Albert Breer’s Week 7 NFL Takeaways: One Hidden Reason the Lions Are Dangerous

Jump to a topic

1. Detroit Lions
2. Atlanta Falcons
3. Cincinnati Bengals
4. Cleveland Browns
5. Los Angeles Rams
6. New York Giants
7. Tampa Bay Buccaneers
8. Miami Dolphins
9. Philadelphia Eagles
10. Quick-hitters

Week 7’s slate was light, and the headliner on Sunday night became a bit of a dud. But there’s still plenty to get to in this week’s MMQB takeaways …

Detroit Lions

The Lions look increasingly dangerous. We all know what the offense is capable of. The defense, with Brian Branch back and Kerby Joseph’s return looming, showed signs of life Sunday, halting the Green Bay run game, and keeping the Packers from making a single play of more than 28 yards, while keeping any of their skill players from getting to even 60 yards rushing or receiving.

And then, at the end of their 20–17 win, I think you got to see the team’s IQ.

About a half hour after the game ended, I had the game’s star, Jahmyr Gibbs (143 yards on 34 touches) on the phone, and asked him about giving himself up on two of his final three runs of the game. On the first one, a first-and-10 from the Green Bay 15 with two minutes left, the Packers tried to let him score. Gibbs figured ahead of the play they might do that, and he was ready. He slid at the 7—though that wasn’t exactly what the coaches wanted.

I told him I thought he did it because, with the Packers holding all their timeouts, putting the Lions in position to run another play or two before picking up the first down would set them up to run out the rest of the clock.

“Yeah, I mean, that’s what I was thinking, too!” he said. “I was like, O.K., this is good. Then it was like, Oh, he wants you to get the first down. I was like, Oh, s---. O.K.”

You know the rest. It worked out. Gibbs got a yard on the next run to set up third-and-1, then, after a false start penalty, converted third-and-6 with an eight-yard gain. He gave himself up at the 3 on that one, setting up a Jared Goff kneeldown and Jake Bates’s winning kick.

There are, of course, merits to going either way, and in a way the Lions did both here.

The bigger thing, though, is the reminder of how that roster was assembled, and how the young core is filled with smart guys like Gibbs who now have the experience to match. It’s also why, before that 10-play, 71-yard drive, the team could survive a Dan Campbell dice roll, where he left the offense on for a fourth-and-1 from the Lions’ own 24 in tie game with 4:53 left.

“I mean, we expect to get every one of those,” Gibbs said. “So we weren’t really worried about anything.”

And because of how the defense was playing—“They told us they have our back, and we have full confidence in that,” Gibbs added—no one was devastated when Packers corner Keisean Nixon tracked down Gibbs from behind on the fourth down. The defense got the stop. The Packers missed a field goal. The Lions took the ball back, and then the game.

Methodically, the Lions squeezed time from the clock, as they inched into Bates’s range.

The goal was twofold. Score, and eliminate any chance the Packers could do the same.

“We want to control the ball,” Gibbs said. “We want to be aggressive. We want to dictate the game. So our philosophy is we finish with the ball. And if we lose with the ball, that’s that. But we don’t want to give the ball back. We want to be in control at all times.”

They certainly were Sunday. As a result, they’re getting closer to controlling the NFC North.

Next week, they’ll get the undefeated Vikings at home. And they couldn’t be more ready for that after riding out some bumps, and injuries, early in the year. Branch and Cade Mays are back now. Joseph will be soon. The team, coming together and beginning to illustrate how Campbell and GM Brad Holmes built it, is starting to roll.

“We’ve been really good,” Gibbs said. “Actually, we started off way better in previous games. I think that was really the only difference. This game, we had two turnovers, could have been three. Usually, we don’t do that. So that part we need to clean up. We left a lot out there. I don’t think the score should have been as close as it was, but we still found a way to win. So, I mean, that’s a positive.”

One of a few on this Sunday for Detroit.

Atlanta Falcons

I’m not sure if Michael Penix Jr. is going to be the Falcons’ starter for next five or 10 years, but that door is certainly opening. And Sunday in Atlanta was a really good step in that direction. On the other side was a veteran 49ers defense that had held four of its six opponents to 17 points or fewer through a 6–0 start. A defense that, on this Sunday, was good enough to hold Bijan Robinson to 63 rushing yards on 20 carries.

That, in turn, put the game on Penix’s shoulders. Penix responded by dealing San Francisco its first loss, with a clean, efficient 213-yard, three-touchdown effort.

That gives Penix a 3–2 record as a starter, following Atlanta’s 0–2 start without him, and this stat line through five games: 96-of-144 (66.7%), 1,157 yards, 9 TDs, 1 INT, 109.1 rating. Which is more remarkable when you consider he’s just two months and two days past his first 11-on-11 practice in Kevin Stefanski’s system, and coming off his third ACL surgery.

“I’ll tell you, he’s a very, very diligent person,” Stefanski told me postgame. “And even going back to the spring, where he’s not taking team reps, he’s doing everything in his power to learn the new system. He’s doing everything in his power to get his body right. And then we’re just following the lead of the medical team, and he does a little bit more here, a little more there. But all the while, working to get ready to play.

“Now, I didn’t know when he was going to get cleared. We didn’t know when that time was going to come. But he works like a crazy man to get his body right, to get his mind right.”

Stefanski then gave OC Tommy Rees and quarterbacks coach Alex Van Pelt their due for getting Penix ready to go under the aforementioned circumstances. And the head coach then pointed out a play—Penix’s 21-yard touchdown strike to Drake London in the fourth quarter—as an example of it. On that one, Penix moved safety Malik Mustapha to his right with his eyes, then flashed back left, where London could bend his seam route into the vacated space.

“High-level stuff right there,” said Stefanski.

And certainly something to build on, just a month and a half after Atlanta was forced into a quarterbacking fire drill with Cooper Rush, who joined the team in late July, and was vaulted to the top of the depth chart in the middle of Week 1 when backup Tua Tagovailoa went down.

At that point, Atlanta looked nowhere at the position.

That’s not the case anymore.

Cincinnati Bengals

The Bengals showed their ceiling in the second half on Sunday. And, according to coach Zac Taylor, there was no magic to it, after Cincinnati fell behind and went into the break down 13–0. No come to Jesus moment. No speech. Just, as he described, trust.

“No, we just never had a chance to get any rhythm in the first half, and that was our own fault, especially offensively,” he told me. “So, really, we just came out, we got the ball, we settled down, got into a rhythm, certainly in the pass game, and then that allowed us to open up some runs that helped us. And then I think defensively, seeing the offense go down there and score allowed them to get some momentum.”

That’d be an understatement.

The result of the second-half flourish was a 35–13 win in Baltimore, a tough place for another AFC North team to get a win of any sort. But if it’s possible, that score didn’t really come close to bringing to life the level of dominance Cincinnati exhibited over the final 30 minutes. Here’s a closer look …

• The Bengals gained 298 yards on 32 plays, an average of 9.3 yards per snap.

• Joe Burrow was 16-of-18 for 249 yards and four touchdowns, with Tee Higgins catching all six of his targets for 148 yards after the half.

• The offense scored touchdowns on its first five possessions after the break.

• The defense had a pick and two turnovers on downs, allowed just 101 yards on 26 plays (3.9 yards per snap), and kept Baltimore off the scoreboard through the second half.

“I think it shows our team what we’re capable of,” Taylor said. “When we’re at our best, it doesn’t matter who we’re playing, we can control what we need to control. But we have to do this every week. We can’t now just have a letdown and have a bad week of practice [before] playing against Tennessee. I think that we built this team with enough leadership to it where that’s not going to be a problem. These guys understand that, but they know what we’re capable of when we’re clicking on all cylinders.”

So with their bye in the rearview mirror, they have the Texans, then a trip to Spain to play the Falcons, before their second game against Pittsburgh. They’re a half game back of the Steelers and Browns in the AFC North. The defense looks fixed—newcomers Bryan Cook, Dexter Lawrence III, Boye Mafe and Jonathan Allen were all big-time factors in Baltimore—and the offense is flexing. There was a lot to like, for sure.

Now, the trick will be looking like that more often.

“It was as clean a half as we could play, yes,” Taylor said. “So we just have to do that for all four quarters.”

Cleveland Browns

While we’re in the AFC North, it’s time to give Deshaun Watson his credit. I understand why some people never will. But from a football standpoint, even if it isn’t always pretty, it’s getting harder and harder to deny the 10-year vet is playing winning ball.

His Browns outlasted the lowly Titans, 27–24, on Sunday, and that alone isn’t much to write home about. How it happened, and how it keeps happening, is.

The Browns are now 5–2, and atop the AFC North (via tiebreaker over the Steelers), and Watson has led game-winning drives in all five wins. On Sunday, in Nashville, against Robert Saleh’s feisty bunch, which was coming off its first win, he had to do it twice. First, he piloted an eight-play, 71-yard drive, and scored the touchdown himself on a nine-yard run, to put the Browns up 24–17. Then, the Titans responded with a touchdown, and Watson returned volley with a four-play, 55-yard drive that set up kicker Andre Szmyt with a 32-yard chip shot to win it.

“Obviously, he’s been in the league for a while, just being the vet,” said tight end Harold Fannin Jr., whose 36-yard catch-and-run fueled the Browns’ final drive. “Even on the sideline, he tells us to keep working with him. And in these close games, you can tell he’s very poised, very experienced. And he just keeps helping us, encouraging us, keeping our confidence up throughout the whole game.”

Which is probably why Fannin, KC Concepcion, Denzel Boston, Dylan Sampson and Quinshon Judkins—who, all in Year 1 or 2, accounted for all the rushes, catches and targets on those two drives—are so ready to go in critical situations.

And why Todd Monken picked Watson to be his quarterback this summer, unpopular as the move might have been back then.

The reality, as I’ve heard it, is everyone had a good idea then who the best option was.

Everyone gets to figure that out now.

“He’s doing a great job, but I kind of expected him to play how he’s been playing,” Fannin said. “Even like when I first got drafted and I came up here, he’d always been working. He’s always been a hard worker. And you can tell it’s paying off.”

And seven weeks in, Cleveland, one of America’s best football cities, has itself a real season.

Los Angeles Rams

The Rams took a good step on Sunday in Las Vegas. This is a critical stretch for Los Angeles. Sean McVay’s crew got the Raiders on Sunday, then has the Chargers, Commanders and Cardinals before a Week 11 bye. Thereafter, there isn’t a real breather to be found. And so as they stumbled into Allegiant Stadium at 2–4, their game didn’t just serve as a potential turning point. It pretty much had to be one.

The good news, then, is that the Rams certainly made it look like one.

Dig a little deeper and you’ll find that, coming out of an ugly loss to the rebuilding Cardinals last week, everyone spent the time there to make sure they’d get one.

“It was really paying attention to details, the finer things, the little things, seeing how we can’t beat ourselves,” third-year running back Blake Corum told me. “And from there, it’s just putting our head down and working. And we had a great week of practice, man. And I think we showed that today.”

Maybe most significant Sunday was how the Rams slammed the door shut.

L.A. went into the half up 28–6, making it look like the Raiders would wind up being light work. But as the third quarter became the fourth, Kirk Cousins turned it on, Vegas linebacker Nakobe Dean picked off Matthew Stafford, and the hosts cut their deficit to 28–18.

The Rams got the ball back with 13:12 to go. Twelve plays, 70 yards and 6:38 later, they’d scored, going up 35–18. They ran the ball on eight of those 12 snaps, with Corum carrying it on six of the offense’s final seven snaps for 24 yards and the touchdown. Flashy, it was not. What McVay and his staff have emphasized for years, it was.

“I mean, there’s resilience there,” Corum said. “That’s how you respond to situations that you get into that happen out of your control. And so we responded as an offense, and I think it’s great for the O-line. They’re there on the sideline: ‘We want to run the ball!’ K-Dot [guard Kevin Dotson], ‘I want to run the ball.’ That’s them just wanting to break the D-line’s will. They knew what we were doing up front. They had a heck of a day.”

And when that drive was over, the game effectively was, too.

Now, if the Rams can just turn that into more than just a good afternoon, with Myles Garrett’s return creeping closer, they’ll really have something.

New York Giants

The Giants showed two things during Sunday’s win over the Texans.

The first is that the sort of ethos that John Harbaugh’s always injected into his teams is taking hold in New Jersey. That much was obvious in overtime. The Giants got a stop first, forcing the Texans to go three-and-out. Then, after a nine-yard drive-starter from J.J. McCarthy to Malik Nabers, New York’s two running backs ended the game. First it was Cam Skattebo exploding for 42 yards right up the gut. Then, Devin Singletary went 30 yards to finish it.

That gave the Giants the 27–21 win. It also gave the visitors a 4-2-1 mark, a two-game lead in the NFC East and a pretty clear idea of who they are under Harbaugh, seven games in.

“Man, it’s being relentless,” Singletary told me. “We played five quarters of ball, man, and we weren’t even tired. We emptied the tank, don’t get me wrong. We emptied the tank, but we were able to have more than the other team when we needed it. And that’s what showed up.”

So there was that, then there was the quarterback who still has two days left before he hits his one-month mark on the Giants’ roster. J.J. McCarthy earned the start in Houston after leading a furious, if futile, comeback against the Saints in Week 6. And all that went right there seemed to carry right over to Houston. He finished 20-of-28 for 252 yards and a 99.1 passer rating against the proud Texans defense.

But more than that, he’s already found a way to instill belief. In fact, as the Texans drove to tie the game in the fourth quarter, he walked up and down the sideline, telling his new(-ish) offensive teammates, “No matter what happens here, we’re going to come out on top today.” Which is exactly what happened.

“We all just rallied behind him,” Singletary said. “The way he carries himself with the boys, he’s a leader. You can just tell that. You can feel that. Throughout the week, we could tell that. And he went out there and he balled, man. He balled. We had his back, and he balled.”

So many of the Giants did. Which is why, after Jaxson Dart’s injury, they’re way better than a lot of people (myself included) thought.

Tampa Bay Buccaneers

The Buccaneers gave me a double take moment amid their dominant win over the Panthers. During the broadcast of the 43–13 win over the division-leading Panthers, about midway through the third quarter, Fox ran a wild fact: At that point, Tampa Bay had run 32 plays in Carolina territory, and Carolina hadn’t run a single play in Tampa territory.

Indeed, the hosts’ first snap in the enemy’s territory came with 5:23 left in the third, and the visitors holding a 30-point lead.

Anyway, that’s a good sign that the Buccaneers have broken out of the 0–4 funk that marked the start of their 2026 season, and seemed to have everyone on the chopping block. Beating Carolina got them back to 2–5, which at least gives them a fighting chance, now a game and a half back of the Panthers.

“The fact that we were in all those games and we had a chance in the two-minute in all those games, if we could just fix that part of it, we thought we’d be O.K.,” coach Todd Bowles told me. “And not that it was just that part. There were things within the game we had to make corrections on and today we finally did it. Those things gave you hope. And we had good leadership to say, We can beat anybody we want to beat when we play our game.”

Bowles pointed to Baker Mayfield, Chris Godwin Jr., Tristan Wirfs and Graham Barton on offense; and Vita Vea, A’Shawn Robinson, Rakeem Nuñez-Roches, Tykee Smith, Calijah Kancey and Alex Anzalone on defense, as the leaders that dug them out. The Bucs ran for 258 yards, forced four turnovers, created field position with returns and you get the picture.

“Definitely a good physical win,” Bowles said. “And it was a hard-fought win. Hopefully it’s an identity setter.”

Miami Dolphins

Dolphins coach Jeff Hafley feels strongly about his young group. That group won its first game Sunday, edging out the Jets in Hafley’s home state, where the coach had about 30 friends and family in attendance. (He grew up in Bergen County, about 20 miles from the Meadowlands.) And it meant more to him than just win No. 1 as a head coach.

Hafley and GM Jon-Eric Sullivan have, by design, made the roster very young, taking on a ton of dead money this year, while welcoming in a 13-man draft class. So they knew what was coming. Wins would be tough to come by, making the first one particularly meaningful.

Finally, Hafley gets to give that roster proof of concept.

“The biggest thing for me is I wanted them to feel what it was like to win,” Hafley said. “The way these guys fought and competed against the Niners and the Chiefs and the Vikings, and been in all those games, and how hard they’re playing, they deserve this. And I wanted to win for them so badly because they practiced like we’re getting ready for playoff games. I mean, they came back from the bye and it was like we’re a team in the playoff hunt, like trying to win a first playoff game. So they deserve this. And it helps with their confidence.

“When you have all these young guys playing, most of our team’s never won an NFL game.”

Now, they get to see how it feels. And Hafley did tell me he feels particularly good for vets like Jordyn Brooks, Zach Sieler and Aaron Brewer, who have carried his flag even if the light at the end of the tunnel is still off a bit in the distance. Another thing that felt good? Asking the line if they wanted to go for it on fourth-and-1 to seal the game in the fourth quarter.

“I grabbed the O-line, I said, What do you guys think, if we go for this, are we getting it?” Hafley said. “And they gave me this look like, F--- yeah.”

They did get it, and the Dolphins got their win. And those two words probably do the job in explaining how they all felt afterward.

Philadelphia Eagles

With the Eagles playing Monday night, it’s worth recapping the strange week that ended Jalen Hurts’s season. I’d say, honestly, that if the team and league didn’t come out guns blazing like they did—presuming that anyone even asking questions was out of line—there would be a lot more grace given for their handling of the situation.

It was a unique circumstance, and I do believe everyone did the best they could. But being defensive over it (which I do understand) didn’t help, especially given the history, specifically from the 1990s, that exists on medical care for players in the sport.

The timeline makes things more logical. Hurts was cleated against the Rams in Week 4. The team traveled to London overnight the following Friday, and it was after that flight that things changed …

• The team took off from Philadelphia at 11 p.m. ET Friday night, with the idea that the players could get their night’s sleep on the plane. They got to the team hotel in London at around 10:30 a.m. local time Saturday with instructions not to nap, but to try to stay up until a normal hour to go to bed, to reset their clocks—the same advice most of us have gotten when going to Europe.

• A team meeting wrapped the players’ activities for the day at 8:30 p.m. London time. That was when Hurts talked to trainers, and the decision was made to take him to the NFL’s partner hospital in the U.K., the London location of the Cleveland Clinic.

• Without a police escort, and through normal traffic, he got there at around 10:30 p.m. He had the ultrasound done, the superficial clot was found and he didn’t get back to the hotel until 2:45 a.m. He then had until 10 a.m. to sleep, ahead of the 2:30 p.m. kickoff.

• After the game, he was cleared to fly without another ultrasound, because they thought it was, again, just a superficial clot. That decision, to me, can now be questioned, but you can also see why in the moment it seemed like it’d be O.K.

What’s unknown is when the clot broke up and got into Hurts’s lungs, and whether the radiologist missed something on the initial ultrasound. And that’s why it’s important to have an investigation. It’s not just about getting people in trouble, which I think is how the league initially took it. It’s also about learning what you can from a novel circumstance that could come up again.

Logically, if the Eagles and the league had to do it over again, they’d probably have kept Hurts in London and had one more ultrasound done before clearing him to fly. I don’t think it makes you look negligent to admit that. I actually think it makes you look like you’re doing all you can to learn from this. Which would be good.

Quick-hitters

Here come the quick-hitters …

• A big stat for the victorious Seahawks on Sunday night: 153 yards rushing on 41 carries, despite the continued absences of Jadarian Price and Zach Charbonnet, who should be back in the coming weeks.

• Jaxon Smith-Njigba could well repeat as Offensive Player of the Year. He’s on pace for 141 catches for a record 2,106 yards and 19 touchdowns.

• As for the Chiefs, the fact that the two players who led the team in receptions on Sunday night, with four each, were Travis Kelce and Kennth Walker III (great as those two are), isn’t great.

• The Vikings are the last unbeaten standing at 6–0, and they did it on defense again Sunday, holding Daniel Jones and the Colts’ offense to 218 yards and 10 points. After a game-opening touchdown drive, Indianapolis mustered just 157 yards on 52 plays.

• Ultimately, Colts owner Carlie Irsay-Gordon is going to have to decide on the course interim GM Ed Dodds takes at the trade deadline with the guys the team is getting calls on—guys like DeForest Buckner, Quenton Nelson and Jonathan Taylor. The Colts aren’t out of the race yet, but I think they should seriously consider it.

• I thought Bo Nix looked more aggressive in Arizona. But to me, the guy who could, in time, really make a difference for the Denver offense is rookie Jonah Coleman. He came back Sunday, and wound up with 54 yards on nine carries (a 6.0-yard average).

• Klint Kubiak didn’t shoot down the idea after Sunday’s game that he could go to Fernando Mendoza this week. And the Raiders do have the Jets on the schedule next.

• I hope Chiefs tackle Josh Simmons gets his life in order. There’s a lot of talent there, and plenty of demons, and by all accounts, deep down, a good kid who wants to do right.

• The Texans’ defense allowed 27-or-more points for the fourth time this season. That’s more than all of last regular season.

• Is Monday the night the Cowboys’ defense starts to find its fixes? With Eagles backup Tanner McKee on the other side … we’ll see.