(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; Top photo of Patrick Mahomes: Ronald Martinez / Getty Images)
Culture
Patrick Mahomes’ turnover woes, Derrick Henry’s dominance, more from Week 4: Quick Outs
Week 4 is in the books — and it still feels weird to say that’s technically not the quarter mark of the season anymore. Whatever. September football is over now, so, spiritually, we’re moving into a new section of the NFL season.
In this installment of Quick Outs, we’ve got a couple of star AFC quarterbacks who aren’t playing quite like themselves, a worthy adversary for Brian Flores, and a little appreciation of one of the rarest runners the sport has ever seen.
Time to dive in.
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Let’s talk about it: Patrick Mahomes’ turnover issues
There is too much Texas Tech in Patrick Mahomes’ game right now.
Mahomes has thrown five picks to start the season — at least one in each game, two in a near-loss to the Cincinnati Bengals. That total — currently the third-most in the NFL — is the most Mahomes has ever thrown through the first four games of a season.
Now, we’ve done this song and dance with Mahomes before. I know that. He (and the Chiefs at large) could not stop turning the ball over early in the 2021 season either. A majority of the interceptions that season felt fluky, though. Drops, tipped passes, miscommunications — everything that could go wrong outside of the quarterback’s control went wrong.
That’s not really the case right now. The funky interception Mahomes threw to Roquan Smith in the opener can go down as a fluke, but I’m willing to put the others on Kansas City’s QB.
.@bengals pick off Mahomes on the first play of the drive!
📺: #CINvsKC on CBS/Paramount
📱: https://t.co/waVpO909ge pic.twitter.com/q9G42w9vi0— NFL (@NFL) September 15, 2024
Against the Bengals, Mahomes threw his first interception by trying to squeeze a deep sit route past a zone defender in Cover 2. The zone linebacker had nobody to cover on his side of the field and melted right back to the middle to pick off Mahomes.
Later in the game, Mahomes tossed up a 50-50 ball to 165-pound Xavier Worthy vs. CB Cam Taylor-Britt. Taylor-Britt made an insane one-handed catch, no doubt, but there’s just no world in which throwing a contested go ball to Worthy against a much bigger cornerback makes any sense.
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Mahomes’ end-zone interception against the Atlanta Falcons was a classic case of not seeing a safety flying back across the field to find the ball. Against the Los Angeles Chargers this past weekend, Mahomes simply overthrew his man on a heavily contested corner route. (I don’t knock him as harshly for that one because it’s a throw I know he’s capable of making, but you still have to hit it at the end of the day.)
Mahomes is probably going to be fine by the end of the season. He’s the best quarterback in the league and a back-to-back defending Super Bowl champion, so there’s no reason to doubt that this is just a blip on the radar.
The turnovers are a legitimate issue right now, though, and they have played a sizable role in all of the Chiefs’ games being so close.
Stat check: Trevor Lawrence’s off-target rate
One month into the season, Trevor Lawrence’s 16.4 percent off-target rate is the third-worst in the NFL, according to PFF. Only Bryce Young and Anthony Richardson have been worse. The former was benched for Andy Dalton; the latter is seen as the league’s biggest scattershot, even by his most optimistic supporters.
Lawrence is an eminently frustrating player. For most of the past three years, the film has painted Lawrence in a positive light, despite misfortune all around him. A couple misfires here and there would draw out his biggest detractors, but Lawrence was by and large a stud at the position. The team-wide results just weren’t there.
That’s just not the case right now. Lawrence is less accurate than ever, plain and simple. Those two or three misfires per game have turned into five or six. He’s not much different or worse when it comes to decision-making or creation ability or aggressiveness — the throws just aren’t connecting.
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Lawrence always had some weird misses, like I said, but it’s never been this bad. He’s typically hovered around an 11 percent off-target rate in other seasons, with a previous high of 12.4 percent. Those are mediocre marks, but not debilitating by any means.
The cope angle if you’re a Jaguars fan is that Lawrence’s average depth of target is much higher this year, so naturally he should be missing more throws. That’s true. Lawrence’s 10.3-yard average depth of target is nearly two yards above his previous career high. Even with degree of difficulty in mind, though, Lawrence is missing way more than he should. Lawrence currently holds a -8.5 completion percentage over expected, according to Next Gen Stats; his previous career low was -5.3 percent during that cursed rookie season under Urban Meyer.
I’m mildly concerned that Lawrence is in need of a little career rehabilitation. He is not the same player we saw peak at the end of 2022 or battle through irritating circumstances in 2023. He’s also not broken beyond repair, but there’s a level of uncertainty and shakiness to the way he plays now that was not there in years past.
Hopefully things normalize as the season goes on. Still, it’s hard to imagine the vibes around the NFL’s only winless team are going to get much better.
Can we just appreciate how ridiculous Derrick Henry is?
He is a 6-foot-4, 247-pound home-run hitter — an optical illusion at running back. Every other runner with anything close to that style of build is a bruiser, but Henry has always done his best work on the perimeter and with a runway.
Moreover, it’s a marvel Henry remains that kind of player at 30 years old with more than 2,000 NFL carries under his belt, never mind the beating he took at Alabama. The dreaded running back “cliff” should have come for Henry, but he just continues to outrun Father Time and run through opposing defenses. He looks as good as ever in Baltimore’s purple and black.
GO OFF KING
Tune in on NBC! pic.twitter.com/fJ5A4eP6on
— Baltimore Ravens (@Ravens) September 30, 2024
Henry does give the Ravens the beef between the tackles they needed in the absence of Gus Edwards, but what he offers them out in space is the real catalyst for success. Henry is currently second in explosive rushes (12-plus yards) this season with nine, per TruMedia. The only player ahead of Henry is Indianapolis Colts running back Jonathan Taylor (10 explosive runs).
Some of that explosive ability is tied to what Lamar Jackson affords a rushing offense in terms of space. The same is true of Taylor playing alongside Richardson, but Henry really is uniquely gifted in the open field for a big man. In 2024 alone, Henry has six runs on which he’s hit at least 18 MPH, per Next Gen Stats. All the players ahead of him on that list are quarterbacks (like Jayden Daniels, Kyler Murray and, of course, Jackson). It does not compute that a man as large as Henry can run with those guys.
Henry has long been doing this, too. Since entering the league in 2016, Henry has hit at least 18 MPH on 85 runs. No other player who weighs at least 240 pounds has more than 35 over that span — and it’s quarterback Cam Newton at that number. The only other running back with double digit 18-plus MPH runs over that span is Najee Harris (12).
There just isn’t another dude like Henry. He has the size and violence to ruin someone’s day with the meanest stiff arm you’ve ever seen before hitting the gas and tearing away from every other defender on the field. Henry is truly one of one, and we should appreciate how insanely cool it is that he is playing next to Jackson in Baltimore’s backfield.
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Scramble drill: Jordan Love vs. Brian Flores
Jordan Love threw three picks in a loss, but I swear he had the right idea for how to attack Brian Flores’ defense.
In theory, Love is the perfect quarterback to deal with Flores’ blitz-laden defense. He is both tough and creative in the pocket. Moreover, he throws with unwavering confidence — the kind of confidence that gets you burned as much as it does you any good. That’s the kind of mindset you need to beat a Flores defense that will send bodies, forcing you to make throws down the field and into traffic.
The problem for the Packers is that the volatility that style of defense invites got them in the first half.
.@k_grugierhill gets his hands on the INT!
📺: @NFLonCBS pic.twitter.com/iJVu45ANrt
— Minnesota Vikings (@Vikings) September 29, 2024
Love’s first interception was on a square-in to Christian Watson. The Vikings put ‘backers in the right A and B gaps, only to pop both off and drop them in coverage. Love tried to beat them with the throw coming in from the left side, but linebacker Kamu Grugier-Hill made an unreal pick in traffic.
Later in the half, Love threw another interception on another pressure. Flores put five defenders on the line, baiting Green Bay to play a man-style protection scheme. The defensive linemen over the left guard knifed inside while the edge defender took it wide, opening a huge lane for a blitzing off-ball linebacker to pop Love as he tried throwing a high-low concept. The ball tipped off his tight end’s hands right to a Vikings defender.
Love did what he had to do from then on, though. He kept throwing from tight pockets and driving the ball into contested windows, continued to bounce in and around the pocket to buy time when needed, and most of all, did not stop ripping it into all the downfield voids left open by Flores’ blitzes. He did not back down or spiral out of control the way most guys do versus Flores.
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Love finished the day 7 of 17 for 188 yards, one touchdown and one pick on throws of at least 15 yards. The completions, attempts and yards were more than any other quarterback on the week. It wasn’t perfect, by any means, but Love did the right thing by continuing to fight fire with fire, ultimately bringing the Packers close enough to put the game to an onside kick.
Teams and quarterbacks around the league should take notice of the damage Love did by playing like a psychopath in the second half. If Flores is going to call an unhinged style of defense, the quarterback has to play equally unhinged to beat it.
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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