Week 11 is rolling with some great games on this third Sunday in November. 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 …

I said it last week and I’ll say it again—this Pittsburgh Steelers team has a knack. For the second consecutive week, Mike Tomlin’s crew was in a street fight. For the second consecutive week, when it mattered most and gloves were dropped, it was Pittsburgh swinging just a little harder.

Last week, it was Minkah Fitzpatrick and Damontae Kazee stoning Zach Ertz inches short of the sticks on fourth down to close out the Washington Commanders. This week, it was a crew of players along the Pittsburgh front winning their one-on-ones, and having a pretty good idea of what might be coming, in stopping a late two-point conversion attempt by the Baltimore Ravens that would have tied it.

There were razor-thin margins in both games. The Steelers took them, as they see it, mostly because they have a bunch of guys fighting for them with a boatload of experience.

“We were just calm throughout, with the rollercoaster,” 14-year vet Cam Heyward told me. “You just learn to stay even keel. No matter if it was good or bad, you got to weather the storm, rally around each other—and understand we can still make a play. Going into that drive, we knew they were going to have to go for a two-point conversion. They scored a little quicker than we would have liked. But we felt confident in our group getting it done.”

And, as Heyward said, that confidence wasn’t shaken, even after the presumptive favorite for NFL MVP, Lamar Jackson, led the Ravens on a nine-play, 69-yard drive that ended in a 16-yard touchdown strike to Zay Flowers at the 1:06 mark of the fourth quarter. There was, indeed, another down to play, and the Steelers were ready for it.

Or, at least, they were after getting a first look at what Baltimore had coming.

“We were in a nickel, and I think they were a little confused up front with what they wanted to do—they had gone to a tackle over formation,” Heyward says. “We called a timeout. They got out of it. We went to our ’Okie’ front, which is our base front. We could see they had a tight end on the ball, two receivers (alongside him). We felt like there was going to be some type of rollout, some type of way. Just because it was a condensed formation (to our left).

“You start playing into that. We felt like it was going to be guided out that way.”

So at the snap, outside linebacker Nick Herbig burst inside receiver Nelson Agholor, and as Agholor flailed to block him, Herbig got in the way of two pulling linemen, who couldn’t get out to the edge fast enough to lead block for Jackson as a result. That left Jackson on the perimeter all alone with corner Joey Porter Jr., who held outside contain and rode Jackson to the sideline, forcing Jackson to throw the ball back to the field in desperation, hoping someone could do something with it. At that point, no one could, and that ended it.

“Nick did a pretty good job of holding it up. Joey Porter Jr falling over the top was great, and we stopped it,” Heyward says. “We were able to force them into a pretty dire situation.”

That, really, was a microcosm of how the game was played. In a rivalry game featuring two physical teams, one offense-heavy (Ravens) and the other defense-heavy (Steelers), it was defense that won the day. And from the very start.

On the second play from scrimmage, Herbig chased down Derrick Henry from behind and forced a fumble that gave the Steelers their first possession on the fringe of field goal range. The Steelers got two three-and-outs right after that, only allowing the Ravens their initial first down on the second-to-last play of the first quarter.

Of course, the plan was more complex than stop them. The key, as Pittsburgh saw it, was creating turnovers—the Steelers thought there’d be opportunities for those, and they came with Herbig’s punch out and rookie linebacker Payton Wilson’s spectacular, pivotal fourth-quarter interception—and keeping Jackson from creating with his legs, in both the run game and the pass game.

“I know we let some runs out, where he got (away),” Heyward says. “I thought we did a good job of having multiple guys, whether it was Minkah, Patrick Queen, get to the ball. There were moments where it was bend, don’t break, where we might surrender some yards, and having to deal with that monster in Derrick Henry was a big reason. But the thing that really stuck out more than anything was the turnovers.

“The turnovers were the key to the game and allowed us to control the game.”

And they gave the Steelers the margin for error they needed to win the game when it mattered most, on the two-pointer and then the following possession, where Justin Fields came into the game to help chew up what was left of the clock in relief of Russell Wilson, who is now 4–0 as starter.

After the fourth of those wins, Heyward called Pittsburgh’s quarterback room “one of the top quarterback rooms” in the NFL.

Is that true? Maybe. Maybe not.

But it’s been good enough to get this team that really seems to know what it wants to be to 8–2, and good enough to vanquish a loaded rival in mid-November. Which means it’s fair to think it might just be good enough to accomplish a whole lot more for a franchise with the highest of standards, one that hasn’t won so much as a single playoff game in eight years.

“We’re very experienced. We’ve seen the highs. We’ve seen the lows. Everybody is better because of those,” Heyward says. “When we get into those tight situations, using Mike T’s words, we don’t blink. One thing that’s been working in our advantage, we have an offense that can sustain drives. I know they didn’t get touchdowns, but they moved the ball with success. Having a good defense that gets off the field, offense that stays on the field, when we create that, it allows us to stay fresh. It allows us to perform in the fourth.”

No coincidence, then, that doing just that has become the Steelers’ specialty.

The Green Bay Packers–Chicago Bears game, in some ways, came down to coaching. And on that, we can start at the end of the Packers’ nail-biting 20–19 win over their archrivals in Chicago.

The situation: Bears’ ball, three seconds left, ball spotted at the Packers’ 28, Chicago kicker Cairo Santos on for the game-winner, with Green Bay holding on to the aforementioned one-point lead. As zero-sum a spot as you’ll get on an NFL Sunday.

But the reality was, to paraphrase the great Sun Tzu, the battle on that snap was won before it was ever fought, and won by Packers special teams coach Rich Bisaccia in particular. The veteran kicking-game guru had his field goal team armed with information. The first piece was that Santos’s trajectory on longer kicks could be low. The second was that the Chicago field goal team was susceptible to getting caved in on the interior. The latter was confirmed on Santos’s previous two field goal attempts, good from 27 and 53 yards, and an extra point.

“We saw something where we could get a great push in the middle, and we saw other teams being able to do the same,” says safety Xavier McKinney—a new Packer, who’s playing at an All-Pro level on defense and is an edge rusher on the block team—when we spoke after the game. “(They) never really corrected it or got it fixed. And I think it was a great play call by Rich. Everybody did their job. The big guys were strong in the middle, they got a great push and got their hands up.”

Play it back, and you’ll see five defensive lineman pinching inside on the two guards and the center. Karl Brooks was the one who got a hand on Santos’s kick and, rightfully, was credited with the block. But Devonte Wyatt and T.J. Slaton were bursting through, too, combining with Brooks to make up over 900 pounds of force exploiting that hole Bisaccia found.

And so it goes for a Packers team that’s 7–3, still in the thick of a hyper-competitive NFC North race, and has shown itself to be thoroughly resourceful.

We’ve been over the Matt LaFleur piece of this. The work he’s done over the last half-decade—from managing Aaron Rodgers to developing Jordan Love to adapting his offense to whoever’s in there—doesn’t get nearly the notice it should. And it’s shown up again this year in how that side of the ball performed when Love was hurt, running the ball incredibly well even when everyone knew it was coming, with Malik Willis at quarterback.

All the same, LaFleur looks like he nailed his defensive coordinator hire, too, in luring Jeff Hafley from the head coaching job at Boston College. That also showed up Sunday in how the Packers adapted on the fly to a new play-caller, in Bears interim OC Thomas Brown, without much track record to go on.

“They did some things where they were a little different,” McKinney says. “They did some quarterback reads that we weren’t really expecting.”

Which, in the end, led to the defense doing just enough on the Bears’ two fourth-quarter possessions to stem the momentum Caleb Williams was starting to build in the third quarter.

“It was just trusting our technique, trusting our DC and him putting us in the right situation to go out there and make plays, him trusting us (with) whatever we see,” McKinney says. “Going out there and playing freely, it’s been the biggest key for all of us. And we just play as a unit and we show togetherness, and no matter the situation, we’re always able to overcome anything really. All that adversity, that’s on the others, not us.”

So where Sunday wasn’t exactly a teach-tape type of game for the Packers, they had just enough, both on the field and in the coaching box, to get past a desperate rival.

Of course, it’s definitely not the first time you could say that for a LaFleur-led team.

Nor will it be the last.

I have two quarterbacking takeaways from a wild one at the Meadowlands, and it was a slugfest spinning into a shootout with revivals from both signal-callers factoring in. We can start with the obvious. Anthony Richardson played his best football, and maybe the best football of his short NFL career when it was needed most in Sunday’s 28–27 Indianapolis Colts win over the New York Jets.

He got the ball back with 13:03 left after Aaron Rodgers and the Jets had marched 59 yards in six plays to take a 24–16 lead. The Colts had been outscored 24–3 since the waning moments of the first half. Things were bleak. And their embattled QB responded.

First, it was Richardson directing an eight-play, 80-yard drive with Shane Steichen leaning hard on the 22-year-old. The quarterback finished the drive 5-of-7 for 69 yards, completed chunk throws to Michael Pittman Jr. and Alec Pierce, and capped it with a dart over the middle to slot receiver Josh Downs coming out of the backfield—on the kind of easy-money underneath throw that the staff has been working him to look for.

Then, it was responding again after the Jets used up 7:30 of the clock, drove 53 yards, and extended the lead to 27–22 with a 35-yard field goal. On the second play of Indy’s next possession, Richardson pump-faked to Downs, getting the corner to bite, and dropped a dime down the sideline to Pierce for 39 yards. The play set up his next throw, which he ripped down the seam to Downs for another 17. That got the Colts to the Jets’ 10, and two plays later, Indy went student-body left and Richardson barreled in for the game-winning score.

Now, of course, the past few weeks were tough on Richardson. The key, though, was his reaction. As I heard it, the normally mild-mannered Floridian was pissed about the Colts’ decision. It lit a fire under him. He worked his tail off to be ready for whenever his next chance might come—knowing that Steichen’s decision was simply about playing the best player. And when Joe Flacco stumbled badly last week with three interceptions in a 30–20 loss to the Buffalo Bills, that created another opportunity, and Richardson was prepared to put together the kind of day he had in Jersey.

Bottom line: The Colts made the decision to bench him three weeks ago, needing to give the rest of the team the best chance to win, and hoping that Richardson would use the circumstance the right way. He did, and maybe, just maybe, it was a turning point in his young career (though they play the Detroit Lions next week, which might make that harder to see for the rest of us in the short-term).

As for the Jets, so much of their collapse has been pinned on Aaron Rodgers, and I definitely understand that. But there’s a whole lot more to it than just that.

To me, it goes back to the decision to fire Robert Saleh in the first place. The prevailing reaction to that from the locker room was, simply, How in the world does this help us now? Six weeks later, it looks like all those players were on to something—thinking the defense was the team’s strength, and doubting that axing the architect while spreading a really good coordinator thin would help.

That the defense couldn’t stop Richardson shouldn’t surprise anyone. Over the team’s first five games, under Saleh, the Jets were allowing 17 points and 255 yards per game. Those numbers, in the six games since Jeff Ulbrich became interim coach, have grown to 26.2 and 346, respectively, proof that this is about way more than Rodgers.

And the Jets being as bad as a franchise can be is, of course, part of what created the golden opportunity Richardson had Sunday. Again, good for him seizing it.

Nick Sirianni deserves a hat tip. The Philadelphia Eagles’ coach got beat up for yelling at the fans earlier in the year, the same way he got knocked around for his introductory press conference in 2021. He was shoved on the hot seat before the season, after three consecutive playoff appearances and a trip to the Super Bowl—which would be rare just about anywhere else, even with last year’s late-season collapse factored in. He had two franchise icons retire (Jason Kelce and Fletcher Cox). He has two new coordinators this year (Kellen Moore and Vic Fangio).

The Eagles are now 8–2, and Sirianni is 42–19 as their coach.

Maybe it’s time to get off his back.

Now, I get the climate in Philly. The roster is leveraged financially to win now. The team came excruciating close two years ago—completely controlling Super Bowl LVII in the early going—before falling short. The current core is stocked with stars in their primes.

On the flip side, being in that environment isn’t for everyone, especially with a team like the one Sirianni has now. And he’s hardly melted in the Delco pressure cooker.

In fact, when that pressure was most justified, and turned up to 100 outside the building, Sirianni was at his best. The Eagles stumbled from the gate, with their first two wins coming over the Packers on an ice rink of a field in Brazil and a New Orleans Saints team that wasn’t as good as it looked at the time. Going into their Week 5 bye, they were coming off getting beaten down in Tampa, and had injuries all over the place. The new systems hadn’t taken. Jalen Hurts wasn’t playing great. The light at the end of the tunnel was dim.

So Sirianni challenged his players to reflect on the first month, both with their units and their position groups. He didn’t jam on the panic button, knowing that the Eagles didn’t play guys as much in preseason, per their normal plan of attack as an established, veteran team. He trusted Moore’s and Fangio’s well-worn schemes would take.

And the players followed him, no one more than Hurts. Hurts and Moore, I’m told, talked every day through the bye week. They went over more than two years of Hurts’s tape and bounced ideas off each other. They talked about leaning into the play-action game, given how Saquon Barkley was playing, and the receiver injuries they were dealing with.

All of it has worked. So have a lot of other things. A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith have come back. Jordan Mailata’s healthy, too. Guys such as Cam Jurgens, Jalen Carter and Jordan Davis have grown into roles to help replace Kelce and Cox on the field. And leadership, through that adversity, showed up to make up for what was lost off the field. Fangio’s defense is humming, with rookies Quinyon Mitchell and Cooper DeJean killing it in the secondary.

I don’t know whether the Eagles can beat the Lions in the NFC playoffs. But I wouldn’t rule it out and, at the very least, they should get their chance to do it. Which is more than a lot of people expected six weeks ago, before 2–2 turned into 8–2.

And while no Eagles coach is ever truly safe from the guillotine that lurks on the airwaves in that city, people there could afford to give Sirianni a little credit for all of this.

Since the college season is winding down, I took a closer look this week into what kind of year this will be to have a high pick in the draft. I knew already that it wouldn’t be a good one to need a quarterback in the draft. What I ended up finding out is that there are a lot of positions trending that way, with the all-star games now just two months away and the combine a month after that.

Here’s some more detail after my digging …

• It’s simple at quarterback: Most of the guys who needed to play well this season haven’t. Georgia’s Carson Beck and Texas’s Quinn Ewers have flattened out. Ditto for Notre Dame’s Riley Leonard, who transferred from Duke. Colorado’s Shedeur Sanders is trending toward being the first one taken, but there are questions about his ceiling. Similar questions face Ole Miss’s Jaxson Dart. Miami’s Cam Ward has had a great year, but was barely seen as draftable before the season. Alabama’s Jalen Milroe is a monster athlete—but is he a good enough passer? So maybe someone will emerge, but the picture is murky now.

• There are big names at tackle, but the scouts’ assessments of them haven’t quite matched public perception. LSU’s Will Campbell has been accepted, outside of the league, as a slam-dunk first-round tackle, and I think the first part of that is fair. He will go in the first round. Whether the second part—that he’s a tackle—is correct is a matter of opinion. Some scouts believe he belongs at guard, because of his lack of length. Meanwhile, Texas’s Kelvin Banks Jr. had a really rough go against Georgia and has been up-and-down all year, and Ohio State’s Josh Simmons showed a ton of promise, but tore his patellar tendon and won’t be ready until the summer. So I don’t know that there’s a truly elite left tackle prospect in the class.

• The top defensive guys all have questions. Georgia edge Mykel Williams might have the best NFL-translatable traits of any player in the draft, but he’s been banged up. LSU linebacker Harold Perkins Jr., like Simmons, lost his season to a serious knee injury. Another Georgia defender, Jalon Walker, has flashed Micah Parson–type versatility to play on and off the ball, and is wildly athletic. Penn State edge Abdul Carter has that sort of skill set, too, having played off the ball the past two years, before moving to DE full-time this year. But for both, there are questions on how they’ll fit certain defenses in the pros.

• Maybe the cleanest prospect to look at will be Arizona WR Tetairoa McMillan, who’s been a monster. He had 90 catches, 1,400 yards and 10 TDs as a sophomore, and he’ll wind up in that neighborhood again this year. He’s big, athletic and consistent. His ability to separate at the next level is one question he’ll have to combat. If you take position value out of the equation, Boise State RB Ashton Jeanty may be as safe a take as McMillan.

• Then, there’s two-way player Travis Hunter, who’ll be the draft’s most interesting player. No one denies how remarkable it is what he’s doing. The question is what he’ll be in the NFL—it’s hard to imagine he’ll be able to carry close to the workload he’s had at Colorado. So then the question becomes whether he’ll be a corner or receiver, and whether he’s good enough at either, in a vacuum, to be a top-five pick. Obviously, Hunter’s going to go high. How high will likely ride on how teams answer those questions.

• I haven’t asked around enough on him yet, but I love Penn State TE Tyler Warren.

So that’s where we are, in a nutshell, if you’re in the process of giving up on your team’s season. Sorry I couldn’t paint a prettier picture of it, for you.