The beautiful thing about NFL overreactions is that they don't even have to be week-by-week. They can be minute-by-minute, swinging wildly throughout the course of a single game. One minute you're convinced the Colts will never score another point, the next minute they're winning the game in overtime.
At various points throughout Week 5, we were absolutely certain that the Colts' season was in the gutter, that the Vikings were about to blow a game in which they led the Bears by 18 points, that the Giants were out of players on offense and couldn't possibly come back against the Packers and that the Buccaneers' defense was about to blow a 21-point fourth-quarter lead.
All four of those teams won their games.
We do this every week in this space -- throw out wild declarative statements about an incomplete season and judge whether those statements are overreactions or not. But the nature of the NFL is that we don't have to wait that long. Maybe we should set up some sort of NFL Overreactions Twitter account and start firing these off during games instead of waiting until after they're over.
I'm gonna run that up the flagpole and see if it catches on. Meantime, enjoy the more conventional format in which we now present to you Week 5 NFL Overreactions.
Brian Daboll is the Coach of the Year
Folks, the New York Giants are 4-1. To say this is not usually the case is a gross understatement. The last time the Giants were 4-1 or better to start a season was 2009, when Daniel Jones and Saquon Barkley were both 12 years old. They actually started 5-0 that year before falling apart in the second half and finishing 8-8, so let's not focus on that year right now. How about this one? The last time the Giants had this many rushing yards in their first five games was 2008, when they went 12-4 and led the league in rushing. That's better, right?
Fact of the matter is, the Giants' 4-1 start this year is the leading miracle in a league full of them. They have absolutely nothing at wide receiver. The defense has been playing without its best lineman for three weeks. Jones, the fourth-year QB whose fifth-year option wasn't picked up was playing on a bad ankle and led the team back from a 20-10 halftime deficit Sunday in London against Aaron Rodgers and the Packers. This week after Daboll was literally drawing up plays on the sideline for Barkley to run as the wildcat quarterback because Jones and backup Tyrod Taylor had left the game due to injuries. The Giants' first three wins of the season were against the Titans, Panthers and Bears, so it was easy to say maybe they weren't as good as their record indicated. But there's no downgrading Sunday's win.
Verdict: NOT AN OVERREACTION
I'm not even sure it's close at this point. Nick Sirianni? Sure. Love what you're doing with the Eagles and Jalen Hurts. Kevin O'Connell? You're 4-1 overall, 3-0 in your division and seem to have your team at its best in the most crucial parts of the games. Andy Reid? Always. Even Mike McCarthy, for weathering the absence of his starting quarterback and keeping the Cowboys in the wacky NFC East race. But nobody's accomplishing more on a weekly basis with less than Daboll is. He and defensive coordinator Wink Martindale are coaching their tails off, and you can tell this Giants team believes in itself even if no one else believes in it. That's a testament to coaching, as is the fact that they are always in the game late. Heck, in their only loss -- Week 3 against the Cowboys -- they were up 13-6 in the third quarter before Dallas rallied. Long way to go, but if they gave this award out after five weeks, it'd be Daboll's in a runaway.
The Packers' defense is a bigger problem than their offense
There's been a lot of focus on how the offense is coming together around Aaron Rodgers and all of those inexperienced wideouts who are not Davante Adams. Rodgers has spoken a lot about how it's not as good as it needs to be on offense and that he has to be patient while they put it together on that side of the ball. All of this is fair. His QBR in the first halves of games this year is 56, with six touchdown passes against two interceptions, and his second-half QBR is 34, with just two touchdown passes and one interception. But regardless of whether the Packers were able to put points on the board in the second half Sunday, the defense didn't have to allow two long touchdown drives to the Giants' banged-up QB and his collection of backup wide receivers.
Verdict: NOT AN OVERREACTION
Just as they couldn't seem to stop the Bailey Zappe Patriots in the second half the week before, the Packers were porous against Jones, Barkley and the Giants in the second half Sunday. The run defense in particular has been looking very vulnerable, which is alarming, because that means you don't even need to be a high-octane passing team to believe you can come back against them. One of the reasons the Packers weren't too worried about the time Rodgers and the offense would need to get things together this year is that they believed they had an outstanding defense that could hold other teams down while they worked on that. To this point, it has not shown a consistent ability to do that.
Bill Belichick and the Patriots are going to make the playoffs after all
A week after going toe-to-toe with Rodgers and the Packers at Lambeau Field with their third-string quarterback, the Patriots on Sunday beat the Detroit Lions 29-0 at home. The 29 is impressive, of course, with Bailey Zappe looking good and Rhamondre Stevenson 's 161 yards the latest proof that the Pats know how to run the ball. But the zero next to Detroit is an even bigger deal, because the Lions came in as the highest-scoring offense in the league, averaging 35 points per game. The Patriots have caught a lot of grief for the way they've structured their coaching staff and for the overall state of their roster, but they're not dead yet, and the last two weeks have marked them as team it's not going to be fun to play.
Verdict: OVERREACTION
You can look at New England's upcoming schedule and convince yourself they're about to go on a run. At Cleveland, home to the Bears, at the Jets, home to the Colts, home to the Jets. Some of those teams (especially the Jets!) are playing well, but none of them really terrify you at this point. If the Patriots can take the Packers to overtime at Lambeau and shut out the Lions at home, they're certainly capable of winning any or all of their upcoming five games.
But let's not get carried away here. The quarterback situation remains murky, with Mac Jones working his way back from a bad ankle. They still don't have explosive playmakers in the passing game. If someone figures out how to shut down their run game one of these weeks, it's going to be very difficult for them to score enough, even to beat the Bears or Colts. And after this cushy-looking five-game stretch, they still have road games in Minnesota, Arizona, Las Vegas and Buffalo, plus home games against the Bills, Bengals and Dolphins. If you're a Patriots fan and you want to have hope, go ahead. I'm never going to try and take that away from you. Me, I need to see more before I'm convinced this isn't the fourth-best team in its division.
The Commanders are going to need to bench Carson Wentz
This is the second year in a row that Wentz has thrown for 1,300 yards and completed at least 60% of his passes over the first five games ... and lost four of them. His devastating interception on third-and-goal from the 2-yard line Sunday, at the tail end of an 18-play drive that looked for all the world as if it would lead to a comeback victory over the Titans, was the kind of thing that completely deflates a team. And if you were shocked by it, then you weren't watching the play before, which absolutely could have been an interception. Wentz's overall numbers look just fine, but he's still making too many of the kinds of plays that cost his team games. Which is a lot like what we were hearing toward the end of the season last year in Indianapolis.
Verdict: NOT AN OVERREACTION
Look, I'm not there every day, so I don't know how the Commanders' locker room feels about Wentz or the way he's playing. I don't know the extent to which they blame him for the losses. What I do know is that there's a pattern here that shows a player, in three different spots over the last three seasons, who does enough wrong to offset the things he does right.
Indianapolis almost got him through last season by minimizing the damage, but they couldn't keep him from sinking them in their season finale in Week 18. It may already be too late in Washington, if you look at the records of the other teams in the Commanders' division. But the team did seem to respond to Taylor Heinicke last year for a stretch, and you wonder whether a change like that is called for before it gets too late. It's not a stretch to believe jobs are on the line there.
The Cowboys are a real Super Bowl contender
On Sunday, Dallas beat the defending Super Bowl champion Rams to improve to 4-1 on the season and 4-0 since quarterback Dak Prescott broke his thumb. The team has allowed an average of 14.4 points per game. It's the first time the Cowboys have held each of their first five opponents under 20 points since 1972. As someone who was born in 1972, I can assure you that this was a very long time ago. Since Prescott went down and backup Cooper Rush took over, the Cowboys have found and established a winning formula where the offense plays efficiently, they run the ball, they stay away from game-wrecking mistakes and the defense dominates. We don't know when Prescott will return -- next week, the week after, whatever. But whenever that happens, Dallas should be able to maintain what it's doing on offense and also add the kind of explosive play ability that could elevate the Cowboys beyond where they've been for the past month.
Verdict: OVERREACTION
Ask me again in a week. The Cowboys play the 5-0 Eagles next week. They crushed the Eagles twice last year, and it remains to be seen whether Philly has closed the gap. It's one of the games of the early season, and it'll tell us a lot about whether Dallas has what it takes to become the first repeat NFC East champion since 2004. As for the Super Bowl? Let's see if they really do keep up this steady play once Prescott gets back, or whether he and offensive coordinator Kellen Moore start getting a little more risky. The Cowboys should be beyond ecstatic about the way they've played since Prescott got hurt. But there's more for them to do before we can put them in the Super Bowl.