Biggest Takeaways and Questions After Week 9 in the NFL

The NFL season is a beautiful thing. You hear all the time that it’s a week-to-week league and anything can happen on any given Sunday (they did make a movie about it, after all). With the nature of the seven-day turnaround, which can vary due to primetime games, every week offers us lessons to learn about individual players, each team and sometimes, the state of the league as a whole.

With any luck, these lessons offer us true insight while other times they can leave us scratching our heads. All we can do as fans and bettors of the game is absorb all the information and use it to shape our decisions in our own week-to-week entertainment when putting together our best NFL bets.

Here are five takeaways, lessons and questions from Week 9:

Are The Baltimore Ravens the Team to Beat in the AFC?

When you can sit back, let your QB throw for less than 200 yards, not score a TD via the air or the ground, and still blow out a likely playoff team by 30 points, you've got something dangerous come the postseason. The Baltimore Ravens did just that this past week against the Seahawks, before destroying the Lions just two weeks prior. The current top-seeded Chiefs haven't looked as good as Baltimore has all year, save for a 41-10 drubbing of the Chicago Bears, which isn't exactly a litmus test for playoff competition.

The All-New Texans Have Arrived

C.J. Stroud, take a bow. The rookie absolutely lit it up on Sunday, becoming the first rookie ever to throw for 400 yards. four touchdowns and no interceptions. He tossed three touchdowns of 20+ yards, engineered a 75-yard, game-winning TD drive with just 40 seconds on the clock and looked like every single thing you want from a top draft pick. He got everyone involved, breaking out WR Noah Brown for a 75-yard touchdown, connecting with Tank Dell twice for a score and getting Dalton Schultz into the endzone again.

Barring injury, he's locked up the Offensive Rookie of the Year race and has the Texans on pace to be the NFL's Most Improved Team as the first one to surpass last season's win total. They're not quite there as a true playoff contender with our model giving them just a 5.8% chance of winning their division, despite being just two games back and holding the tiebreaker over the Jaguars, but with $86M of cap space for 2024, they look like they'll be a contender both within the AFC South and the postseason for seasons to come.

The NFL Needs Players Like Josh Dobbs

Feel good stories own the headlines and get everyone rallied around the same thing, which no matter how you slice it, is good for business. As much as rabid fanbases going at it and trash talk between one another is as much a part of the game as the turf it's played on, there's almost nothing better than when we come together over one common thread. This year, that thread is Josh Dobbs, who is playing for his second time just this season alone.

Dobbs stole the show early in the year by giving the bottom-of-the-barrel Cardinals some life and at least a little bit of swagger, even though they didn't even have his jersey in the team store. Then traded the Vikings, Dobbs went on to engineer a beauty of a win after stepping into the game in relief of injured QB Jaren Hall. Dobbs has started for four different teams in four years and now is at the helm of a Vikings team that is somehow 5-4 with a 20% chance to win the NFC North at +800, and that simply makes for great TV.

When we have guys like Jimmy Garoppolo and Carson Wentz (now backing up the Rams) continuing to get premium chances in this league, it's good to see players who are actually competent and giving it their all get their shot.

Check out our latest Super Bowl odds here.

Josh Allen's Turnovers Will Kill the Bills

Shocker: turnovers are bad. But it's deeper than that. Josh Allen is an extremely talented quarterback, one of the best runners in the league under center with an absolute cannon of an arm. He clearly progressed in each of his first three-four seasons, but he now seems to have hit a wall. In every game Allen has thrown a pick this year, the Bills have lost or struggled to squash their opponents, with the exception being a 37-3 Week 3 blowout of the Commanders, in which Sam Howell said "hold my beer, Josh" as he threw *four* interceptions of his own. 

The Bills' biggest wins otherwise? 38-10 over the Raiders and 48-20 over Miami, both clean sheets as far as interceptions go. But his three-INT loss in Week 1 against a Jets team that had to throw Zach Wilson out there unexpectedly is singlehandedly keeping them from being in first in the AFC East. He's giving off major Tony Romo vibes, who had a great QB mind and a great arm, but also a penchant for committing crucial turnovers. The Bills' window won't be open long and Allen might literally throw it away.

Officiating Is At an All-Time Low

This certainly feels like the worst year in recent memory as far as flags go. This week alone, we saw flags for defensive PI on passes well out of bounds, an intentional grounding call on Josh Allen because his receiver ran an option route, and a roughing the passer call on a literal textbook sack. They were Angel Hernandez behind the plate levels of bad. It's ugly, takes the fun out of the game and leaves us shaking our heads (or worse when it affects our bets and fantasy teams). I won't wax on and on about the zebras getting it wrong, as it's not a new revelation, but in an age where we can instantly review any play and have someone on the other side of the country overruling an on-field decision, there is simply zero excuse to be letting blown or bad calls impact the game on a weekly basis.

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