Culture
NFL Week 10 top storylines: Russell Wilson vs. Commanders, Broncos-Chiefs, can Lions stay hot?
Believe it or not, Week 10 of the NFL regular season already is upon us, and a sense of urgency has set in across the league with just nine weeks remaining before the playoffs.
The second head coach of the season received his walking papers last week. The Saints fired Dennis Allen on Monday and replaced him with interim Darren Rizzi as they grasp for solutions on how to end their league-worst seven-game losing streak. The trade deadline followed Tuesday, concluding with 25 teams engaging in 18 trades in hopes of fortifying their rosters for the homestretch.
Division races are beginning to take shape or tighten. A crucial AFC North showdown took place Thursday night, when Lamar Jackson and the Baltimore Ravens outdueled Joe Burrow’s Bengals 35-34 despite a historic night by Cincinnati wide receiver Ja’Marr Chase.
The action continues Sunday morning, when the New York Giants and Carolina Panthers face off in Munich, Germany. It continues with seven games at 1 p.m. ET, three more in the 4 p.m. ET window and a Sunday night matchup between the Detroit Lions and Houston Texans. Week 10 concludes Monday night with the Miami Dolphins visiting the Los Angeles Rams.
Here’s a look at five compelling storylines around the NFL this week. (Find the full schedule here.)
1. Familiar faces in new places after trade deadline
Eight players changed addresses Tuesday, the final day for teams to make trades. That brought the total player moves this season to 19. In recent weeks, we saw Davante Adams, Amari Cooper and DeAndre Hopkins make their debuts with their new teams. Now we’re about to see another cluster of players try to bolster their new teams’ chances of contending for division titles, playoff berths and Super Bowl runs.
In-season trades rarely dramatically change team fortunes, but there are some exceptions. Hopkins looks like a difference-maker in Kansas City, where he recorded two touchdown catches to help lift his new team over Tampa Bay last Monday. Who will make an instant impact this week? Cornerback Marshon Lattimore (hamstring) is out for the Washington Commanders and Lions pass rusher Za’Darius Smith may not play Sunday, but keep an eye on two new Steelers acquisitions, edge rusher Preston Smith and wide receiver Mike Williams.
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2. Steelers-Commanders: Meeting of unlikely division leaders
The Steelers and Commanders both reset at quarterback this offseason. The Steelers acquired veteran Russell Wilson hoping the nine-time Pro Bowl selection could help them win their first playoff game since the 2016 season. The Commanders, meanwhile, drafted Jayden Daniels second overall, praying he could rescue them from years of dysfunction and ineptitude.
Wilson’s Steelers tenure got off to a slow start thanks to a calf strain that sidelined him for five weeks while Justin Fields helped Pittsburgh to a 3-2 start. But now in the starting role, Wilson has looked like the difference-maker Mike Tomlin envisioned this offseason, going 2-0 and directing the offense to two of its best outings of the year.
Daniels, meanwhile, has shined as a passer and rusher for one of the most prolific offenses in the league and as a result is the favorite to win Rookie of the Year honors. Midway through the season, not only are these teams winning thanks largely to the sparks their new quarterbacks have provided, but they’re both leading their respective divisions. Pittsburgh (6-2) is first in the AFC North and Washington (7-2) leads the NFC East.
Both teams enter Sunday’s contest in Landover, Md., riding three-game win streaks but needing victories to hold off divisional foes (Baltimore for Pittsburgh, Philadelphia for Washington). The game is a reunion for Steelers coach Mike Tomlin and the Commanders’ Dan Quinn. In 1994, Tomlin played defensive back for William & Mary while Quinn served as the Tribe’s defensive line coach. The following season, they both landed jobs on Virginia Military Institute’s coaching staff. Now they’ll try to lead their teams to victory and maintain the momentum built during the first half of the season. (Steelers at Commanders, 1 p.m. ET Sunday.)
3. Broncos’ next tough test: Visiting the Chiefs
Sean Payton’s Broncos embarked on a surprising 5-3 start to the season despite playing a rookie quarterback and going through growing pains in other areas. Last week, however, they ran into a buzzsaw in Baltimore and got thumped 41-10. They are in a tight race with the Chargers (5-3) for second in the AFC West and remain hopeful they can end an eight-year playoff drought.
Their next task won’t be easy: Sunday, Denver travels to Kansas City to take on the 8-0 Chiefs, who are the NFL’s only undefeated team. Patrick Mahomes boasts a 12-1 record against the Broncos. His only loss to them came in Week 8 last season, when he threw two interceptions and no touchdowns and also lost a fumble in a 24-9 defeat in Denver.
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Can the Broncos make it two in a row? Cornerback Pat Surtain II said this week, “It’s a good opportunity for us to showcase what we’ve got,” and if anyone’s up to the challenge of stopping Mahomes, it’s Surtain, who is regarded as the top cornerback in the NFL.
Denver’s greatest concern, however, might be its own offense versus Kansas City’s defense. Rookie quarterback Bo Nix has delivered bright spots this season, but this week he must face the unit led by mastermind Steve Spagnuolo. Spags makes life difficult for most quarterbacks, but his defenses tend to feast on rookie quarterbacks in particular. Since 2019, Spagnuolo owns an 11-1 record against rookie quarterbacks, and his Chiefs have gone 5-0 at home against Denver during the same span. Spagnuolo will send all kinds of pressures, disguise coverages and plant seeds of doubt in Nix’s mind. How will Payton equip his rookie to deal with the challenge? (Broncos at Chiefs, 1 p.m. ET Sunday.)
Rookie Marvin Harrison Jr. has helped turn the Cardinals’ tide. (Matt Kartozian / Imagn Images)
4. Arizona Cardinals’ rise
Is it time to start viewing the Cardinals in a different light? Considered non-factors in the NFC West after a 1-3 start to the season, the Cardinals have since won four of their last five, including three straight, to improve to 5-4. Arizona is now atop the division standings as it hosts the New York Jets on Sunday.
An authoritative 41-10 victory over the Rams in Week 2 was the only early-season highlight for Arizona. But after a 42-14 loss to the Commanders, Jonathan Gannon’s team rebounded with a 24-23 win at San Francisco in Week 5. They lost to the Packers in Week 6, but back-to-back comeback victories over the Chargers and Dolphins preceded a convincing win over the Bears last week, and now the Cardinals find themselves as the only NFC West team with a winning record.
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There’s a lot to like about this team. Quarterback Kyler Murray is doing a good job of taking care of the football while distributing it to a diverse cast of weapons that include tight end Trey McBride and wide receivers Marvin Harrison Jr. and Michael Wilson. Harrison, a rookie, has shown flashes of dominance (his six-catch, 111-yard performance in Week 8 carried Arizona to victory over Miami). Running back James Conner ranks sixth in the NFL in rushing. Defensively, the Cardinals have displayed improvement and hope to receive a boost with their trade for Baron Browning.
While Arizona appears to be trending in the right direction, the Jets have endured a challenging season and lost five straight before last week’s win over Houston. Aaron Rodgers, Garrett Wilson and Adams lead the Jets offensively, but the unit has yet to live up to expectations. New York’s defense has surrendered 330-plus yards in three of its last four games under interim head coach/defensive coordinator Jeff Ulbrich, who replaced the fired Robert Saleh. The Jets’ biggest weakness is stopping the run, so a heavy dose of Conner and fellow backs Trey Benson and Emari Demercado with Murray sprinkled in could help pave the Cardinals’ way to success. (Jets at Cardinals, 4:25 p.m. ET Sunday.)
5. Detroit Lions: Ripe for an upset?
On one hand, the Lions — with a 7-1 record and riding a six-game win streak — are one of the hottest teams in the league. Much of the time, they look like the best team in the entire NFL. But could Dan Campbell’s imposing group be upset Sunday night at Houston?
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Jared Goff is leading the NFL with a completion percentage of 74.9 and in recent weeks has completed 100, 72, 88, 80 and 81.8 percent of his throws for 11 touchdowns and no interceptions. The Lions can win pretty. They can win ugly. Detroit’s defense is among the best in the red zone, allowing touchdowns only 43.48 percent of the time (fourth best) and only 37.5 percent in the last three games combined.
The Texans are coming off a bye, however, and although Las Vegas has them as 3 1/2-point home underdogs, DeMeco Ryans’ boys are 3-0 when boasting a rest advantage from a bye or mini-bye. Offensive production has dipped recently for the Lions (225 yards against Tennessee in Week 8 and 261 against Green Bay in Week 9). Meanwhile, Detroit’s defense has allowed at least 130 rushing yards in four of its last five contests. Texans quarterback C.J. Stroud will command plenty of attention, and not having his top two receivers will hamper his efforts. Running back Joe Mixon has five 100-yard performances in six outings this season, however, and could exploit Detroit’s weakness in this department and position his team for a strong outing. (Lions at Texans, 8:20 p.m. ET Sunday.)
(Top photo: Joe Sargent / Getty Images)
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Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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