First Take

Thirty-five to seven, in Jacksonville, by a football team that opened plus nine and a half. Our control room has told me this is the first block and the third block and they are thinking about the fifth. Stephen A., they gave you the ball.

Holla at your boys! And Shae, before I say the other thing I want to hand Cleveland what Cleveland earned, because I have never been a man who takes a thing off somebody who went and got it. Thirty-five points on the road. They punted one time. One time. They did not turn that football over. Eleven third downs and they got eight of them. That running back went fifteen carries for ninety-six and he was not being tackled by the first man. That is a professional football afternoon and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But here is my problem. My problem is not in Cleveland, Ohio. My problem is in Duval County, Florida.

Here we go.

Now let me get to the Jacksonville Jaguars, and I am going to speak to them directly. You won thirteen football games last season. Thirteen! You are the champions of that division. You led this league against the run. And you came out in your own building, in front of a crowd that paid money to look at you, and you gained two hundred and eighteen yards of offense. Two hundred and eighteen. Ten first downs. Sixty-five yards rushing on twenty-three carries, which is not a running game, that is a grown man falling down twenty-three consecutive times on national television. And Trevor Lawrence goes fifteen for twenty, a hundred and sixty-two yards, and hands one to Cleveland in his own end zone. That is a football team that had somewhere else to be. I have been watching Septembers in this league for a long time.

Yeah, so — I’ve got two of these and I care about the second one a lot more, and I will probably forget the first one, so hold me to it. First one is I’m not ready to call Jacksonville a fraud on September the fourteenth. I have sat in the room on the Monday after that game, on the losing side, and it does not look like people at home think it looks like. It’s quiet. You put the third-down cutups up and the room counts. Liam Coen is counting the same number I’m counting, four for ten one way and eight for eleven the other way, and whatever anybody wants to say about heat or effort, that number ate their afternoon.

Four for ten at home.

At home. Now the second thing — no, Shae’s going to want the second thing in the third one, so I’ll sit on it.

I’m going to want it in the third one.

I’ll sit on it.

Can I say the boring one? A hundred and something degrees, one o’clock kickoff, no wind. I have played that game in that stadium in that month, and what happens is at some point in the second quarter you stop thinking about football and you start doing arithmetic. You’re counting how many more times you have to get down in a stance. And Cleveland had the ball damn near the whole day, so that Jacksonville defense never came off the grass. Never came off. Then it’s twenty-one to seven and there is a lot of quarter left.

That is an excuse, Marcus.

It’s the weather.

It was the same hundred degrees on both sidelines!

One of ‘em was sitting down.

Three touchdowns for Harold Fannin Jr. yesterday, and I’d like one person at this desk to look at that before we all go back to Florida.

Forty-eight yards and three scores. That’s a man they’ve decided about inside the ten. You can see that on a call sheet before you ever see it on a Sunday.

Second-year tight end, and that’s a trust thing more than it’s a talent thing. Somebody over there put his name next to the goal line back in June.

And I am happy for the young man! I am. Now, and this has got nothing to do with anything — there is a man on the fourth floor of this network who had Jacksonville minus nine and a half, and he has not opened his door since three-thirty yesterday. I knocked twice. I heard a chair move.

Stephen A.

I’m coming back to it, Shae, because a thirteen-win football team in the state of Florida gave up thirty-five points at home in week one, and the next two hours are downstream of that. You want to talk about the quarterback in Cleveland, we’ll talk about the quarterback in Cleveland. But we’re talking about him against that.

That’s next, and Skip and Mina are in for it. Later on, a quarterback in Denver put up four hundred and sixty-six passing yards and lost the football game by a single point, and that is not the strangest number on his line.

Skip.

Twenty of twenty-four. I want to stay there, because I don’t think this table has stayed there. Twenty of twenty-four means four footballs hit the ground all afternoon. Four. On the road, opening weekend, a hundred degrees, twenty-four years old, and he had never once taken the first snap of a season in his life. Somebody at this desk go and get me those four. All summer long I was told by people at this network, on the phone, in the hallway, in the makeup chair, that I had lost my mind on this young man. So I am not softening it this morning. I am going further than I went in July. That is a franchise quarterback, he has been one since the day Cleveland drafted him, and yesterday did not surprise me by one yard.

Mina, you’ve been writing.

The case against him is being made badly this morning and I’d like to make it properly, because the people making it are owed that much. It isn’t that he can’t complete a football. Last year he made seven starts. Seven touchdowns, ten interceptions, a Total QBR of 18.9, which is fifth from the bottom of the six hundred and ninety-six qualifying seasons this network keeps on file. That’s not a bad afternoon. That’s four hundred and something snaps of a young quarterback playing badly, and a person who watched all of it and came away thinking he isn’t a starter in this league is not a crank. One Sunday does not delete four hundred snaps.

Behind who? Mina. Behind who.

And there’s the other side of it and I was about to make it for you, so let me. The line he played behind last year is not the line that was out there yesterday. Three of those five men were somewhere else in December. So the honest position is that he was supposed to be unable to do this — take a road opener, play on time, hand it back to his defense with nothing on it — and he did it at eighty-three percent, and on one snap they went and asked for something else entirely and he put a fifty-five-yard ball on a receiver off a third-and-short. I can’t get either one of those to knock the other one down. Twenty-four attempts is what we have.

Twenty-four attempts against two hundred and eighteen yards of opposition.

That’s the other half of it, yes.

Oh, so now the throws are worth less because of who caught them?

No! No, no, no, no. Skip. To be fair to that young man — and I have been fair to him since the first week he walked into that mess — he was terrific yesterday. Shedeur, if you’re watching this morning, and I know you are, because that family watches everything — you were terrific and you go enjoy your Monday. However. The football team you did it against did not want to be out there.

You watched a different game than I watched.

I watched every snap of it twice.

Then you watched it twice and came back here to tell me about the other team both times.

Can I do the sacks? Because I don’t hear either side of this touching them. He went down four times in a game his team was ahead in for fifty minutes, and one of those was a grounding. On the scoreboard that’s a rounding error. On the tape it is not, because it is the same thing that showed up across those seven starts, and you can’t hand all four of them to the guards.

Fine. I’ll take the four sacks. Give me the four sacks and keep the two hundred and seventy-five yards, that is a trade I will make on any Sunday of my life, and I’ll tell you the other thing while we’re here, since Stephen A. brought up Trevor Lawrence —

Here it comes.

— fifteen completions. At home. With his whole season in front of him and a football handed to the other team. I have been told that man was the answer in that town every year since he was a teenager. Two quarterbacks played in that stadium yesterday and one of them shouldn’t have been drafted, according to thirty-two football teams. THE WRONG MAN HAS BEEN GETTING THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT IN THIS SPORT FOR FIVE YEARS.

Trevor had a bad day, Skip.

He has had a lot of them.

Our replies have been one thing since about four o’clock yesterday and it is not subtle. Mina, you’ve had the same.

Eleven thousand of them and they are extremely organized. And a lot of those people have been right in public for two years about things they said would happen to him, which is more than most of us can say about anything.

Thank you.

It doesn’t make the twenty-four attempts into forty.

One more thing, and I have been sitting on it since the graphic went up. Harold Fannin. Four catches, forty-eight yards, two of them in the end zone, then he runs one in from a yard, and on the third one he holds it out for the nearest official and jogs off like it is a Tuesday in June. Twenty-two years old. I loved that. I have watched grown men put on three minutes of theater after a touchdown while they were down four scores. That kid handed it over and left.

Third one and he don’t even look up.

He does not.

Mina’s leaving us, she’s on NFL Live tonight, thank you. When we come back we get to the head coach, and I have kept a man waiting twenty minutes for it.

Before anybody says a word, roll it, because half of America has already seen it and the other half has seen it twice.

The man threw his headset on the ground.

He didn’t throw it, it came off.

It came off because he went up. Shae, the head coach of a National Football League team left the ground on a third-and-two in the second quarter of week one. And somebody in a polo shirt had to bend down and pick that thing up off the grass in the middle of a football game, and we are sitting here talking about a fifty-five-yard throw.

Marcus.

I want that man’s name.

Can we do the football?

Louis. That second thing has been sitting there for an hour and ten minutes.

Yeah. Okay. So — I watched the whole thing twice and I want to start somewhere else than where this has been going all morning. There is real football on that tape. The ninth pick, the tackle they took against every board that got published, drew Hines-Allen all afternoon, and I did not write a thing down about him, and that is the compliment. The rookie receiver caught six on six for a hundred and nineteen. The back went six-four a carry. Delpit’s in the big slot doing a job he has not been asked to do before and he had nine tackles out of it. Four football players.

And?

And every one of those four is a February decision and an April decision. That’s a personnel department having a very good spring, and I am not taking a bit of it off him, because most people are bad at that job. But it was already done before anybody got on a plane to Florida. Now, so — okay, look. Hand me the coaching column from yesterday. It’s two fourth downs he didn’t get, four sacks his quarterback took while they were in front the whole way, and a second quarter where the coverage got beaten twice on the same picture, which the man said himself at the podium. Read that column back to me.

Mm.

And I have been trying to get people to hear this since January, so I’ll say it slow. A man can be a very good evaluator of football players. Better than the people doing it in some of these places. And that same man can be the wrong man standing on that sideline on a Thursday night in November, left tackle out, best rusher hurt, fourteen degrees, twenty-two seconds and a timeout and eleven guys looking at him, and not one person in that headset is allowed to tell him no. Those are two different jobs. They have always been two different jobs. I spent nine years in that league and another fifteen in those buildings trying to get one of these chairs, and a four-touchdown afternoon in Duval County in September doesn’t say a word about the second one.

Skip, that’s yours if you want it.

I don’t want it. I’m not doing the coach today. The coach did not throw the football yesterday.

Marcus.

Nah, Lou’s right. I ain’t got nothing for that.

I’ll go further than Louis went, and then the money, which has not come up once this morning. He might be an outstanding evaluator. He might! I said that in January and I’ll say it in September, and I have no problem with the young man personally. My issue is with the family that hired him and the people who put that roster in that condition. And here is what I want the folks at home to understand on a morning when Cleveland is feeling good. They won by twenty-eight yesterday and the cap sheet in that place reads the same way it read Saturday. A hundred and seventeen point six, for a man who is not in that building, and it will still be sitting there in December when they are trying to sign a guard.

They need one.

They need two!

Interior was a problem in a game they won by four touchdowns. A blowout hides all of that, and then you go to Tampa and Vita Vea is in your center’s lap on the first snap.

The Steelers got beaten thirty to three in their own place with the cornerback Cleveland sold them, and I am told Cleveland has been insufferable about it for eighteen hours.

They’ve earned one day. One.

Can I come back to something? Mina said a thing before she left and I let it go and I shouldn’t have. I have never once heard a soul in this business complain that a quarterback didn’t have to throw it forty times. That is the thing you want. And when Cleveland lose one in October and he throws it thirty-eight times for two hundred and ten yards, the same people will tell me the volume proves he can’t play. I have been listening to that trick for thirty-five years.

That is a fair complaint and I’m not going to fight you on it.

Write it down, somebody.

Ninety seconds, then final takes. Did anybody hear a thing this morning they didn’t have on Saturday?

On the roster, yeah. Some.

On Jacksonville, plenty, and none of it is good news in Duval County.

The tight end.