The 2021 NFL season just gets weirder and weirder with each passing week. Over the past month, the best quarterbacks in football by Total QBR have been Justin Herbert, Jimmy Garoppolo and Taylor Heinicke. The only 4-0 team over that time frame is the Patriots, who are led by surging rookie Mac Jones. The Saints, who looked to be capable of winning with just about anybody under center, have gone 0-4 with reportedly now-benched signal-caller Trevor Siemian at the helm. The only passer with a worse QBR over the past month than the former Broncos starter? Naturally, it's Russell Wilson.
Let's focus here on the quarterback side of things and take a closer look into three veteran passers who have declined over the past few weeks. That could include any number of players this season. I won't be looking at guys like Wilson and Baker Mayfield, who are playing through injuries. Ben Roethlisberger actually pieced together his two best games of the year before Sunday's stinker against the Bengals. Tom Brady's been struggling with giveaways, and Josh Allen has seven interceptions over the past month. They could very easily be subjects for further analysis.
But I'll drill down on three other passers -- Matthew Stafford, Ryan Tannehill and Lamar Jackson -- who have turned in multiple concerning performances recently, starting with the guy who was my MVP pick at the midway point of the season. The all-in Rams have lost three straight for just the second time in the Sean McVay era. Is their quarterback to blame?
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Stafford | Tannehill | Jackson
Matthew Stafford, Los Angeles Rams
Of course, we could pretty easily sit here and devote an entire article to everything related to the Rams. You already know about the stars on their roster and the draft picks they've traded to get here. This is a team whose social media account was pushing poker chips into the middle of the table after the Von Miller trade earlier this month. The Rams aren't going to disappear or break up after 2021, but anything short of a Super Bowl win for this team would be considered a disappointment.
Los Angeles' three-game losing streak has coincided with a drastic downturn in the play of its starting quarterback. The Rams traded two first-round picks and deposed starter Jared Goff to the Lions to acquire Stafford this offseason in the hopes of getting a passer who could both excel in McVay's scheme and create big plays out of structure. Through the first eight games of the season, Stafford was everything the Rams could have envisioned, with the former Lions standout completing nearly 69% of his passes, averaging more than 9 yards per attempt and posting a 22-to-4 touchdown-to-interception ratio. At 78.5, Stafford had the best QBR in the NFL by more than nine points.
Since taking the field against the Titans in Week 9, though, Stafford has been a mess. The Georgia product has posted a 27.8 QBR over the past three games, which ranks 30th in the NFL. Stafford has thrown more interceptions (five) and taken more sacks (nine) over those three losses than he did over the first eight games of the year. His completion percentage is down to 61.4%, which is 6.7% below his expected completion percentage, per the NFL's Next Gen Stats. This offense is still creating easy completions, but Stafford isn't hitting them.
Things get worse when you strip out garbage time, where Stafford threw a 52-yard touchdown pass to new wideout Odell Beckham Jr. against the Packers on Sunday afternoon. If we take out the plays where Stafford's team had no more than a 5% chance of winning the game before the snap, Stafford's numbers unsurprisingly decline. This is true for just about every quarterback, of course, including when Stafford was playing for some uncompetitive teams in Detroit.
But even going back through Stafford's time in Detroit, this three-game stretch looms as particularly brutal. Removing garbage time from the equation for every one of his starts as a pro, Stafford's 21.7 QBR over the past three games is the second-worst stretch of his career, topped only by a miserable run in the middle of 2014. That Lions team was able to overcome Stafford's struggles by fielding what was the best defense in football by DVOA.
If you prefer another metric, let's use adjusted yards per attempt (AY/A). Stafford has generated 4.5 AY/A outside of garbage time over this run, which is the fifth-worst stretch of his career and just the second time he has been this bad since the 2013 campaign. To take it a step further, let's use a blind comparison of two players:
Player A is Stafford over the past three weeks after we remove the sub-5% win-percentage performance from his stat line. Player B is Goff over the last three weeks of the 2020 regular season, when McVay soured severely enough on his prized pupil to start untested reserve John Wolford in a playoff game over Goff, who made the roster with a broken finger as Wolford's backup. Goff came in when Wolford went down injured and played well enough to beat the Seahawks, but McVay still unceremoniously dumped his starter to the Lions as flotsam in the Stafford deal. And Stafford is arguably playing worse right now than Goff did during that run.
Like Goff at the end of 2020, we know Stafford isn't 100 percent. ESPN's Dianna Russini reported before Sunday's loss to the Packers that Stafford is dealing with "pain in his throwing arm, his elbow, a sore ankle and chronic back pain." Nobody doubts Stafford's toughness, and he has played through serious injuries at different points in his career, but we're also two years removed from him missing half of 2019 with fractured bones in his back. He was also forced from a game against the Bucs last December with an ankle injury.
For the Rams, this could get very messy. Los Angeles sent two first-round picks to the Lions and ate nearly $25 million in dead money on Goff's deal to acquire Stafford and then didn't give its new quarterback an extension. Stafford's current deal expires after next season. The Rams almost certainly didn't trade for Stafford expecting to move on after two years, and I don't think they should be making any rash decisions after three bad games, but can you really pay a player with Stafford's recent injury history $40 million or more per season? I'm not sure the Rams really have a choice beyond hoping Stafford gets healthier and plays better. It's a little troubling that Stafford didn't look better after getting a week to rest during the Week 11 bye.
The Rams haven't been effective recently in places where they excelled earlier in the season. Over the first eight weeks of the year, Stafford was way ahead of the pack working out of empty formations; his 87 pass attempts out of empty were 21 more than anybody else in football. Stafford averaged 9.4 yards per attempt out of empty and posted a 80.1 QBR, with both marks well above league averages when other quarterbacks work out of empty sets.
Stafford still has more empty set attempts over the past month than anybody else, but he's now averaging just 5.1 yards per attempt and posting a 15.1 QBR out of empty, which ranks second worst. His 47.5% completion percentage out of empty is 17.9% below expectation, which is the worst mark in football. Teams have gotten pressure on Stafford nearly twice as frequently out of empty over the past three weeks, and while the offensive line isn't playing its best football, its pass block win rate out of empty has still been above average. Some of this has to fall on the quarterback.
I think Stafford will get better. The disastrous pass he threw falling down in the end zone against the Titans was a horrific decision he's unlikely to repeat, and safety Jimmie Ward's pick-six in the 49ers game was an almost comical bit of bad fortune on a drop by tight end Tyler Higbee. Running through the past three weeks, I've seen him miss throws that even a hurting quarterback typically makes, including multiple passes from clean pockets to uncovered receivers in the flat. I don't think he'll continue to miss those as frequently as he has over the past few weeks.
Beyond that, though, it might come down to Stafford's health. The offense around him also has questions. Receiver Robert Woods is done for the year with a torn ACL, and while Beckham would have been a dream replacement given the other options available, he's not remotely the same sort of player. The Rams ask Woods and Cooper Kupp to do as much as any group of wideouts in football when it comes to blocking anyone from defensive backs to edge rushers, and while Beckham will give blocking his best effort, he's not on Woods' level. Putting Beckham in Woods' spot on the field reduces the variety and effectiveness of the window dressing McVay uses in his offense.
He's not the only one. Running back Cam Akers has also missed the entire season with a torn Achilles, and the combination of Darrell Henderson Jr. and Sony Michel ranks 26th in yards after first contact. Higbee, signed to a significant deal in 2019, has struggled with drops while averaging 6.2 yards per target, his worst mark since 2017. DeSean Jackson's $4.5 million deal came to an end after seven games, while second-rounder Tutu Atwell has played just 10 offensive snaps. Kupp has been brilliant, but the Packers dedicated themselves to having two defenders on Kupp in key situations during Sunday's win.
No team is going to look good if its star quarterback is struggling, but the Rams are probably the most top-heavy roster in football, and we're seeing what happens when their stars aren't playing like stars. The Packers took advantage of the weak spots on Sunday. Safety Taylor Rapp, moved back into the starting lineup this season, gave up one touchdown. Linebacker Troy Reeder, who moved back into the lineup in Week 7, missed a tackle on the other. Green Bay's Aaron Rodgers picked on slot cornerback Donte Deayon for two long completions to Davante Adams. All three are playing because the Rams lost defenders in free agency over the past two offseasons.
The Rams win games because their stars are good enough to overwhelm opponents and overcome the lesser spots on their roster. Their stars need to take over to get Los Angeles back on track, and that starts with the guy taking snaps under center.
Ryan Tannehill, Tennessee Titans
This one seems easier, right? Before the year, I ranked the Titans third on my list of the best offensive weapon groupings in football. When you can give the ball to Derrick Henry or throw it to A.J. Brown and Julio Jones, your life is going to be easier. On Sunday, the Titans did not have any of those superstars. D'Onta Foreman and Dontrell Hilliard, who carried the ball a combined 31 times during Sunday's loss to the Patriots, weren't even on an active roster when the 2021 season began. The only Titans players to catch more than one pass were Nick Westbrook-Ikhine and Cody Hollister, both undrafted free agents who have bounced between the Titans' active roster and their practice squad over the past couple of years.
Naturally, Tannehill isn't going to have the same sort of success with replacement-level players at skill position spots, but that alone doesn't explain the offensive struggles. The differences in terms of catch rate and yards after catch aren't significant over the past four games without Henry in the fold, with a dip of about 1.8% in CPOE and half a yard per pass attempt in yards after catch over expectation, but the Titans made up for that on Sunday with a number of big runs on the ground.
Tennessee had seven plays of 30 yards or more over the first eight games of the year, but even after Henry has gone down injured, the Titans have actually managed to generate five explosives over the ensuing four contests, including two against the Patriots. One was a 68-yard run Hilliard took to the house. The other was a 30-yard run by Foreman, which ended with the former Texans back fumbling and the Patriots recovering.
More than the lack of firepower, turnovers have doomed the Titans over the past two weeks. Tennessee was able to get by without Henry over the first two games of his absence by turning the ball over just once and posting a turnover margin of plus-2, but that has disappeared over the past two games. The Titans have turned the ball over nine times in losses to the Texans and Patriots without forcing a single takeaway themselves. That's a staggering amount for an offense which turned the ball over only 12 times all season during the 2020 campaign.
If anything, the Titans are lucky to not have more. They have fumbled an unconscionable nine times over the past two weeks, recovering five of those possible giveaways. This is a place where they clearly miss Henry, who has fumbled only once every 136 touches as a pro. The Titans have fumbled about once every 16 plays over the past two weeks, with four different backs -- Hilliard, Foreman, fullback Khari Blasingame and since-released legend Adrian Peterson -- spilling the ball. Tannehill has also been strip-sacked twice.
The Titans' QB also has to bear some of the blame. He has thrown five interceptions, and while you could excuse him for throwing picks against the Patriots' defense, four of those five turnovers came against the Texans. You could maybe chalk the final pick against Houston to poor receivers, but Tannehill has made some poor decisions throwing to the middle of the field and been turned over by defenders who should have been in his range of vision. One interception came when the Titans didn't adjust a protection to some late pressure and Houston got home with a free rusher.
Two of those interceptions have come in the red zone, with a third starting just outside and ending at the 1-yard line. For a team that dominated inside the red zone in 2019 and 2020, the Titans realistically can't afford to give away opportunities to score points. Their red zone performance had already declined some this year before Henry went down injured, so we can't really pin their decline on the running back's absence. But the Titans have as many turnovers in the red zone over the past two weeks as they did over the entirety of 2020.
If one part of the offensive formula for the Titans was scoring touchdowns in the red zone, the other was creating big plays using play-action. Henry's departure was a useful test of the research suggesting that teams don't need to establish the run or have a great back to succeed with play-action. Opponents haven't been dropping more defenders into coverage without the star rusher -- they played two-deep about 37% of the time with Tannehill and Henry in the lineup and have been at about 35% over Henry's four-game absence -- but they've fared much better against play-fakes:
The Titans have run play-action less frequently since the Henry injury and been much less successful when doing so. After creating four explosive plays of 30-plus yards off it during the first eight weeks of the year, the Titans haven't generated a single explosive with a play-fake since Henry went down. Some of this likely has to do with the absences of Brown and Jones for part of that run, but it's clear that the Titans have needed to change what they do in the passing game from what worked so well before the past month.
As is the case with Stafford, I wouldn't just toss Tannehill aside. The Titans are going to look better on offense when he is throwing to two superstar wideouts as opposed to guys like Hollister and Westbrook-Ikhine. The turnovers might be more of a problem than they were in the past, but nobody in the NFL turns the ball over four times per week on a regular basis. The Titans get a much-needed bye to settle down this week and a home game against the Jaguars the following Sunday before their schedule picks up again to end the season. With the Colts losing to the Bucs and Tennessee holding the head-to-head tiebreaker, Mike Vrabel's team still has a 97.5% chance of winning the AFC South, per ESPN's Football Power Index. There's no need to panic for the Titans.
Also like the Rams, though, the Titans came into the year with Super Bowl aspirations. With Henry not expected to return this season, it's clear that they have to try to find a different way to win football games from here on out. The formula they've run out over the past two weeks wouldn't work for any team, but the Titans need to find a reliable offensive identity without their star running back. Tannehill has had to shoulder the smallest workload of any quarterback in football with Henry in the fold; now, regardless of whom he has at receiver, he needs to be successful as the focal point of Tennessee's march toward an AFC title.
Lamar Jackson, Baltimore Ravens
The 2019 MVP hasn't had a fun three weeks. After throwing for 266 yards and adding 120 more on the ground in a 34-31 overtime win over the Vikings in Week 9, Jackson has struggled. The Heisman Trophy winner posted a 30.1 QBR in a prime-time loss to the Dolphins, missed the Week 11 win over the Bears with a non-COVID illness and then threw four interceptions in Sunday night's narrow victory over the Browns.
Winning two out of three puts the Ravens in much better shape than the Rams or Titans over that time frame, but Baltimore had been held under 20 points just once between 2018 and 2020 with Jackson as its starting quarterback, and it has now been held under 20 points in four of the past five games. Even worse, the dreaded "b" word is being bounced around. Did the Dolphins discover a blueprint for slowing down Jackson and the Ravens by running heavy doses of Cover 0?
I'll spoil the answer: No. The Dolphins did run some Cover 0, where there's no deep safeties and defensive backs are asked to cover a receiver all across the field. They also ran some zone coverages that might have looked like Cover 0 before the snap. On paper, playing Cover 0 against the Ravens makes some sense; you can create pressure on Jackson by loading the box and add an extra defender to the run fit, which eliminates the numbers advantage the Ravens create in the run game with their star quarterback. All of that is true.
Getting past that, though, the idea that this is a blueprint doesn't hold up. Teams don't typically play loads of Cover 0 because it takes only one slip from a defensive back to give up a long touchdown, especially against a team with loads of speed at receiver, like the Ravens. Teams are also hesitant to play man against them because of what Jackson can do as a scrambler. Being even with the Ravens in terms of numbers in the run fit doesn't necessarily mean you're going to stop Jackson, who can beat just about anybody in the NFL one-on-one with the ball in his hands.
We've also seen defenses try Cover 0 against the Ravens in the past. The Broncos ran some Cover 0 against them in Week 3, when Jackson threw for 316 yards and a touchdown in a 23-7 victory. Jackson's breakout game as a NFL quarterback was arguably in Week 1 of the 2019 season, when the Louisville product went 17-of-20 for 324 yards and five touchdown passes. The defense he played that day? Brian Flores' Dolphins. Three of Jackson's five scores that day came against Cover 0 looks.
Cover 0 is playing with fire, and while the Dolphins got burned in 2019, they managed to avoid the burn this time around. The Ravens tried to counteract the pressure looks with bubble screens, but the Dolphins did a great job of tackling to prevent any of those screens from breaking into something bigger. Jackson was able to hit downfield shots against Cover 0 the last time the Ravens played Miami, but this time, he was 1-of-5 for 30 yards on passes traveling 20 or more yards in the air. And that completion didn't come until the Ravens were down 12 points with two minutes to go. Jackson did throw a catchable pass to Sammy Watkins against Cover 0 for what could have been a 28-yard score, only for Watkins to seemingly lose the ball in the air.
The Dolphins game wasn't the only contest where Jackson struggled with deep shots. Since Week 6, Jackson has gone 6-of-25 (24%) on those 20-plus-yard passes, which is well below the league average (39.2%) and his expected completion percentage on those throws (34.6%). Jackson was 10-of-25 on those same passes through the first five weeks of the season, so this is a newer development.
The bigger concern for Jackson, as it might be for Tannehill and Stafford, is a sudden rash of interceptions. The 24-year-old quarterback has thrown nine interceptions over his past five games. Jackson threw just six interceptions in 15 games during his MVP season in 2019 and nine in 15 games for the Ravens last season, so this is out of character. Jackson had a 1.9% interception rate before 2021 and is at 3.5% after the Browns game.
There's not one single problem driving the sudden interception glut. Jackson has been picked by two linebackers stepping in front of throws, which is 100% his fault. Part of it is definitely bad luck, as he has been victimized by some of the most spectacular picks of the season. The Browns had two on Sunday night; one where the ball bounced off a Ravens player and then off another Browns defender into the hands of Cleveland cornerback Denzel Ward, and another where an underthrown pass to Mark Andrews bounced off of the star tight end and into the arms of safety John Johnson III, who appeared to catch the ball almost by accident. Those wild picks aren't likely to continue.
The underthrown deep pass does concern me, though, as does the play where Andrews was open on a stick route and Jackson simply threw to a different spot. Jackson did miss Week 11 with that non-COVID illness, and after the Browns game, the Ravens passer admitted that he felt "weak" during the contest. As Stephania Bell noted yesterday, quarterbacks typically struggle to maintain their prior level of play for a week or two after missing a game because of illness. Jackson's four-interception game isn't typical by any stretch of the imagination, but it might be partially explained by the likelihood that he is still recovering from whatever he was dealing with the prior week. Unless the illness lingers, or Jackson's dealing with another undisclosed injury, I would expect him to get back to being the guy we saw over the first month of the year by the end of the season.
I also think the Ravens will be better on third down. They were the second-best team in football on third down during Jackson's MVP season in 2019, converting 47.1% of the time. Last year, they were up at 48.8%, which was fourth in the NFL. This season, though, Baltimore has converted only 36.6% of its third-down attempts, which ranks 25th in the NFL. It simply has too many weapons, Jackson included, to struggle so much on such an important down.
At 8-3, even with a struggling Jackson, the Ravens still look to be in great shape to win the AFC North. If they do collapse over the final month and a half, I think it's more likely that John Harbaugh's team will be undone by its schedule. The Ravens face the Steelers, Browns, Packers, Bengals and Rams before finishing up with a rematch against Pittsburgh. I think Jackson will be better than the guy we've seen over the past two games, but he won't get to round into form against any pushovers from here on out.