What’s Hot and What’s Knott in Football – Week 14

By Rhys Knott

It was a good week to be a Josh who plays football. But the Walter Payton Man of the Year Award brings the most important hotness to Week 14. This world needs all the good news it can get. The NFL provided some as team’s announcing their nominees. Week two of the My Cause My Cleats campaign also brought us a welcome boon. 

On the field, we had a very chippy Thursday Night Game (on and off the field) between the Packers and Lions. Dan Campbell’s fearless approach to analytics (because you can’t say massive cojones here) won out. The Lions sealed the deal when they converted a fourth down with just 43 seconds left in the game. 

This is the time of year when injuries (even to officials) really play a part. The Lions have 18 players on IR and four more players missing in Week 14! Despite that Campbell’s team secured a playoff berth and Kevin O’Connell had his best night’s sleep of the season.  

The loss puts the Packers three games behind the Vikings with four left to play. Green Bay and Minnesota will meet on the 29th of December. O’Connell’s Vikings should have a Wildcard place sewn up by then, but the Packers could well need that win to secure theirs. 

Meanwhile, Josh Allen did Josh Allen things and Matthew Wright (not the bloke off channel five) got a member’s bounce at Arrowhead. And circus catches came back into fashion on both offense and defense.

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What’s Hot in Football – Week 14

The Walter Payton Man of The Year award is a prize given to the NFL player for “excellence on and off the field”. Each team nominates one player for the award and it’s a great way to highlight how players and teams impact their local community. 11 of the 2024 nominations are defensive linemen. It’s always good to give the big guys some love.  

Steelers defensive lineman Larry Ogunjobi was nominated for his tireless work with families in Pittsburgh. Maxx Crosby is the Raiders nominee.  

The defensive end has hosted five Make-A-Wish visits this season for families with seriously ill children. He also donated $1,000,000 to Eastern Michigan University. That money will help the Eagles improve facilities and resources for not just student-athletes but also for the local community. 

The best part of the Walter Payton Man of The Year award is you can vote for your favourite on social media. 

But the good news doesn’t end there, it was also the second week of “My Cause My Cleats” where players wear cleats that are literally designed to support a cause close to their own heart. Kyren Williams and Puka Nacua supported the axeALS Foundation. D.K. Metcalf had special “Prison Fellowship” footwear. 

Jalen Hurts had help designing his cleats from some patients at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

But River Cracraft might have worn the most important cleats of the season.

Back on the field, quarterbacks are so hot this week. Seven different signal callers racked up more than 300 yards through the air, and Baker Mayfield only missed out by five yards. Sam Darnold led the charger though. 

Darnold finished the game against the Falcons with a 157.9 passer rating (out of a possible 158.3) after he completed 22 of 28. The Vikings quarterback threw five touchdown passes despite suffering four sacks! By far his best pass was this 52-yard pitch and catch with Justin Jefferson.

On the subject of versatile receivers in the NFC North, we need to talk about Christian Watson. Watson was simultaneously hot and the reason the Packers lost a football game they really needed to win. The third-year receiver racked up an impressive 114 yards on four catches. 28.5 yards per reception is remarkable enough. When you consider that Lions’ defensive backs would rather commit defensive pass interference than allow a catch it’s really impressive. 

Watson however lost the only fumble of the game. A turnover that resulted in the Lions kicking a field goal to take a 10-0 lead. 

Other receivers showcased their skills with some catches that you definitely shouldn’t try at home kids. Adam Thielen started it all off by plucking the football out of the sky. 

And then Malik Nabers had a go. He deserves to be named “Malik of The Week” in Week 14. It’s the only thing the poor guy is going to win while he’s playing for the blue dumpster fire in New Jersey. But he definitely didn’t pay for that plane.

Anyone who has watched Boyz in The Hood knows that South Central L.A is no stranger to shootouts, but the Rams and the Bills demonstrated a different type of shootout out in Inglewood.

Josh Allen only completed 59% of his throws, but that didn’t stop him throwing three touchdowns. It also didn’t stop him running the football into the endzone three times! 

You might think that scoring 42 points on the road would be enough to score the Bills’ 11th win of the season.

You’d be wrong, Sean McVay’s Rams went full Sean McVay offensive explosion and racked up 457 total yards and 44 points of their own!

The Bills’ 42 points is terrible news for the Jets and Patriots who still have to play the Bills, Jerod Mayo’s guys get to play them twice in the last three weeks of the season!

The Bills travel to Detroit on Sunday night too, better keep an abacus handy for that game. Josh Allen wasn’t the only Josh who scored three rushing touchdowns this week. Josh Jacobs only had 18 carries in Detroit, but he took three of them to the house.

Defensively there’s only one place to start, Yetur Gross-Matos had three sacks as Thomas Brown showed us all that being the Bears’ head coach is actually really difficult. The 49er had only had one multiple-sack game in his career and he’d never had three in the same game. He doesn’t face that Bears offensive line very often though. 

Even though it was a good week for the quarterbacks there were still 14 players who made interceptions. Most memorably K’Lavon Chaisson, who knocked the ball up and managed to grab it whilst falling flat on his back. 

Winning the AFC West is hot too, especially when everyone and their dog insist you are just a bad football team. Welcome to the Chiefs’ 2024 season. At this stage they’re just trolling the naysayers and banging the field goal that secures a ninth straight title is the icing on that particular cake.  

You don’t need to be making a play with the football to make the hot list though. Sometimes you just have to have a bit of a boogie.

What’s Knott in Football – Week 14

The Packers’ inability to convert the pressure their defensive line generated into sacks is definitely Knott. And it could be something that comes back to bite them later in the season. Jeff Hafley’s group hit Jared Goff three times on his 32 dropbacks but only managed one sack for just three yards. 

Officiating is always going to be important in close games, even more so in a divisional game. And when the home team allows fans on the field to talk smack to the visiting team that isn’t making the officials’ jobs any easier. John Hussey’s crew worked the Monday Night game in Denver too! 

Missing calls is one thing, but calling some penalties on one team and not on the other is the sort of thing that enrages coaches.

Wasting perfectly good cheese purely to troll a football team? That’s Knott too.

Trying to take out the guy who called you out for being a dirty football player? Oh you better believe that’s Knott too.

An interim coach bawling out his punter is very much Knott too, especially when the broadcast crew were at pains to explain how the younger Darren Rizzi would escort kids who were being bullied to his high school when he was growing up in New Jersey!

That’s the sort of thing you can do in a team meeting on Tuesday, not on the sideline in front of the TV cameras.

There are a lot of things wrong with the Saints, but only Tommy Townsend has landed more punts inside the opponents’ 20-yard line than Matthew Hayball this year. Older Darren needs to be more like younger Darren.

RHYS KNOTT

NFL/FANTASY FOOTBALL ANALYST

Rhys has been watching the NFL for 30 something years and still hasn’t managed to pick a team to support. When he’s not fixatED on pass rushers you can find him blithering on about most sports on Twitter @wrhys_writes

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