Working through Week 8, with the midpoint of the season now approaching. As we’ve been doing all season, we’ll publish the takeaways Sunday and update them live through Monday morning. So come back again if not all 10 are here yet …

The Washington Commanders’ Hail Mary wasn’t all luck. But it is a pretty good symbol of how many things have gone right for D.C.’s once-embattled football franchise over the first eight weeks of the 2024 season—mostly because plenty of things had to for that play to work.

In fact, really, the only thing simple about it was the name OC Kliff Kingsbury gave the call.

Hail Mary. Or, as one Commanders coach joked via text Sunday night, Hail F—ING Mary.

It was, to be clear, Washington’s conventional call for such a play. No real tricks. Just rules on where players were to wind up to make this sort of prayer come true. Everyone involved knew it was a long shot, as rookie phenom Jayden Daniels approached the line of scrimmage with two seconds remaining and his team trailing the Chicago Bears, 15–12.

“You have a jumper in the middle, then three guys looking for the tip—one in the front, two in the back,” says veteran receiver Noah Brown, one of the former Cowboys that Dan Quinn brought with him from Dallas in the offseason. “I happened to be in the back.”

It was from there that Brown made a miracle happen for the coach he followed from the Dallas Cowboys in Washington’s 18–15 win. But before all that, a lot of other things had to fall into place, starting with the guy who’d throw the ball to him even being available for the game.

Daniels sustained a rib injury in the Commanders’ Week 7 rout of the Carolina Panthers, and his status for the game against the Bears (and his showdown with the one player taken ahead of him in April’s draft) was up in the air all the way into the hours before kickoff. The quarterback sat out practice Wednesday, then participated in the Thursday walkthrough. On Friday, Daniels felt good enough to go, so Quinn wanted to push him to test his limits with his injured ribs.

“Can he get outside the pocket? Can he throw on the run? Can he throw across his body? We really pushed it,” Quinn told me over the phone after the game. “We pushed him to see how he’d respond.”

Daniels told his coaches on Saturday, ahead of the team’s walkthrough, that he felt fine. So he went through that walkthrough—“just easy moving around,” per Quinn—and everyone had their fingers crossed he’d wake up and feel good again Sunday morning. The final test came during normal warmups at the stadium in the afternoon. But that just confirmed, after Friday’s tests that he was still good.

“(Friday) wasn’t a scripted-play day, it was, Could he get off track and could he avoid and protect himself?” Quinn says. “Those were the things that we looked at. Went through the whole process and told him, If you don’t look like you, I’m going to pull you. I wanted to make sure he knew that it had to be him. He did a fantastic job.”

Physically, Daniels was there. Performance-wise, though, it wasn’t all the same. The Commanders moved the ball but stalled three times in the red zone in the first half. The only points in the second half, prior to the Hail Mary, came on a long field goal after Washington got the ball on a short field.

So the defense needed to come to play to make that last play possible, and it did.

Eventually, the Bears started to move the ball. D’Andre Swift ran for a 56-yard touchdown. And after one long drive was short-circuited by the Bears calling the William “the Refrigerator” Perry goal-line run back from the mid-1980s—the exchange between Caleb Williams and backup center Doug Kramer was fumbled and lost at the 1—Williams drove the Bears for the go-ahead points near the end of the fourth quarter.

After a well-placed kickoff forced a return, the Commanders’ offense trotted out with 19 seconds left, the ball at Washington’s own 24 and hope in short supply.

The initial hope was to get a chunk play, call the team’s last timeout, then run a sideline route to set up a game-tying field goal. But Daniels’s first throw, deep over the middle to Zach Ertz, fell incomplete with 12 seconds left. Which shifted the plan to a simpler one—get the ball into range to throw the Hail Mary. So Daniels threw again to Ertz, this time for 11 yards, then called the timeout. After that, he found Terry McLaurin for 13, and McLaurin quickly got out of bounds at Washington’s 48-yard line with those two seconds to spare.

“That’s the one you need,” Quinn says. “If we don’t get that play to him, then we’re out of gas.”

But they did, and in went the call, Hail Mary.

At the snap, Brown flew down the field and worked, as Daniels bought time, to get behind the defense. His normal landmark—“the top of the letters in the end zone, you get yourself some space, so that if the ball does fall back like that that you’re not out of bounds”—would change a bit, because the throw was short. But as the crowd gathered around Ertz, the jumper on the play, Brown got himself about five yards back and, to his surprise, he was alone.

“I just got into the end zone, tried to box my defender out, keep him behind me,” he says. “He ended up in front of me, but so did Zach.”

Chicago’s Tyrique Stevenson went to bat the ball away. Instead, Ertz batted it back. You know the rest.

“The biggest key, when you go back to watch it, it’s Zach Ertz tipping it,” Quinn says. “And it’s so hard to catch. (Ertz) was the one that went up to knock it up, and then it went behind to Noah. There’s a reason they don’t work very well, and a reason it’s called Hail Mary. The fact that Zach was able to get a hand on it to keep it alive, I thought that was the real key. Jayden did a good job of buying time.

“Some people all-out blitz it. Some people rush three and drop everybody back. The whole key is it’s got to get into the end zone by tip or by the throw. Jayden did a good job of buying time. Nick Allegretti might have strained to make a block at the end to give himself a chance to throw it. It was wild.”

For Quinn, it was historic, too. He mentioned how hard it is to complete a Hail Mary. He knows, because he’s never been on either side of one in a game. Brown told me he hadn’t, either. Kingsbury has—he was the Arizona Cardinals’ coach for the 2020 Hail Murray—but there were plenty more on the Commanders’ sideline like Quinn and Brown.

And for the record, while Jim Nantz and Tony Romo wondered on the broadcast whether Daniels’s rib injury would allow him to make that throw (they suggested that the Commanders could bring in Marcus Mariotta for the heave), Quinn had no doubt. During that Friday workout, he said, “he ripped one 60-something yards.”

So he knew Daniels would get the ball where it needed to go.

Of course, the chances it’d land in a Commanders player’s hands in the end zone was always a long shot. Then again, for even the most ardent believers of Quinn and new GM Adam Peters, so too was the idea Washington would contend in those guys’ first year. Or at least it was to those who weren’t in that building.

“I’m not surprised,” Brown says. “I know what happens when you put in hard work. I know what it looks like. We have all the ingredients to do that here. We have all the guys who come in and work day in and day out. As long as we continue to do that, the success will continue.”

On Sunday, it did in a most unconventional way.

Luck was part of it, of course. It just wasn’t the only part of it.

The Cleveland Browns’ players, so you know, see Jameis Winston the same way you do. Receiver Cedric Tillman, one of the heroes of Sunday’s upset win over the Baltimore Ravens, said as much over the phone after the game, describing his own reaction to Cleveland’s new quarterback’s quick-to-go-viral pregame speech.

“I’m not gonna lie,” Tillman says, “I was laughing a little.”

It was easy to laugh afterward, too, given the day the Browns just had, and what Winston brought to them in spades—a palpable energy that everyone could feel.

The stories coming back from Browns 29, Ravens 24, of course, will lead to bigger-picture questions (we’ll get to those, too) about how Cleveland looked, again, without Deshaun Watson. But in the moment, the players involved were going to be careful, and Tillman was, about elevating one teammate at the expense of another. And the truth is just the surface part of Sunday’s story, a 1–6 team improbably upending a powerhouse, was good enough.

That’s especially true with the way it ended because it sure looked like Baltimore, in the waning moments of the fourth quarter, had finally delivered the dagger to kill off the underdog with a six-play, 91-yard drive featuring three plays of 20-plus yards. Derrick Henry’s two-yard touchdown run made it 24–23 with 2:36 left. Lots of punches had been thrown by both sides at that point. It wouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone to see the mighty Ravens deliver the knockout blow right there.

Instead, Winston quickly moved the ball downfield. Tillman for 12. Jerry Jeudy for 11. Elijah Moore for seven on third-and-7. And then, after a penalty, on a second-and-15 from the Ravens’ 38, it was the Browns swinging, rather than absorbing.

“They went to a man look,” Tillman says. “We had a dagger concept, kind of left me on the safety going across the field. I just tried to get open, and Jameis made a great throw.”

The rest is history. 

The 38-yard touchdown put Winston at 334 yards and pushed his passer rating to 115.3. And a Browns team that won 11 games starting five different quarterbacks a year ago had reason to believe again.

Of course, the elephant in the room is there, too. The Browns looked crisper, more explosive and more efficient in one game with Winston than they have in the previous seven with Watson. And after Joe Flacco played the way he did last year leading the team’s late-season surge, a lot of people will be convinced now—and it’s a fair thought, for sure—that Watson is the problem, not the solution, and is weighing the team down with a contract the franchise can’t get out of.

But this week, the Browns’ focus was on Winston, who just a week ago had to deal with being demoted, for game-plan reasons, to third string. How he handled it was another reason why the players rallied so hard behind him. Among other reasons.

“I’ve been saying it, Jameis has been the same guy week in and week out, no matter what his role on the team was,” Tillman says. “Jameis has been talking about when the opportunity comes, we all got to be locked in.”

Winston was, from the very start, with a speech that amused—and did inspire, too.

“We just always got to listen to the message,” Tillman continues. “Yeah, it can be a little funny, but the message of this team is important. He brings that energy.”

And the Browns responded in a way they haven’t in a while.

The Cardinals are tied for first in the NFC West and deserve your attention. There were signs this could happen last year—and in particular in a late-season road win that wounded a spiraling Philadelphia Eagles team headed for the playoffs. There is talent, too.

The question, then, was when the competitive losses would become wins.

Answer: The past six days. On the heels of a 17–15 Monday-night win over the Los Angeles Chargers that came down to a buzzer-beating, game-winning field goal from Chad Ryland, the Cardinals one-upped themselves in a short-week game staged at 10 a.m. Pacific Time on the other side of the country. They did it against a desperate Miami Dolphins team getting the lift of Tua Tagovailoa’s return. They did it even though the Dolphins led 27–18 with less than 10 minutes left.

This 28–27 win in South Florida was more than just the case of the Cardinals winning a game. It was showing that a very young team now is learning how to win.

“I think we’re just staying together, believing in the plan that we have and the guys in the huddle,” one of the game’s stars, third-year tight end Trey McBride, said afterward. “We know that we’re going to fight until the very end. We’re going to give it everything we got until the game’s over. That’s exactly what we did.”

In doing so, and putting together an eight-play, 70-yard touchdown drive; then a 13-play, 73-yard march to set up another Ryland buzzer-beater, the Cardinals proved a few things.

The first was that Kyler Murray has really grown up. He doesn’t stay back in Texas for the offseason program anymore, and it seems, to those in the building at least, like he took the criticism on his work ethic (you’ve heard the Call of Duty jokes) to heart. Second-year coach Jonathan Gannon’s staff hasn’t seen that guy—they’ve seen one who won very big in high school and college, and sure seems determined to do it again in the pros.

“The guy’s a great leader,” McBride says. “He’s an elite athlete, a guy who’s had a lot of success in his life. Heisman winner. The guy’s a freak. Just to have him on our team, to know that he can extend plays at any time, he’s been great. This year has been awesome. He’s bringing everybody around, leading the team the right way. I love the guy. I’m willing to go to war with him every week. He’s my quarterback. … I’m very proud of him.”

Then, there’s his budding No. 1 receiver—who’s proving the Cardinals right on how they used the No. 4 pick in the draft.

Marvin Harrison Jr.’s stat line (six catches, 111 yards and a TD) doesn’t fully explain how important the reigning Biletnikoff Award winner was to the Cardinals on Sunday. On the touchdown drive, he tracked down a wayward Murray throw to pick up 16 yards on third-and-4. On the game-winning drive, he converted second-and-15 with an 18-yard catch, made over the middle, while getting crunched between two Dolphin DBs. And that was after he toasted Jalen Ramsey for a touchdown earlier in the game.

“The confidence in Marvin is through the roof,” McBride says. “He’s such a great player, great pro. Kyler has that confidence in him, I think the whole team does as well. What a great opportunity for him to have that big catch in the corner of the end zone and then help us march down to win the game. I’m just so proud of him.”

So McBride is proud of Murray, just as he’s proud of Harrison—and, really, the whole operation, which is the other piece of this.

Being able to grind out wins like these in succession shows the young core starting to grow up and figure it out. It doesn’t mean the Cardinals are suddenly any sort of favorite in the NFC West. But when they landed back in Phoenix late Sunday night, they did so in a tie with the Seattle Seahawks for first in a tight division race (and the San Francisco 49ers joined those two teams at 4–4 on Sunday Night Football). And based on the youth of the roster, and the number of young players being counted on, the Cardinals should keep getting better from here.

At the very least, that’s how they see it playing out.

“We just have a belief in our coaches, belief in our team,” McBride says. “Second year with this staff, the offense is coming a little easier, coming a little quicker to everybody. Most importantly, I think guys are believing in what we’re doing here, believing in our plan. J.G. and (GM) Monti (Ossenfort) have done a great job of building a great team.”

And maybe the Cardinals aren’t there, as a great team, yet.

But they’re absolutely on the way up.

Jerod Mayo passed a significant test Sunday. A lot was made of the New England Patriots coach’s comments after an ugly loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars in London. Mayo called his team soft. It wouldn’t be a run-of-the-mill comment for any coach, let alone a first-year head coach, or one who didn’t provide some “gotta coach it better” qualifier beforehand.

To me, from there, two things were relevant.

The first was what Mayo had said to his players privately. I was told, after doing some digging, that Mayo’s address to the guys after the Jacksonville loss struck the same chord as the postgame presser. In other words, he called them out for a lack of physicality in the game that was disturbing for a staff trying to build a hard-edged program. The second would be how the team would respond.

And we have our answer to that now. The Patriots took it to the New York Jets—over and over again Sunday—eventually putting together a 12-play, 70-yard drive, capped by Rhamondre Stevenson scoring on fourth-and-goal from the 1 with 22 seconds left in a 25–22 win. They survived a quarterback injury. They got a stop on a two-point conversion (with an assist from the Jets’ coaches) that proved pivotal. They looked, well, not-so soft after all.

“You just take it and you essentially have to prove him wrong,” says backup quarterback Jacoby Brissett, who came in for a concussed Drake Maye. “I think the guys, throughout the week of preparation, went out and responded the right way. Today was the fruit of the labor. Hearing that, nobody wants to be called that, especially as a team.”

Now, Mayo did walk his comment back a bit last Monday, a day after he first fired the salvo.

But by then, the damage had been done. And the critics—including Mayo’s legendary predecessor, Bill Belichick—were circling. As such, the Patriots’ response would be scrutinized, with a desperate Jets team that routed New England in September coming in.

Then, Maye was taken to the locker room to be evaluated for a head injury. And by the time Brissett, benched two weeks ago, entered the game, the Jets were up 13–7.

So this team trying to prove its coach wrong was being led by a player trying to do the same.

“I’ve been in this league for a while, and I understand how fast this league works,” Brissett says. “It’s being ready to go at any moment’s notice. When these opportunities come up, it’s even better when you can go out there and, I don’t want to say prove people wrong, but I would say prove yourself right.”

Brissett did the rest of the afternoon, and did so despite his receivers dropping balls left and right. He, like his team, hung in there, and had the wherewithal to make his biggest plays when it mattered most, on the drive to win the game. First, there was a 14-yard scramble to convert third-and-9. Then, he made a courageous throw for 34 yards to Kayshon Boutte, one of the guys who’d battled drops, made while taking a massive hit.

“The safety came—he’s not paying attention to the X (receiver), he’s thinking that we’re going to throw the ball over the middle of the field based on his game-film-watching,” Brissett says. “Boutte just did the rest. I thought I underthrew it a little bit, but Boute made a hell of a play and went up and came down to the ground and caught it. I didn’t think I was going to get hit, but I did. He did the hard work.”

And after that came the straight-forward gap run to win the game on fourth down, a call that’ll test a team’s, and its opponent’s, toughness in a very real way. Consider that test passed now, and Mayo’s questions answered. “(That run is) a testament to this team and what we’re trying to build,” Brissett says. “That was a great tool to build off of and for guys to learn about the culture that we’re trying to set here and the team we’re trying to build.”

It also showed, in a pretty real way, that the Patriots are tuned into what Mayo’s saying.

Which, in the end, is the most important part. Mayo took a lot of shots last week, from a lot of places. His players, who took a shot of Mayo’s own, had his back all the way through.

“I don’t know what Bill said, that’s between them two,” Brissett says. “The guys wanted to come out here and respond. We’re not coming out here to lose. We’re trying to win. Things haven’t gone our way the last couple weeks. I think today was a testament of what we’ve been building.”

And, perhaps, a bit of a turning point for Mayo, as the new boss in Foxborough.

It sure feels like the Detroit Lions are the best team in the NFL, and my favorite set of stats this season really explains why. Last week in the space, for transparency’s sake, I advocated for Jared Goff to be a real MVP candidate. This week? He played well again … but the Lions didn’t exactly ask him to do a ton of heavy lifting.

The numbers tell the story.

• The Lions had 61 net yards passing and scored 52 points.

• When Goff took his first snap of the second half, Detroit had nine net yards passing and 42 points. At that point, Goff had a 118.8 passer rating.

• In the first half, the Lions had three touchdown passes on nine pass attempts (two from Goff, one from David Montgomery).

So some might look at that and see an indictment on Goff, even if he was super-efficient with what Detroit needed from him. I’d take the opposite view—that Sunday’s 52–14 beatdown of a bad Tennessee Titans team was a vivid display of exactly how complete Detroit is. And running through how the Lions scored all those points shows it.

The first touchdown was scored on a short field generated by a pick. The second came on a 70-yard Jahmyr Gibbs run. A 72-yard kickoff return gave the Lions another short field for the third touchdown. The fourth, like the first, was set up by an interception putting the offense deep in Tennessee territory. The fifth came with a long punt return setting up a short field. The sixth was a punt return touchdown. The seventh was a short field created by a forced and recovered fumble.

A field goal that capped the scoring at the end of the third quarter actually came off the closest thing the Lions had to a sustained drive—they went 48 yards in eight plays to set up Jake Bates’s 51-yard field goal.

So if you’re scoring at home, the defense set up two scores with picks and another off a fumble. The special teams set up two more with kick and punt returns, then scored another on its own with a punt return. And the run game, which finished up with 164 yards, hit a home run, too.

That, folks, is damn impressive.

(Yes, Goff is still an MVP candidate. He did, after all this, finish 12-of-15 for three touchdowns and a 129.9 passer rating.)

The New York Jets’ season isn’t over, but it sure is teetering. To me, the most damning, and least excusable, moment of a very ugly loss came after New York scored its final points of the day—when Braelon Allen barreled in on second-and-goal from the 2 with 2:57 left. It put the Jets up 22–17, and in the obvious spot where they’d have to go for two and try to push the lead to seven.

The offense stayed on the field. With around five seconds left on the play clock, it became clear Aaron Rodgers and the other 10 guys in the huddle wouldn’t be able to get the snap off. Rather than call a timeout, Jets coach Jeff Ulbrich let the clock expire. A flag was thrown.

From there, Rodgers threw a slant to Mike Williams from the 7, he was tackled inside the 5, and that opened the door for the Patriots to go win the game outright in regulation.

To me, the lack of readiness of the offense to go for two, and of the coaching staff to manage the situation correctly, was mind-blowing. It showed a staff that’s struggling in the aftermath of losing its leader, Robert Saleh, and having to shift roles around and assimilate new pieces such as Davante Adams and Haason Reddick over the past few weeks.

It’s also, to me, indicative of a franchise that seems to be wildly pulling levers in search of some sort of fix for everything that’s wrong. First, it was the firing of Saleh that the locker room was confused by—with the players feeling like losing him would stretch the staff thin and hurt a defense that was the strength of the team. Second, it was going the extra mile to land Adams before the Pittsburgh Steelers game, despite the fact that the Jets didn’t have an offer on the table for him, period, before Saleh was fired

So now that those fixes have failed … what’s next?

The 6–2 Houston Texans are next on the schedule. Houston will come to the Meadowlands on Thursday with a chance to put the Jets’ season on life support. If it’s not there already.

The Minnesota Vikings, now 5–2 and riding a two-game losing streak, are in a fascinating spot. To be clear, I still really love where they are from a building standpoint, and their trajectory for the rest of this year. The Vikings get the Indianapolis Colts, Jacksonville Jaguars and Tennessee Titans the next three weeks before what is shaping up to be a pivotal NFC North showdown in Chicago just before Thanksgiving.

That said, the fallout from Thursday’s loss to the Los Angeles Rams should test the team in some pretty interesting ways.

• The left tackle situation isn’t great after Christian Darrisaw tore his ACL and MCL. He was playing Pro Bowl–level ball, and justifying the contract he got in the offseason—and the drop-off going to David Quessenberry in the second half was obvious (Minnesota rushed for 20 yards on 10 carries after the break, and Sam Darnold was under constant duress).

As bad as the injury is (spare me the takes on kneeling out the first half, because it’s football, and things happen), Darrisaw is 25 and it’s fair to think he’ll be able to return to form next year. So, it’s not like there’s a long-range issue here that calls for the Vikings to do something drastic. But bringing in an experienced hand such as D.J. Humphries, David Bakhtiari or Charles Leno Jr. might make sense. They could also look at moving right tackle Brian O’Neill, the bedrock of the line, to left tackle or shifting Blake Brandel from left guard to tackle.

The bottom line: While Darrisaw isn’t the team’s best player (that’s the guy who wears No. 18), he may well be its most irreplaceable one.

• The future at quarterback is still TBD.

For the most part, Darnold played pretty well in his Southern California homecoming before the Rams’ defensive front took over late after the Darrisaw injury. And he’s been consistent, and proven to be a good fit for the Vikings’ offense. As for what that means going forward, Kevin O’Connell has addressed the elephant in the room, and told Darnold to worry about having a good day, a good practice, a good game. After that, they’d all address what would be a very good problem down the line.

Meanwhile, rookie first-rounder J.J. McCarthy was part of the team’s traveling party for the first time. He went out to dinner in L.A. with the quarterbacks Wednesday night and was on the headset on the sideline Thursday night. He’ll be with the team going forward, but most of his focus is still on rehab. He’s building strength back now and isn’t yet at the point where it’s 50-50 rehab-to-football work, but he’s getting there.

McCarthy’s done a lot of rehab while his teammates are on the practice field, has participated in meetings and has a one-on-one meeting once a week with O’Connell.

• The defense has taken it on the chin a little the past couple of weeks against the Lions and Rams, and it’ll be interesting to see the response there from a group that has some aging pieces (Harrison Smith, Stephon Gilmore), whose experience helps to enable the complex scheme Brian Flores is running. Whether those guys need to be paced a bit to make it through the year remains to be seen.

The Rams’ offense took center stage Thursday night, but the defense should take a bow for the way it played. And, to be clear, I’m not saying Cooper Kupp, Puka Nacua, Kyren Williams or (certainly) Matthew Stafford shouldn’t be on that stage—they all did their part in what could be a season-shifting win over the Vikings.

I just don’t think folks should miss the job that Chris Shula is doing with the defense.

The 38-year-old is one of the few remaining coaches from Sean McVay’s original staff, brought over from the Chargers in 2017 by his old college buddy who was getting a shot to run his own ship. Because of that tight relationship, and Shula’s last name, McVay knew his close friend would have to earn any promotion he was given. So while McVay went and got Brandon Staley to replace Wade Phillips in ’20, and Raheem Morris to replace Staley the year after, Shula kept chipping away.

That’s why, in January, McVay pushed back against the idea that Shula had simply waited his turn the past seven years—knowing he’d really earned it.

And that’s shown up the past couple of weeks. Shula’s adjusted to playing out of more five-man fronts. He’s also gotten consistent improvement from the fleet of young guys the team has up front (Jared Verse, Braden Fiske, Byron Young), and great play from complementary pieces like Michael Hoecht. Verse has been disruptive from the jump as a rookie, and has gotten even more effective of late by playing within the structure of the defense, which highlights his shades-of-Terrell-Suggs skill set.

All of it, of course, is a nice complement to what Los Angeles is doing on offense with the aforementioned stars. The Seahawks are up next. There’s hope the offensive line will have both Steve Avila and Jonah Jackson back to take on the Dolphins in Week 10.

Perhaps it’ll be enough to make the team shift its team-building strategy a bit. Over the past week, the Rams took calls on Kupp and told teams it’d take more than what the Las Vegas Raiders got for Davante Adams to pry the franchise icon away. Now? It may be even tougher for the Rams to let Kupp go, which is a tribute to how the group is coming along on offense and defense.