NFL winners and losers: The NFC East has become football’s saddest division

Is there anything more indicative of the NFL’s parity than the NFC East right now? Here was a division many pegged to be one of the league’s most competitive, with the resolute Eagles, a Cowboys team ready to prove they can be elite, a revitalized Giants, and a healthy Commanders. Five weeks in we have the sorriest group of teams in the league.

The Giants are in first, mostly by default. They’re playing decent football, sure — but nobody believes this team really has a chance as long as Jaxson Dart and Brian Burns are out. The team is more or less limping along, benefiting more from teams being worse than them, rather doing anything spectacular in their own right. Sunday was indicative of this, because facing off with the Commanders is the kind of game the Giants should dominate in order to make anyone confident in their ability moving forward.

Then there are the Eagles, who are still in contention, somehow. Losers of three games straight, riddled with injuries, and with a Hall of Famer offensive lineman retiring, Philadelphia is coming to grips with a world where each week their coach Nick Sirianni stands at the podium and admits that he did something critical to cause the team’s loss. The Eagles became the first team in NFL history to lose back-to-back games with a 97% or greater win probability in the fourth quarter. Unquestionably the most disappointing team in the NFL based on their preseason prediction, Philly sits at 2-3 and is the frontrunner to fire their head coach.

Maybe the Cowboys can be the team to put it all together? Just kidding, they found a way to lose to the 0-4 Buccaneers on Thursday night football, raising questions about the team’s construction. They might have the wrong head coach, perhaps they lack a QB to get the job done, and they don’t have the cap space to get markedly better. Meanwhile, the guy they fired, head coach Mike McCarthy, has the Steelers competing with a much more problematic roster than the one he left as a 12-5 coach in Dallas.

The Washington Commanders also exist.

As a whole, the NFC East is a combined 8-10-2. Not the worst division on paper but it owns some of the most embarrassing losses in the NFL so far. Their collective schedules are only getting more difficult from here, and we could easily see three coaches get axed from the East before the season finishes — unless there’s some demonstrable improvement. This shouldn’t happen in the NFC East. Routinely, it’s one of the league’s better conferences, home to some of the richest rivalries, and with more trash talking than most of football combined. Instead of talking trash to each other, these teams can only point to how trash they have become.

What a sorry state of affairs.

And now onto the rest of the winners and losers of the week …

It was easy to fall victim to early-season doubt when it came to New England, but now they’re roaring back. The Pats’ sobering loss to the Jaguars’ in Week 3 lit a fire under them, which has continued in back-to-back weeks with big-time wins over the Bills, and now the Raiders — who have been extremely competitive this season.

The nexus has been Drake Maye, who has been a different quarterback in each of the last two weeks. He’s regained his confidence under center, despite the fact that the protection has still been fairly awful. There’s just a level of consistency and comfort with that pressure which has changed. Maye is standing tall in the pocket and taking hits, and gaining more belief in his receivers to make plays — rather than trying to force throws himself.

That was abundantly clear against the Raiders, as he was under pressure for much of the afternoon, sacked once times, hit six times, and pressured 12 times total — but it just never felt that way. Maye carved up Las Vegas, finishing with 357 yards and four touchdowns in a perfect game.

It’s tough to know what happens with the Patriots next, but at the very least they’ve shown they can hang with the NFL’s best and win. That’s several orders of magnitude better than they looked after three weeks.

This whole situation in Tennessee just isn’t working. The core problem with Cam Ward as a No. 1 pick is that he absolutely needed time to adapt to the NFL game, but the Titans forced him to start immediately, and it’s blown up in their faces. At no point on Sunday did it look like Ward can be an NFL quarterback, and while he was playing a difficult Texans defense, he just doesn’t look like he can succeed.

It’s abundantly clear what needs to happen in Nashville: Cam Ward needs to be benched. There is zero shame in being benched in your second year, just ask Bryce Young. Tennessee doesn’t have anything great waiting in the wings, and turning the ball over to Mitchell Trubisky would be treading water — but Carolina was in this same position by putting in Andy Dalton to give Young breathing room to learn the position, accept the failure, and bounce back.

When we get to brass tacks it’s pretty simple, really. If Ward can sit, learn, study, and bounce back — then he could be the guy. If he’s not able to cope with being benched, then he was never going to be the player the Titans needed in the first place. The biggest concern in watching him is a complete lack of awareness when it comes to the pass rush, and when paired with less-than-stellar blocking there are major issues.

I want Cam Ward to succeed. The only way is to bench him and see what happens next.

Is San Francisco the Super Bowl favorite at this point? It’s really feeling like it. No matter what gets thrown at this team, they just keep finding ways to win. Sunday was far from their most dominant performance of the year offensively, clearly struggling against the varied, creative Seahawks’ defense — but this team is unflappable.

No team in the NFL is better at adapting on the fly than the Niners. Kyle Shanahan is gifted at feeling the ebb and flow of a game, and altering his plan in order to target what the game is giving him, rather than what was planned for throughout the week. Sometimes this coalesces, and the 49ers look dominant, but it’s when they get stuffed early that it becomes so fun to see how Shanny and Co. will find a way out of the situation.

There’s just something special about this team.

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