OnlyMamaKnows

Pickett has regressed rapidly over the past month, culminating with one of the poorer throwing performances you will see last Sunday at Cleveland, with some passes as many as 15 or 20 yards off target.

That is when enough became enough.

Time will tell that, but time might have already done its damage. Pickett is a broken quarterback who has regressed significantly in his second year.

Consider this:

• Over Pickett’s past seven games, he has just 1,033 yards passing (147.6 yards per game), two touchdowns and one interception. • Pickett has six touchdown passes all season. Cowboys cornerback Daron Bland has four pick sixes. • There have been 315 quarterbacks that have 500 pass attempts since the 1970 merger. Pickett ranks last with a 1.9 percent TD rate, according to CBS. • Pickett is averaging 6.1 yards per attempt and 10.1 yards per completion. • He has thrown only 22 passes at least 20 yards down the field. • Against the Browns, he did not total 100 yards until his final throw.

Whether it was all Canada’s fault or not, we shall soon see, but 23 games into a first-round quarterback’s career is a lifetime to many. By then, you usually know who the great ones are like Patrick Mahomes and Roethlisberger, and you know who Jake Lockers and Brandon Weedens are, as well.

Arrowhead Stadium — home of the Kansas City Chiefs — had the highest percentage of players (17.9 percent) vote it as the best NFL stadium among the 84 players who responded to the question. The Minnesota Vikings’ U.S. Bank Stadium (13.7 percent), the Los Angeles Rams and Chargers’ SoFi Stadium (8.9 percent), the Green Bay Packers’ Lambeau Field and the Seattle Seahawks’ Lumen Field (both 8.3 percent) followed in the rankings for best stadium.

Players also sounded off on the league’s worst venues to play in, with the New York Jets and Giants’ MetLife Stadium outranking the others (18.4 percent) in that category. The Washington Commanders’ FedEx Field (13.9 percent) and Buffalo Bills’ Highmark Stadium (12.7 percent) were the other top vote-getters for the worst stadium to play in.

What makes this situation frustrating is that the Jets knew what Wilson was after watching him for two years as a starter. It stands to reason that if Rodgers were lost at any point — and certainly that had to at least be entertained as a scenario given his age — there should have been a question asked in connection with it. And that question is this: If Rodgers is lost for extended time, why is there confidence that Wilson’s performance will be any different than it was in his first two seasons?

There’s a backdrop of knowledge for that question. When the Wilson plan went wrong for the Jets, the internal assessment of the failure after the 2022 season landed on one central point of regret: If the franchise could do it all over again, Wilson would have redshirted his rookie season. When the powerbrokers inside the organization looked back on what went wrong, it was the assumption that Wilson was ready to commandeer the team as a rookie, even when the surrounding depth chart had lingering issues.

He wasn’t ready. What they didn’t expect was the consequences of that reality. Not only wasn’t he ready in 2021, it would linger into a disastrous 2022 and get worse to the point of a near mutiny in the locker room. The response to that was to admit the mistake and make a move for Rodgers. But that move ended up carrying the fatal flaw that we are seeing now.

After depending on Wilson to be something that he wasn’t for the first two years of his career, the Jets rolled the dice a second time, leaving him in place as a backup. And the results are suggesting a fundamental truth. Not only did Wilson need a redshirt year in 2021, he needed another one in 2023 to begin reconstructing him from the ground up. It’s a stark and expensive reality, but the Jets would have been in much better shape if they had started the season with another dependable backup for Rodgers. And with that decision, Wilson should have been put at the third spot on the depth chart with the expressed goal of allowing him to learn from Rodgers without exposing the team to the risk that Wilson wouldn’t be ready when called upon.

Of course, most NFL architects would tell you that such a scenario is absurd. You can’t take a quarterback with Wilson’s salary and slide him all the way down to the third spot on the depth chart so that he can take a sabbatical from pressure. Either he’s capable of being a backup who can help rather than hurt, or he’s no longer an asset to the roster. The San Francisco 49ers came to that conclusion when they dropped Trey Lance to the No. 3 spot on their depth chart and then subsequently traded him to the Dallas Cowboys. It was a hard mistake to admit, but it also put the front office and coaching staff into the position of staring at their backup spot and thinking the player there, Sam Darnold, can at least give them a fighting chance to survive in case of an injury.

They could have gone with Lance as backup and made their own twice-baked mistake. But they knew that the risk he represented as a backup was too great, and declined. Everyone in that organization has moved on and is sleeping just fine.

The Jets went the other way. And they’re reaping what they sowed. The only questions now are how much longer they’re willing to stand in the path of this relentless imperfection at quarterback, and whether it’s already too late for everyone to get up from the collision.

Before we go any further, we need to define what a mayday field goal actually is. Broncos coach Sean Payton said he calls it “hurricane” now, and other teams might refer to it as “lightning,” but whatever you call it, teams have similar parameters.

1. Running clock
2. Offense has no timeouts left in the half
3. Third down, in or near field-goal range
4. Inside of 40 seconds, all the way down to 17 seconds on the clock

The Athletic talked to two recently out-of-the-game special teams coordinators and three other current NFL staffers who work closely with coaching decisions, and all five agreed that an NFL team should not sub out their existing defense for the field goal block defense when they are operating in a “mayday” field goal situation. There’s not enough time to guarantee a clean substitution (under two minutes, the officials don’t stand over the ball to allow a man-for-man substitution) and the chances of blocking a field goal are miniscule.

“Defensively, we would never substitute an opponent’s mayday situation for the exact reason (of) what happened the other night,” said Mike Priefer, longtime special teams coordinator for four NFL teams, most recently the Cleveland Browns.

Over the past five seasons, just 2.2 percent of all field goal attempts have been blocked across the NFL (86 of 3,925), and it’s been even less common with the game on the line. Over the same span, just 1.8 percent of all potential game-tying/go-ahead field goal attempts in the fourth quarter or overtime have been blocked (7 of 392).

Buffalo has actually had better-than-average results on this play. The Bills have blocked 2.7 percent of all opponent field goal attempts under head coach Sean McDermott, the seventh-highest rate across the NFL since his first season in 2017. That includes 7.1 percent of potential game-tying/go-ahead attempts in the fourth quarter or OT by their opponents (1 of 14).

But that’s still not enough reward to risk a more likely and unnecessary result: Having too many men on the field.

“You don’t want to give them a second chance,” Priefer said. “Whatever 11 is on the field, in a mayday situation, nickel or dime, keep them out there and make sure you don’t have more than six on the line of scrimmage on one side of the center or the other, and make sure you come off the edge.”

Hutchinson often dances at Ford Field wearing a Honolulu blue jersey, a silver helmet and eye black on one side of his face that he says prepares him for war. It starts above his eyebrow and reaches a point on his cheek around his mouth.

Not long ago, however, he was dancing at his home stadium wearing a pastel shirt and jorts — a tribute to Taylor Swift’s “Lover” album. Hutchinson was in a private suite for the Eras Tour concert with family and friends, including some little girls.

None of the other Swifties in the suite were more animated than Aidan. “He peaked that night during ‘You Belong With Me’ and ‘Love Story,’” his sister Mia says.

"First, my wife Brittany got them for me, so I'm not throwin' y'all down, but I have to wear 'em, ya know," Mahomes, 28, told the brothers of his former high-school sweetheart, 28.

"At the same time, I threw 'em on that first season [and] we had a pretty good season that season," he explained of how it all started back in 2017.