Culture
NFL Week 14 roundtable: Should Pittsburgh be on upset alert? Time for Michael Penix Jr.?
The Jameis Winston experience reached heights never seen before with the Cleveland Browns’ loss to the Denver Broncos on Monday night. The Browns aren’t your typical 3-9 team, which the Pittsburgh Steelers already know well.
Should the first-place Steelers be on upset alert again in Week 14? Our writers Mike Sando, Zak Keefer and Jeff Howe address the question in The Athletic’s roundtable previewing Week 14’s remaining slate.
Our writers also ponder if it’s too late in the season for a team amid a playoff push to throw a rookie quarterback in the fire. It’s the talk in Atlanta as the Falcons and Kirk Cousins (at Vikings) continue to fall with the rival Tampa Bay Buccaneers (vs. Raiders) rising.
Read more below for what else is on our writers’ minds this week.
As Monday night showed, you never know what you’ll get out of the Jameis Winston experience. Should Pittsburgh be on upset alert vs. the Browns on Sunday?
Keefer: Absolutely. For starters, they lost to this same Browns team in Week 12, and it’s no secret across the league that Cleveland’s offense is much more potent with Winston under center than Deshaun Watson. Maybe Winston’s prayer to rid himself of the pick-sixes will work, because without those killer mistakes, he’s unlocked something in the Browns’ passing game. For starters, look at what Jerry Jeudy’s doing (he’s eighth in the league in EPA per reception). Also, with Winston at QB, the Browns have had their three most productive days on offense this season.
Howe: The Steelers would need to have short-term amnesia if they aren’t on upset alert because the Browns beat them two weeks ago in one of the funnest games of the season. The Browns are playing much better on offense with Winston, similar to the way the move to Joe Flacco sparked the offense in 2023. You can tell the Browns are playing hard for their coach and quarterback, and they’d love nothing more than to sweep their rivals during an otherwise lost season. The Browns may not be able to predict what they’ll get out of Winston each game, but the results were far more predictable and a whole lot less successful earlier this season when they could foresee the results.
Sando: Yes, because it’s a divisional game and Pittsburgh already lost to the Browns recently. The Mike Tomlin-era Steelers are 19-4 against the Browns when Cleveland had a losing record entering the game. The record is 4-2 since 2019 and 0-1 this season.
The Jaguars meet the Titans without Trevor Lawrence, who, while sliding, suffered a concussion on a hit by Texans linebacker Azeez Al-Shaair last week. There has been some debate over whether Lawrence started his slide too late. Is there any merit to that notion? Could you envision the league ever addressing “fake” QB slides in the future?
Keefer: I’m not buying that. Lawrence started to slide when he saw the defender approaching, giving himself up on the play. Al-Shaair leveled the quarterback with a forearm to the upper part of Lawrence’s shoulder pad and his neck. It was late. It was dirty. It was unnecessary. And it’s not the first time this season Shaair’s been criticized for a late hit on a QB. I do think, if quarterbacks start faking slides to keep the play alive, the league will step in. But this was not that.
Howe: Lawrence slid later than critics may have liked in order to maximize his opportunity to get a first down, but that doesn’t come with an open invitation for a defender to launch himself with a leading elbow to the head area. Later slides generally come with some level of contact from the defense, and the officials tend to do a decent job of determining which of those hits are incidental and which others rise to the level of a penalty. If quarterbacks start a tendency of doing the fake slide, a la Kenny Pickett at Pitt, the league should absolutely put an end to it. The closest thing we’ve seen to that, at least in terms of any semblance of regularity, would be the QBs who take advantage of a few extra yards near the boundary, but I’m not sure how that could be objectively enforced.
Sando: The first coach I spoke with regarding the Lawrence hit pointed out right away that he thought Lawrence slid late. There is merit to the notion. Texans GM Nick Caserio speaking out so forcefully in defense of Al-Shaair does raise the possibility some in the NFL could push for clarifications/changes. But because the league would rather have critics complaining about too many protections for quarterbacks than not enough protections for them, I think it’ll take examples more blatant than the one involving Lawrence for the league to address “fake” slides.
The Bears and 49ers meet on Sunday. Who might be the best fit as the next Bears head coach? What should be at the top of the 49ers’ offseason to-do list, should they miss the playoffs?
Keefer: Can they get Ben Johnson? If Kevin Warren is right — and this is the best job of the NFL’s impending hiring cycle — then this franchise needs to do everything it can to lure the Lions’ offensive coordinator down to Chicago. Nothing is more paramount than Caleb Williams’ development, and the rookie’s shown enough promise this season, despite the recent chaos surrounding the organization, that with the right coach he can become a star in this league. The old Chicago regimes would get this wrong. Maybe this year they actually get it right.
As for the 49ers, despite what some pundits are saying, I don’t think a full-on rebuild is necessary. There’s too much talent. Brock Purdy is young. Christian McCaffrey will be back next season. This year was plagued by a ridiculous stream of injuries, and probably the lingering effects of last year’s gutting Super Bowl loss. The roster needs some tweaks, and needs some youth, but there are too many sound building blocks to move on from.
Howe: They should prioritize offensive consistency for Williams, so there should be apprehension over a defensive-minded coach who could lose his offensive coordinator every couple years. Thomas Brown will deserve a serious look if the Bears play better down the stretch, and the Bears should also bring in Ben Johnson, Zac Robinson and Liam Coen for interviews. With the Niners, it’s been a few years running now where rival executives marvel at the top-end talent but remain wary over their depth, which is why they run into these issues when their stars go down. They aren’t giving out bad contracts to their stars, but there’s an injury risk involved that’s been coming to a head. Same with the Trey Lance pick. Sure, they ultimately figured it out at quarterback, but they’d be in a much better spot right now if they hit on the trio of first-round picks that it cost to draft Lance. This would be a logical time to move on from veterans who are on the back nine and reinforce depth through the draft.
GO DEEPER
Thomas Brown’s chances to stay? Trade for a coach? Bears mailbag, plus Week 14 picks
Sando: How fun would it be if the Bears made a run at Deion Sanders? I’m thinking outside the box with an eye toward the other coaches in this division. Dan Campbell is one of a kind, an outsized personality. Kevin O’Connell and Matt LaFleur are more conventional and both are flourishing. Coach Prime would instantly make the Bears relevant. And while most high-profile coaches would want more personnel/organizational control than Chicago appears willing to grant, Sanders might not. He could bring in some veteran NFL coaches and shake up the division. Is anyone with me?
Would Colorado Buffaloes head coach Deion Sanders be a fit for the Chicago Bears? (Ron Chenoy / Imagn Images)
The Bucs (vs. Raiders), Cardinals (vs. Seahawks) and Rams (vs. Bills) are all 6-6 and probably need to win their respective divisions to make the playoffs. Which team should be feeling most confident right now?
Keefer: I like Tampa Bay’s chances in the NFC South simply because the Falcons feel like frauds. Atlanta’s been so wildly inconsistent this season, and Kirk Cousins is amid one of the worst slumps of his career. The Bucs, meanwhile, won’t see a team with a winning record the rest of the regular season.
Howe: If the Bucs take care of business, they should win four of their last five games and take the NFC South. Their defensive inconsistencies are concerning because it’s tough to rip off a winning streak like that, but their schedule is the most accommodating compared to the Seahawks and Cardinals. The NFC West is completely unpredictable and has been pretty much all season. The only thing I feel confident about is the Niners won’t win the division, so you might as well print their championship T-shirts now.
Sando: Tampa Bay is the team for me as well. It’s amazing to me the Bucs lost twice to the Falcons, but they did, and that’s why they’re in this position. The Athletic’s model puts the Bucs’ playoff chances at 54 percent, compared to 35 percent for Arizona and 26 percent for the Rams. That feels about right to me.
Our writers trust Baker Mayfield and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to end up on top in the NFC South with the Atlanta Falcons struggling. (Elsa / Getty Images)
The Falcons are on the road vs. the Vikings. Throwing a rookie QB into the fire against a Brian Flores defense seems ill-advised. But should the Falcons consider starting Michael Penix Jr. over Kirk Cousins at some point this season if things get worse?
Keefer: Yes. If Cousins continues to struggle — his third interception Sunday against the Chargers was one of the worst ones I’ve seen a starter throw all year — the Falcons need to consider giving Penix a chance. The division is still within reach, and if you stick with a starter who’s killing drives and costing the team games, you’re doing a disservice to the locker room. Players know. Players pay attention. They simply want the guy who’ll give them the best chance to win on Sundays. Penix played a lot of games in college; it’s entirely possible he could step in and give this offense a spark.
Howe: I’ve been told Penix has been lighting it up in practice, so a switch would be justified if they felt like making the move. Under no circumstances would I start Penix against the Vikings, but the remaining games against the Raiders, Giants, Commanders and Panthers would be appealing. But this decision wouldn’t be made in a vacuum. If the Falcons go with Penix while they’re still in contention and he plays decently enough, I don’t see how they could keep Cousins in 2025. And it’s fair to believe Cousins will be better next season once he’s fully healed from the torn Achilles. But if the Falcons switch to Penix once they’re out of contention and he plays OK, even if it’s only for the regular-season finale, Cousins won’t have any room for error with the fan base in 2025. The safer play is to stick with Cousins. But if the Falcons believe moving to Penix would spark the locker room and accelerate his chances to start in Week 1 next season, such an aggressive move would be the correct play.
Sando: The Falcons should play Penix for the final four games if Cousins plays poorly and/or the team loses at Minnesota. They’ll have an extra day to get Penix ready because they follow their game at Minnesota with a Monday night visit to Las Vegas in Week 15. Atlanta then finishes with the Giants, Commanders and Panthers. Getting some experience for Penix in the absence of great expectations seems like a good idea. Getting Cousins to the offseason without another injury also has value.
(Photo: Brooke Sutton / Getty Images)
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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