NFL October Pumpkin Watch

At the beginning of the NFL season, when unpredictable trends or unexpected successes and failures occur, we mark them off as just a small sample size.

“There is no preseason anymore!” we say, as a team that had in our preseason predictions with postseason expectations falling early.

The reality is that it’s October now.

We have a larger sample size, and this past week, in the spirit of the month, we sure did see some teams turn into pumpkins that we thought were postseason carriages now that we know more.

The season is a living, breathing entity that we’re consistently trying to figure out as more is revealed.

Who’s officially turned into a pumpkin following week 6?

New Orleans Saints

This may be a little unfair to New Orleans in their loss after having a rookie quarterback taken in the fifth round start his first game, especially in that he wasn’t necessarily the main problem throwing for 243 yards and a touchdown, given the amount of duress he endured. Still, the once 2-0 Saints are what we thought they were.

Going into the year, in the NFL fan confidence index, the Saints ranked dead last- there’s just something that isn’t exciting about Dennis Allen’s scheme that is so bland alongside Derek Carr as a middle-of-the-road identity post-Drew Brees. We then talked ourselves into their explosive first two wins, scoring 47 and 44 against Carolina and Dallas, with Kamara looking like the Kamara that scored 6 touchdowns on the Christmas day game in 2020 again.

It turns out that those may have just been early-season one-timers running up the score against poor competition. They’ve lost three straight, including two where they’ve only had one offensive touchdown. In their loss against the Bucs, they had one explosive quarter where they scored 27 points and did NOTHING afterward. On top of that, the defense allowed 51 points to Tampa in a fashion that showed Chris Godwin taking a screen pass 55 yards that should have been maybe 10 and two top-15 rushers even without Rachaad White.

The Saints are back to being the “32nd in fan optimism” Saints.

Arizona Cardinals

The exciting ceiling that Kyler Murray plays with as the elusive dual threat that makes magic happen following being the #1 overall pick and a Texas high school athletic legend makes us always talk about their offense exploding and stealing one. Going into the year, the Cardinals were considered a “half team,” with the offense having loads of potential and the defense rebuilding around Budda Baker and a ton of guys. Still, the early season shootout against the Bills, the blowout victory in which Marvin Harrison Jr. “arrived” against the Rams, and edging out a victory over the highly-touted Niners team last week made us believe they were a team that can consistently give the competition a run for their money.

Then, they got entirely bullied by Green Bay.

In their 34-13 loss at Lambeau, albeit without concussed Harrison, they’ve been blown out in two of the last three games and have made mistakes rebuilding teams make. There was a stretch of three straight fumbles, Jordan Love was consistently able to lob the ball and just say, “Romeo Doubs is down there somewhere,” as he tossed touchdowns over the secondary, and Kyler Murray and James Conner were involved in a plethora of mixups that killed drives.

The offensive ceiling is exciting in a video game sense, but the Cardinals were pumpkin-sized.

Jacksonville Jaguars

PHOTO: Peter van den Berg/Imagn Images

Look, even with the 1-4 record going into this week, we have consistently talked ourselves into Trevor Lawrence’s potential. He was a former generational 1-of-1 quarterback who appeared in multiple College Football Playoffs, won an NFL playoff game simply by not having Urban Meyer as his coach anymore, and received a massive 5-year deal to make him the highest-paid quarterback in NFL history. Those sorts of accolades on paper have prevented us from claiming they’re in the doldrums of the league.

The Jaguars have now confirmed a pumpkin, a bad team, whatever you wish to refer to them as. They flew out to London, their “second home,” and got utterly embarrassed by the Chicago Bears and had to stay there for another week for ANOTHER London game. In their 35-16 loss, Caleb Williams torched the defense for four touchdowns, and Cole Kmet shoved secondary players into the English field left and right for two scores, and they’ve now given up the second-most points of the year. Andre Cisco said there was “a lot of quit,” and Doug Pederson, the literal man in charge of culture, said there are some culture problems in yet another week where he doesn’t take the blame because he’s not Urban Meyer and has a miracle Super Bowl ring under his belt.

Dallas Cowboys

For Jerry Jones’s birthday, he asked for a heaping pile of vegetables and got mad when he didn’t receive any birthday cake.

The song and dance that we’ve played with the Dallas Cowboys- beating up on poor teams in the regular season only to witness a shorthanded, flawed team exit early in the postseason, has only been exposed earlier this year. In their embarrassing beat down by the Lions in their home stadium that had a Lion King-esque horizon blocking all of us from even viewing the field, we no longer have to wait for the moment that the chariot becomes a pumpkin in January.

Dallas lost 47-9 to the Lions at home in a game where they had fun running high school trick plays to Sam LaPorta and even their beefy left tackle to add salt to the wound. They trailed 27-6 at halftime in a lifeless effort and gave up 35 points in their loss to the Saints at home before the half and faced a 21-6 deficit at home to Baltimore at the half in their home loss the very next week. It’s the Twilight Zone of their blowout postseason loss to the Packers at home to end last year.

Yes, they were without Micah Parsons and DeMarcus Lawrence, but there’s no one to blame for them being short-handed other than the construction of the superstar team that we knew would happen. Re-signing Dak Prescott and CeeDee Lamb is all fine and well until you realize the “all-in” sentiment that was being hyped up this offseason leaves an unbalanced rushing attack for pre-fired Mike McCarthy to draw up a boring, unexciting scheme for Prescott that gets figured out in big spots. Jerry will get into constant stand-offs with the superstars on his team during training camp, only to have the price go up and leave the team lost.

They’re 3-3 now with wins against a dead Browns team and Giants and Steelers teams that they could only put up 20 points against. With a tough upcoming schedule on deck following those three embarrassing losses, the aura around this team could not be more of an overwhelming net negative- it just happened in October this time.

PHOTO: Peter van den Berg/Imagn Images