The rise of wide receivers signals the NFL’s ‘Desperate Housewives’ era



The two most important players in the National Football League do not play quarterback. They both play wide receiver: Miami’s Tyreek Hill and Philadelphia’s A.J. Brown.

Most NFL experts have yet to reach this obvious conclusion. They’ve so far failed to recognize the consequence of rule changes initiated to make the game “safer” and promote scoring.

Football is no longer a heavyweight combat sport. It’s a battle of lightweights, a competition controlled and decided more often than not on the referees’ scorecards rather than knockout punches. An imposition of will has been transformed into a game of finesse so that it is more palatable to women, emasculated men, and non-sports fans.

Wide receivers dominate today’s game, and their importance to the game will only grow more stronger as the league continues to reduce the degree of difficulty and risks for all players.

With eight games to play, Hill and Brown both have a chance to eclipse 2,000 receiving yards for a season. The NFL record is 1,964 yards, a number Calvin Johnson reached during the 16-game 2012 season. The NFL now plays 17 games.

According to gambling oddsmakers, nothing has really changed in the National Football League. Five quarterbacks — Patrick Mahomes, Jalen Hurts, Lamar Jackson, Tua Tagovailoa, and Joe Burrow — are the favorites to win league MVP.

In the new, kinder, gentler NFL, wide receivers are just as important as quarterbacks.

The odds reflect the mindset of Associated Press voters. They’ve been programmed to follow the prescribed NFL narrative: The quarterback of the most successful team is always a front-runner for MVP. Quarterback is the most difficult and important position in all of sports.

This is no longer true. No position in sports has had its degree of difficulty reduced as drastically as quarterback. Quarterbacks no longer call their own plays. They run simplified, college-style offenses. There are restrictive rules and regulations limiting when, where, and how you can hit them. The consequences for throwing a receiver into coverage have been virtually eliminated.

Patrick Mahomes doesn’t face the kind of challenges Johnny Unitas, Bart Starr, Roger Staubach, Terry Bradshaw, and Dan Fouts confronted throughout their careers. Mahomes isn’t playing the same game that Tom Brady and Peyton Manning played when they first entered the NFL.

Football has changed. The way we evaluate value and importance needs to change, too.

In the nearly 70 years the Associated Press has been naming an NFL MVP, no wide receiver has ever won the award. In 1987, Jerry Rice probably should have won MVP. He scored 22 touchdowns in a strike-shortened season. He played just 12 regular-season games. John Elway won the MVP award in a very close race.

Quarterbacks and running backs have dominated the MVP. Defensive tackle Alan Page, kicker Mark Moseley, and linebacker Lawrence Taylor are the only three players to win the award who did not play running back or quarterback.

This year we should strongly consider adding a new position to the MVP club. In the new, kinder, gentler NFL, wide receivers are just as important as quarterbacks.

Tyreek Hill and A.J. Brown are allowing two solid former Alabama quarterbacks — Hurts and Tagovailoa — to masquerade as MVP candidates. Strip Hill and Brown from Miami and Philadelphia, respectively, and Jalen and Tua are nowhere near the top of the MVP race.

I’m not denigrating Hurts and Tagovailoa. They’re solid players. I’m recognizing the greatness of Hill and Brown and the transformation of football. The wide receiver position has never been more important than it is today.

Rule changes have elevated the importance of the players who line up outside the hashes. Football — when it was a game defined by physicality — used to prioritize the players who lined up in the middle of the field. You would build an offense around the center, quarterback, and running back. You would build a defense around a defensive tackle, middle linebacker, and safety.

Now the most valuable players are on the outside. Receivers, edge rushers, and corners are ascending in value. The MVP vote should reflect this new reality.

It will be interesting to see if the NFL allows its media partners to discuss the new reality. The league’s television ratings are tied to selling the myth of the all-important, all-American quarterback.

Will diva wide receivers attract as wide an audience as Mahomes versus Burrow?

What’s going to happen when Minnesota’s Justin Jefferson realizes he’s more valuable than Kirk Cousins? What will that contract negotiation look like?

Teams, management, and head coaches have been partnering with quarterbacks for decades. The New England dynasty hinged on the relationship among Robert Kraft, Bill Belichick, and Tom Brady.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Vikings head coach Dennis Green partnered with Cris Carter and Randy Moss. As Carter's and Moss’ influence grew within the Minnesota locker room, the culture soured. The Vikings fired Green in 2001.

A league built around wide receivers will be quite different from the one that used to rely on quarterbacks and running backs. My prediction is that it’s going to be a lot safer, far less predictable, and a lot more appealing to the crowd that loves “Desperate Housewives” and “The Bachelor.”

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Whitlock: Joe Burrow may be suffering from Colin Kaepernick disease



I hope I’m wrong about Joe Burrow, the Cincinnati Bengals' quarterback.

I’m rooting for him. No different from how I rooted for Josh Rosen, Robert Griffin III, Cam Newton, and Colin Kaepernick. I root for pretty much every young quarterback. I want them all to be the next John Elway or Tom Brady or Peyton Manning.

Great quarterbacks make sports fun and interesting.

So Cincinnati Bengals fans, back off. We’re on the same team. My tweets analogizing Burrow to Rosen and Griffin were not written with malicious intent. They reflect my gut instincts at the moment.

They reflect the reality that sometimes young quarterbacks trip over their own egos and sabotage their careers.

I pride myself on having a highly sensitive QB-ego radar that allows me to detect potential problems before others see them. It starts with a gut feeling and then grows.

Monday afternoon, during a discussion with T.J. Moe and Steve Kim on my podcast, I had a tingling in my gut when we started talking about Joe Burrow. Initially I attributed the tingling to the thought of eating Skyline chili while visiting Kings Island theme park last Saturday. The chili is considered a delicacy in Cincinnati. A humane person wouldn’t feed that garbage to a dog.

Upon review, it wasn’t the chili that set off my radar. It was the realization that Burrow has some of the same personality quirks and characteristics as Rosen, Griffin, Newton, and Kaepernick.

Burrow is off to a horrible start in the 2022 NFL season. Fresh off a Super Bowl appearance, the Bengals are 0-2, having lost to the Mitchell Trubisky-quarterbacked Pittsburgh Steelers and the Cooper Rush-led Dallas Cowboys.

Joe Burrow is supposed to be the next big thing in football. In his first complete, injury-free season, he led the Bengals on an improbable run to the Super Bowl. Prognosticators saw Burrow as the second coming of Dan Marino.

But now Burrow can’t outscore Trubisky and Rush, two quarterbacks who will be holding clipboards around Halloween. What’s the problem?

Burrow has tossed four interceptions in two games. Despite a dynamic receiving corps, his yards per attempt hover around the bottom of the league. Cincy has scored a total of 37 points this season. Burrow has been sacked 13 times.

You can blame the sacks on Cincy’s rebuilt offensive line, but there’s more to the story. Burrow doesn’t look comfortable in the pocket. He’s leaving the pocket too soon, and he’s not climbing up in the pocket and helping his offensive tackles. The sacks are a combination of bad O-line play and a skittish quarterback who was sacked 70 times last season.

There’s more.

Does Burrow have the right attitude? Is Burrow too cocky for his own good? Has he prioritized social justice virtue-signaling above football greatness?

Is Burrow suffering from Colin Kaepernick disease?

The disease killed Josh Rosen in the football womb. The UCLA quarterback entered the NFL with the stated goal of being a social justice champion and complaining about the nine teams that didn’t draft him in the first round. He lasted one season as a starter in Arizona.

Kaepernick disease is a deadly form of arrogance, shallowness, narcissism, and wokeness. The disease is triggered when agents, handlers, and media influencers convince young athletes that their mission is to be more than athletes.

The disease has been around for a little more than a decade. Scientists believe the virus leaked from a laboratory in Portland, Oregon, years ago when Nike executives, at the behest of China, developed a formula to make LeBron James the next Muhammad Ali.

The leak sparked a pandemic across football and basketball. An early symptom of the disease was the desire to kneel during the national anthem. New variants of Kaepernick disease cause athletes to speak out on political issues they know very little about.

Burrow recently posted on Instagram about abortion and the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. In June, he urged politicians to “get those crazy guns.” Back in 2020, during the summer of George Floyd, Burrow and his Bengals teammates made a joint statement standing in front of the National Underground Railroad Museum.

There’s no doubt Burrow has at least a mild form of Kap disease. It’s not just the wokeness. The arrogance and flamboyance are other telltale signs of Kap. Arrogance and flamboyance destroyed Cam Newton and RG3.

Like Newton and Griffin, Burrow had a singular, spectacular season in college football, won the Heisman Trophy, and entered the NFL draft amid high expectations.

Early in Newton’s and Griffin’s pro careers, my QB-ego radar started sending me signals that they would not sustain their success. Once Newton committed to dressing like the Queen of England, I jumped ship. When Griffin refused to come out of a playoff game against Seattle, even though it was obvious that his injured knee rendered him useless, I jumped off the Griffin bandwagon.

I was ridiculed and reviled for arguing that their egos and off-field ambitions would undermine their success.

That’s what I see potentially happening with Joe Burrow. He wants to be more than an athlete. He wants to be a fashionista. He wants to engage in political discussions. He’s distracted and cocky.

He’s headed down the same path as Rosen, Griffin, Newton, and Kaepernick. Those guys all ignored my warning and continued down the path of destruction.

Joe Burrow should focus solely on football right now. He can be a runway model and uninformed political pundit in his 40s. Now’s the time to be a great quarterback.