A surprise fix for the Miami Dolphins?
Tua's mysterious eye illness was apparently the best thing to happen to the Dolphins. PLUS, Myles Garrett is so good for a very bad team, JETS WIN JETS WIN, and more!
This past NFL Sunday was one of the bleakest I can remember. Normally, this league can cook up competitive slop, with game after game coming down to the wire. Sunday, the Witching Hour was entirely witchless. (I get it, it’s Halloween, they were probably busy.)
The only close game involved my New York Jets …
…
…
WHO WON A PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL GAME! I FORGOT THEY COULD DO THAT!
The Pinkeye Pistol
Tua Tagovailoa has had a rough year. Entering Week 8, he was the league leader in interceptions after back-to-back three-pick performances, while posting career lows in yards per attempt and passer rating. He had the two worst individual QB performances by ESPN’s QBR. He also gave a press conference this week saying that because he’s shorter than most quarterbacks, he struggles to see over his offensive line. NOT IDEAL.
After publicly discussing his vision issues, he showed up to Sunday’s game against the Falcons, who have one of the best pass defenses in the NFL, looking like this:
Tagovailoa had an “illness” that caused his left eye to swell up, and forced him to play with a visor for the first time in his career. Reading between the lines: He had pinkeye. (There aren’t that many “eye illnesses” out there.)
I suspect the Dolphins didn’t say “our QB has pinkeye” because everybody’s first thought when we hear the word “pinkeye” is, “Oh, the thing that happens to your eye when you don’t wash your hands after wiping your butt.” It’s most common among toddlers who haven’t learned about hygiene yet.
We should fight this stigma. Pinkeye can be caused by all sorts of viruses, bacteria, and allergic stimuli. Furthermore, the Dolphins never confirmed that Tua had pinkeye. Tagovailoa said that he “kind of had some thoughts of what it could be, but none of those seemed to be what it was,“ while head coach Mike McDaniel noted that Tagovailoa seemed to be responding well to allergy medication.
Anyway, long story short, there is no confirmed evidence that Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa rubbed his poop hands on his eyes and got poop germs in them. We can neither confirm nor deny that Tua’s eye illness was poop-related in any way. Anybody saying that Tua Tagovailoa played in an NFL game with a swollen poop eye is being intentionally dishonest.
And yet, with one eye shut … Tua threw four touchdowns and no interceptions in a 34-10 road beatdown of the heavily favored Falcons.
I also saw at least two blatant drops by Dolphins receivers, perhaps because they were aware of how pinkeye spreads easily via shared objects such as toys.
Clearly, the Dolphins need to do whatever it takes to give Tagovailoa pinkeye every game for the rest of the season. They need a staffer rubbing this man’s pillowcases with various unspeakable substances and contaminating his contact solution.
Myles Garrett should be mad
Myles Garrett had five sacks against the Patriots, so you might assume the Browns won.
(Sorry, this was the best highlight video the NFL posted. 🤷🤷🤷)
Last year, NFL teams scored touchdowns on 26 percent of drives with no sacks and just 8 percent of drives with sacks. If you got five sacks, killing roughly half of the other team’s opposing drives, your team likely dominated. Garrett’s performance was just the 20th time in NFL history that a player has recorded five or more sacks in a game, and the previous teams went 16-3, with all three losses by three points or fewer.
The Browns lost by nineteen.
Garrett honestly might have had the all-time greatest performance by a guy whose team got its ass kicked.
He was clearly distraught during the game. He was spotted sitting alone at the end of the team bench and slamming his helmet to the ground in frustration.
Considering the offseason he had, Garrett’s reaction wasn’t surprising. He demanded a trade in February, expressing a desire to play for a championship. He ultimately agreed to a contract extension that made him the highest paid non-quarterback in NFL history, supposedly after receiving assurances that the franchise would get serious. But the Browns are also paying a huge salary to Deshaun Watson, a famous pervert who is bad at football and also injured. They don’t really have a lot of resources to build a competitive football team. Their offense lets down their outstanding defense week after week after week because they’re playing a Day 2 rookie at quarterback and have the second-cheapest WR corps in the league.
Garrett is rightfully angry after his pitiful franchise squandered yet another outstanding effort. But, well, that’s what the money is for.
J-E-T-S
In 2021, the Lions started new head coach Dan Campbell’s tenure with an 0-10-1 record, losing five one-score games (including one at the buzzer by doinking the longest field goal in NFL history.) “Please, football gods,” I wrote at the time, “let the Lions win a damn game.”
We all know how that turned out. The Lions have become a model of NFL success, both for their on-field creativity and excellence, and their franchise-wide culture.
Campbell’s top assistants, offensive coordinator Ben Johnson and defensive coordinator Aaron Glenn, were hired as the new head coaches for the Bears and Jets, respectively. Glenn’s Jets tenure began with an 0-7 record featuring five one-score losses, including three last-second field goals. They lost games in which they couldn’t get a stop, and they lost games in which they couldn’t score a point. The team’s owner, Woody Johnson, openly criticized quarterback Justin Fields, asking how the team could win games with such poor QB play. “Please, NFL,” I wrote two weeks ago, “stop making everyone look at the New York Jets.” (Blinded by personal sports pessimism, I was a little bit less hopeful about my team than the 2021 Lions.)
Sunday, the dam finally broke. The Jets beat the Joe Flacco-led Broncos 39-38, scoring more points in the fourth quarter (23! Three touchdowns and two two-point conversions!) than in their previous two games combined.
The winning touchdown came on a no-no-nO-NOOOOO-YES!!!!!! running back pass by Breece Hall. I saw a post a few days ago saying that nobody has a lower IQ than a non-quarterback with the option to throw, and you can see that observation in action here. Hall sees Mason Taylor sprinting unguarded toward the back of the end zone then pump fakes, waits for Bengals cornerback DJ Turner to cover Taylor, and then throws to his completely blanketed tight end …
AND IT WORKED! He threw the most interceptable pass of 2025 and it won the game!
Fields tried acting nonchalant about Johnson’s comments, calling them “outside noise” despite the fact that Johnson is quite literally inside and in charge of the Jets’ organization. However, Fields also admitted that the comments led to a moment of personal desperation:
“Yesterday I started praying, praying like crazy, just for a win … I’m going to get pretty vulnerable right here. This week I found myself in my closet crying on the ground, lying down. Not because of the hardships, not because of the troubles. I felt like I was built to handle that. ... Yesterday I was just praying over and over and over again, just one win.”
TBH, Fields’ sounds a lot like I did when I beseeched the football gods on behalf of the Lions four years ago.
So are the Jets destined to walk the Lions’ path? I’m not going to be that bold. They are, after all, 1-7, with even more unanswered questions than the 0-10-1 Lions.
But one thing is clear: Despite losing seven straight games, despite being the laughingstock of the NFL, the Jets still cared deeply enough to keep pushing and crying and praying to win games. And my hope is that’s a sign of fight you can’t fake.
We have to do something about the way the Tush Push is officiated. I am a big fan of the Tush Push and it brings me no pleasure to report this. In Sunday’s game against the Giants, Jalen Hurts fumbled the ball on the most controversial play in sports, but officials ruled his forward progress had been stopped.
Uhhhhhh iiiiiiiiiiii dunno about that one, Jim! Throw in all the ignored false starts and there’s clearly a real officiating problem with the Tush Push.
After backup quarterback Cooper Rush threw four interceptions in two starts in place of an injured Lamar Jackson, Baltimore turned to third stringer Tyler “Snoop” Huntley … and rolled over the Bears, 30-16. I’m a little confused why the Ravens ever went with Rush, a player in his first year with the franchise, over Huntley, who backed up Jackson for four years before a stint with the Dolphins in 2024. Don’t they remember that he made the Pro Bowl?
Jordan Love completed 20 consecutive passes in the Packers’ win over the Steelers, tying a franchise record set by Brett Favre and not by Aaron Rodgers, whose Steelers lost.
Mournfully bang your head into the closest wall for Cam Skattebo, whose brief stint as everybody’s favorite NFL player has ended after he suffered a season-ending ankle injury in Sunday’s loss to the Eagles. I’m personally devastated that his season is over, and also a little worried about what he’ll do about his pent-up energy while in recovery. It’s like when a dog can’t go to the park because it had surgery. The Giants need to bring in Jaxson Dart to the hospital every day so that he and Skattebo can butt heads and sniff each other for a few hours.
When Justin Fields shared such a vulnerable moment with the world, all I could think was, “Damn, he’s got a really big closet.”
I feel like all the moaning about that Tush Push call fails to mention that the play before Hurts ran for (and got!) the first down and then was hit out of bounds. He already earned the first down, this play happened because of a bad stop and botched call. The whistle here was just a make-up by the refs for flubbing the previous play.