As we reach Week 18 of the NFL season, a ghost pepper ripens. This pepper, much like the Ghost of Christmas Past, encourages us to review our takes of old and dig deep into what we thought at the time, why we thought it, and how it turned out. Over the past season, many Hot Sauce Hot Takes have been thrown out into the ether, so the final entry into this series will be reviewing the best and worst spices of yore.
Certified Cold: Struggling with the South and the East.
As any mortal man, I am susceptible to bias. I must apologize to the readership and listenership of Hot Sauce Hot Takes. I fear my coldest takes of the year were rooted in bias.
First, throughout the early parts of the college football season, I promised that Jalen Milroe was a Heisman candidate. I should have put a disclaimer on that take that I was raised in SEC country, and I must admit I neglected Ashton Jeanty for weeks because I didn’t want his Boise State Broncos to get the Group of Five playoff bid over my beloved Tulane Green Wave. Luckily, I was in awe all season of Travis Hunter, which saved me, but at the end of the day I missed warning signs on Jalen Milroe. When it was all said and done, Milroe ended the 2024 season with:
- Less passing yards than 2023,
- Less touchdowns than 2023,
- And more interceptions than 2023.
While the advanced metrics show that he had a similarly elite impact on games, it was credited substantially more to his legs than in 2023. All of this makes for a disappointing season for the Alabama Crimson Tide, and a bad take for me.
Sticking in the South but moving over to the NFL, I was one of the last believers in the Saints and Panthers, even has their outlooks grew dark around midseason. While I did put a “too hot” disclaimer on those takes, I probably should’ve sold my stock on those teams earlier. As of Week 17, both teams will have under 6 wins and almost certainly draft in the top half of the draft. However, the Panthers look a lot sunnier going into 2025 with a bit more trust in their young quarterback Bryce Young, his receiving corps, and their featured back Chuba Hubbard. Meanwhile, the Saints have their two featured players on offense – Derek Carr and Alvin Kamara – injured, practice squad wide receivers, and an aging defense that badly regressed this year.
Finally, I live in New York, and so one could accuse me of having a bias toward the hometown Jets, who certainly did NOT win the AFC East as I predicted in the preseason. But I still am somehow stuck on the fact that the Jets should at least be passable. By Week 18, the Jets will have opened as favorites in 14 (!) of their 17 games. This is an insane total for a team that will likely end the year with 4 victories. The reason why is because, in a vacuum, they seemingly have good players. In our SumerSports Pro Bowl voting, they received votes at the wide receiver, guard, outside linebacker, inside linebacker, defensive tackle, and cornerback positions. To reiterate, THIS IS A FOUR WIN TEAM. Perhaps they are still a quarterback, a coach, or a front office away. But until then the Jets are still a danger to society and to my takes.
Late Burn, Perhaps?: Is there room for mid-tier quarterbacks in today’s economy?
There seemed to be a trend in my takes that didn’t really break to the cold or the hot. They were all regarding quarterbacks in the middle. Even in college, where I predicted that Arch Manning would replace Quinn Ewers by the end of the season, it turned out that it still seems true but isn’t certifiably accurate yet.
With regards to young NFL quarterbacks, I predicted that Anthony Richardson would be the best quarterback to come out of the 2023 NFL Draft around midseason. Unfortunately, Anthony Richardson (and that class in general, as Richardson, Stroud, and Young are all 24th or below in ESPN’s QBR metric), is immensely confusing. Richardson is the best player in our decision-making metric, which evaluates whether or not a quarterback is throwing towards a player who is expected to generate the optimal yards gained, but second to last in our accuracy metric. If he could just be accurate, or even relatively accurate, he seemingly would be effective, but it seems he simply cannot do it.
Meanwhile, with regards to the newest class of quarterbacks, it appears that Drake Maye and Jayden Daniels are their teams’ quarterbacks of the future. As a result, my prediction that at three or four members of the Class of 2024 will make it to their second contract hinges on Michael Penix Jr., who looks good through two games but is too early on in his career to call, and Bo Nix, who I would tag with a shrugging emoji if I could. Nix is below average in nearly every advanced metric both SumerSports and outside parties calculate, except sack avoidance. That being said, sack avoidance seems to be the entire basis of his game, and in recent weeks we’ve seen him improve on deep passes.
At the higher end, there seems to be some interesting discussion about market leader Dak Prescott (who suffered a tough hamstring injury this year after a breakout performance last year) and how that might affect Brock Purdy, who is likely to begin extension talks after another productive year, albeit a tough one in the wins column for the 49ers. I’m not ready to call it yet on either of these players, but they certainly demand a close eye from the Hot Sauce Committee going into next year.
A high-level view at this gives us a clear conclusion, the NFL still has no clue how to operate properly with mid-tier quarterbacks. The 2024 season, where retread quarterbacks like Baker Mayfield, Jared Goff, Sam Darnold, and Geno Smith succeeded while the 2023 Draft Class floundered, did not add much clarity to that discussion.
Certified Hot: Betting on the physical high-flyers.
In 2024, I found that I was consistently supporting the big burly brutes of the football world. I was partial to teams that wanted to play physically and fast.
Take the college game for example, I was a big fan of head coaches Dan Lanning and Fran Brown. Dan Lanning spent his time convincing his players that they were performing in the Roman Coliseum, and Fran Brown refused to shower unless his Syracuse team won. As a result, Oregon is in a prime spot to win the College Football Playoff, while Syracuse had a breakout year that didn’t quite end in the ACC Championship implications that I predicted but ended with a knockout of Miami from playoff contention.
That is the kind of energy we were on in 2024. And no better team resembled that energy than the Detroit Lions. In the early preseason, I told my friend Shawn Syed of the Stats & Scheme podcast that the Lions would win 14 games. In response, he said he would pick up a dinner tab if it did happen. Well, here we sit after Week 17, with the Lions sitting pretty at 14 wins, and the restaurant menus are being sent to Shawn as we speak. Moreover, they are one of the top offenses in the league and were one of the top defenses in the league before literally every player on that side of the ball got injured. Despite that, they have persevered, pulling off big win after big win.
In a similar manner, Justin Herbert, Jim Harbaugh, and the Los Angeles Chargers also have locked in a playoff spot behind a strong defense and the strong will of Justin Herbert. Under Harbaugh’s tutelage, Herbert rose to the level of quarterback who an entire offense can be heliocentric around. Despite having exactly zero elite receivers (unless you count Ladd McConkey, who is just outside the top 15 in our receiving all-in-one metric), Herbert dragged a Chargers offense to a playoff bid behind play that ranked 8th in the league in our passing all-in-one metric. I thank him for his service in fulfilling my promise of Chargers playoffhood.
