field with penalties and drops of their own. They struggled to block up Kansas City’s blitzes after an early touchdown pass, and on the whole, Stroud was 5-of-13 for 78 yards and a score against the blitz. The third-year quarterback missed too many throws, often high, but he also came up with a handful of big plays on third down to keep possession. On a day where Houston’s running game turned 29 carries into just 77 yards, it was on Stroud to move the ball. It wasn’t a highlight-reel game most of the way, but he made fewer damaging mistakes than Mahomes and got more help from his receivers.
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0:25
CJ Stroud flips it to Woody Marks for Texans TD
CJ Stroud throws a short pass to Woody Marks to take a 10-0 lead over the Chiefs.
For the Texans, this is some measure of a vindication in a place where they’ve been haunted in years past. The Chiefs knocked the Bill O’Brien-era Texans out of the playoffs in Kansas City during the 2019 playoffs, overcoming a 24-0 deficit and scoring 51 of the final 58 points. They beat the Texans at home in the season opener the following season, won in Houston in overtime two years later and then swept the Texans with a pair of home victories a year ago — including the 23-14 postseason victory which ended Houston’s season.
It also keeps the Texans one game behind the Jaguars in the AFC South. Given that the Colts are likely to fall out of the race without Daniel Jones at quarterback, the Texans are in great shape to land a playoff spot, especially given that they have home games against the Cardinals, Raiders and Colts to come. It’s possible none of those teams has its starting quarterback available for those games. The Texans have all but officially battled back from starting 0-3 to make it to the postseason.
For the Chiefs, well, time is running out. FPI suggests that Kansas City has a 48.7% shot to make it to the postseason if it wins out, which would require several leaps of faith at this point. The Chiefs now have another loss and would subsequently lose a tiebreaker to another wild-card contender in the AFC; the one team they do have a tiebreaker victory over is the Colts, who are likely to fall out of the playoff pack. Their streak of winning division titles is officially over, and while there’s still time for miracles, a Chiefs team which felt preordained to land something transcendent at exactly the right time for nearly a decade looks downright ordinary these days.
Packers’ playoff odds change: 89.2% to 93.7% (up 4.5%) Bears’ playoff odds change: 73.5% to 63.1% (down 10.4%)
Bears players sick of hearing about how unsustainable or unlikely their first-place position in the NFC was had a chance to end it this weekend. Beating the Packers at Lambeau Field would have given Ben Johnson’s team a stranglehold on the NFC North and made it the inside favorite to claim the top spot in the conference. While players will happily tell you that they don’t care about opinions outside the building, this win would have conferred significant credibility to a Bears team that’s trying to establish itself atop the division, just as beating the Packers in Week 18 of the 2022 season might have confirmed that Johnson’s Lions were for real and about to take a leap forward in 2023.
The Bears were good, but they weren’t quite good enough. In part, that stems from the biggest disconnect between this team and reality. The Bears came into this game with the best turnover margin (plus-17) in the NFL by a considerable amount, driven both by sound offense and a whopping 26 takeaways on defense. They entered turning 19.8% of opposing possessions into turnovers, which was both the best rate in the league and the third-best rate by any team in any season over the past decade.
There’s nothing wrong with takeaways, of course, but we know they can be subject to significant amounts of variance. And while some great defenses (like the Broncos) create plenty of takeaways and then still stifle teams when they don’t snatch the ball away, the Bears have not managed the same feat. When you strip out drives ending in fumble recoveries or interceptions for all 32 teams and just look at what defenses do on drives without takeaways, the Bears came into the game ranked 29th in points allowed per possession. If you can protect the rock against the Bears, you can move the ball and score on them.
This was a bad matchup for that version of the Bears defense, given that the Packers had turned the ball over a league-low seven times heading into this NFC North showdown. And indeed, that’s how it played out. Jordan Love threw an ugly interception to end the opening drive, with the Bears failing to turn the short field into points, but that was Green Bay’s only turnover of the game. And across their seven other meaningful possessions Sunday, the Packers had four touchdown drives, all traveling 60 or more yards.
The Bears had a legitimate reason to hope to not be that same defense heading into the game: health. They welcomed back cornerbacks Jaylon Johnson and Kyler Gordon last week, while linebackers T.J. Edwards and Noah Sewell were back in the fold this week. Johnson is a Pro Bowl-caliber cornerback at his best, and with the returning contributors, the Bears should have felt like they had a realistic chance of holding up on the drives that didn’t end with turnover celebrations.
It didn’t play out that way in reality. Gordon injured his groin in pregame warmups and was a late scratch. Johnson was in and out of the lineup and played only 65% of the defensive snaps. Edwards was on the field for 63% of the snaps in his return, while coordinator Dennis Allen played D’Marco Jackson ahead of Sewell, who suited up to play just one defensive snap all game.
Gordon’s injury cost the Bears their top slot cornerback. Guess where Love picked the Bears apart? Love was 7-of-7 for 150 yards and three touchdowns throwing to receivers operating out of the slot on Sunday, nearly doubling his passing output on throws to receivers who were split out or started in the backfield.
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0:22
Christian Watson hauls in his second TD
Jordan Love passes to Christian Watson and he turns on the jets to the end zone to extend the Packers’ lead.
Those plays were typically against mismatched safeties. Against a Cover 0 look, Christian Watson ran away from Kevin Byard III on a post for a touchdown. Love hit two big plays against hybrid corner/safety C.J. Gardner-Johnson, including a 41-yard touchdown on a slant to Watson in the fourth quarter. Gardner-Johnson has been great near the line of scrimmage since joining the Bears, and Byard has intercepted six passes this season, but Chicago doesn’t want either of those guys running in coverage against wide receivers very often.
Love’s 45-yard strike to Bo Melton for another score came with the Bears seemingly running what’s known as a “2 invert” coverage, with Jaylon Johnson dropping to play safety on one side of the field in what’s essentially a disguised version of Cover 2. Johnson tried to wall off a crossing route at the second level, but there was nobody covering or really paying attention to Melton’s deep post route. I don’t think we can say for sure whether Johnson (a cornerback playing safety) or Byard (a safety you don’t want running vertically with wide receivers) should have been in coverage, but when Jaquan Brisker was unable to catch up to the throw, Love had another huge strike for a score.
It was just a rough game for the Bears defense, which also missed 13% of its tackle attempts. Josh Jacobs hasn’t had the best season, but this was the Packers running back’s best game of the season. Jacobs’ 20 carries produced a solid 86 yards, but he made a number of big plays on third down, most notably a third-and-2 pitch in the third quarter where he appeared dead to rights against Bears edge Montez Sweat only to cut back behind the Chicago defender, break through a tackle attempt by Gervon Dexter Sr. and turn upfield for a 21-yard gain. Jacobs punched in the game-winning touchdown from 2 yards out two minutes later, riding a Nick McCloud tackle into the end zone.
Coming off a dominant rushing performance against the Eagles, the Bears eventually got their run game going, but it took some time. Chicago’s first three drives of the game produced a total of just one first down and 5 net yards. The Bears managed just one possession with more than one first down in the first half of the game before racking up 15 first downs across their four drives after the break.
Ben Johnson very clearly wanted to do whatever he could to avoid making Caleb Williams a sitting target for Micah Parsons in the backfield. This was one of the heaviest boot and play-action game plans I’ve ever seen for an offense. The Bears typically use play-action on just under 33% of their dropbacks, which is one of the highest rates in the league. On Sunday, that jumped to 60.5%, the highest rate for any quarterback in a single game all season and the eighth-highest rate in a single game over the past decade.
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1:16
Why Dan Orlovsky still has concerns about Caleb Williams
Dan Orlovsky explains why he doesn’t feel great about Caleb Williams following the Bears’ loss to the Packers.
Look at what Williams did and you can understand why Johnson leaned into moving his quarterback around. Williams went 14-of-22 for 144 yards with two touchdown throws and a pick using play-action, but he was just 5-of-13 for 42 yards as a dropback passer. He started slow and was just 1-of-7 for 2 yards in the first quarter, but as the game wore along, he improved. He was 13-of-21 for 154 yards with two scores and a pick in the second half without taking any sacks.
That interception was painful. With the Bears trailing by seven and four of the six preceding drives by both teams resulting in touchdowns, Johnson clearly wanted to make his team’s two-minute drill the final possession of the game. With three timeouts and 3:26 to go, the Bears moved the ball into the red zone and were very comfortable running both the football and the clock, presumably with the idea that they would score a touchdown and then go for two with as little time remaining as possible to try to win the game.
It didn’t quite work out that way. On a third-and-1 from the Packers’ 14-yard line with 35 seconds left, edge Kingsley Enagbare overpowered inexperienced Bears left tackle Ozzy Trapilo and then stopped Kyle Monangai at the line of scrimmage in his tracks for no gain. A merely solid tackle attempt would have likely yielded a first down, given that Monangai was running vertically and Enagbare was coming at him from the side, but this was a great play by Enagbare. The Packers missed just two tackles all game, per NFL Next Gen Stats.
After the two teams traded timeouts, the Bears called yet another bootleg on fourth-and-1, this time with Williams scrambling out to the left. He has had a habit of taking the safe throw in spots where he might have wanted to try to hit a home run in the past, but he got the process flipped this time. The concept the Bears called was designed to go to D’Andre Swift in the flat, and while he wasn’t wide open, a well-placed ball would have given the Bears a first down if thrown at the right time.
Instead, Williams threw against his body to take his shot downfield, seeing green grass ahead of tight end Colston Loveland. The problem? Cornerback Keisean Nixon read the concept, and when Williams couldn’t get much on his pass attempt, Nixon had plenty of time to catch up to Loveland and intercept the pass, sealing a Packers victory. On first-and-10 and with plenty of field space to work with, it would have been a reasonable decision. Needing a first down to survive, though, Williams probably made the wrong call.
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0:31
Packers seal win with INT of Caleb Williams
Keisean Nixon picks off Caleb Williams to seal the win for the Packers with 22 seconds left in the fourth quarter.
There were plenty of positive moments for Williams in this game, including a spectacular throw to Cole Kmet on the move and a touchdown pass into an impossible window for Olamide Zaccheaus. Williams drove the Bears into position for the game-altering score they’ve gotten so many times in the fourth quarter this season. This time, though, the Packers were up to the task.
This was a painful loss for the Bears, who fell all the way from the top spot in the NFC playoff picture to the seventh seed by the end of Sunday’s games. The Packers have a half-game lead atop the division and now possess the head-to-head tiebreaker over the Bears. While Chicago can get its revenge at home in two weeks, the Packers have already clinched a better division record than their rivals by going 4-0 in the NFC North. The Bears and Lions are both 1-3. There won’t be a tied race as long as the Packers have a tie on their record and their two divisional brethren do not, but the Packers would be in position to win any tiebreakers if that scenario does come up.
Lions at Rams total points OVER 55 (-108)
