We’re bringing the Tuesday Morning Quarterback back this week. So let’s skip any long preamble and get it going …
The pivotal play from Sunday night’s shocker will be remembered for the rising young star quarterback who threw the ball, and the hair-on-fire veteran receiver who caught it in the stadium he once called home.
But to Mike Vrabel, what’s more meaningful is what the other nine guys did out there.
Three plays into the fourth quarter, the Patriots were at second-and-11 on the Buffalo 36-yard line, leading the Bills 13–10. As soon as Maye’s back foot planted, at the top of his drop, the ball came out, heading for Diggs in a dead spot in the Buffalo zone. Diggs spun past Bills safety Cole Bishop into the open field. At that point, receivers Pop Douglas and Kayshon Boutte, center Garrett Bradbury and tight end Austin Hooper raced downfield.
As Diggs approached the 20-yard line, with five Bills defenders in close proximity, Hooper washed corner Christian Benford out of the play, Douglas worked back across to pick up safety Taylor Rapp and Boutte blocked corner Tre’Davious White. The ballcarrier quickly raced through the seam they created, and got all the way to the Buffalo 6-yard line. Two plays later, Rhamondre Stevenson cashed in all that effort with a touchdown that made it 20–10.
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These may seem like little details. But Vrabel’s Patriots don’t see them that way.
“Obviously only one guy has the ball at a time—and I feel like [Vrabel] has really emphasized playing as hard and as long as the guy that does have the ball,” veteran tight end Hunter Henry says. “That’s a big emphasis for him. We’ve preached it over and over and over again. And we’re just trying to apply it when we’re out there on the field.”
It didn’t just start happening under the bright lights of Sunday Night Football, either. Seven days earlier, Marcus Jones set a franchise record for punt-return yardage in a game—a record punctuated with a game-turning 87-yard touchdown in a 42–13 beatdown of the Panthers.
Yet, after giving Jones a game ball, in the postgame locker room, all Vrabel wanted to do was talk about the other 10 guys on the punt return unit.
“So it’s why we tell you to finish longer than the guy with the ball,” Vrabel told his players. “Because sometimes the guy with the ball decides to ride the f— out and everybody else is just standing there. Or we go and block, put our head down and finish, and good things happen.”
Sure enough, if you go back and watch Jones’s return, you’ll see a return so well blocked that five of his teammates are leading a convoy to the end zone.
.@MarcusJonesocho TO THE HOUSE 💥
📺 FOX pic.twitter.com/71GGzjnuXQ
— New England Patriots (@Patriots) September 28, 2025
Henry mentioned to me how this dynamic had been established through a month, on the off-scripted plays where Maye put on a cape, and the tight end himself was a model for it on the quarterback’s 30-yard dot to Diggs in the third quarter on Sunday. As Maye broke contain, Henry walled off defensive tackle Zion Logue and linebacker Shaq Thompson, buying time for Diggs to uncover downfield.
“Things didn’t always go our way [Sunday], but we kept chopping away, kept grinding away, and I think you can see that,” Henry says. “Vrabes has preached that from the beginning, just keep chopping away, keep plugging away, have resilience, don’t be a front-runner when things aren’t going your way—I think that definitely showed up last night.”
Vrabel has talked to his players plenty about the “play style” he’s looking for, and it showed on Sunday night. In a game where the Bills turned the ball over three times, and were penalized 11 times, it put a decided underdog in a position to steal a huge early-season win.
Of course, this isn’t all to say that Maye and Diggs weren’t big pieces of the win, and when Henry and I talked Monday over his lunch break, he only affirmed that.
Regarding his quarterback, Henry wasn’t much surprised with what we all saw.
“Not personally, no,” Henry said. “It was just cool for everybody else to see it. I knew all those things about Drake. He’s a special player. It was cool for everybody else to witness it on prime time.”
And as for the star receiver, maybe contrary to some perceptions, Diggs has emerged as a leader for the Patriots. A couple of weeks back, he got after the team’s skill players about needing to focus on the details of Josh McDaniels’s offense, which shares some similarities with the one Diggs was part of under Brian Daboll in Buffalo.
So, Diggs’s public show as a flagbearer Sunday was another thing that didn’t really shock anyone in Foxboro (or, for that matter, anyone who was around him in Buffalo or Houston, where he was a tone-setter and leader, and mostly did the right things while he was in the building).
“He’s been great,” Henry says. “He’s played in this league for a long time, he’s been a great leader, he’s brought a great energy to our offense, but also to that receiver room, to the skill guys, and it was fun to see him in a place he had a lot of success in, to go back in there and have the success he had last night was pretty fun to watch.”
The Jaguars are now 4–1 coming out of Monday night, with consecutive wins over two teams that have recently made multiple Super Bowl appearances—and the thriller over the Chiefs solidified Liam Coen’s team as one to watch over the next few weeks.
One thing that I think Coen and his staff have really done a good job at is building belief with the players—in the systems they’ve installed, in the roster and in themselves.
It’s something I talked with Trevor Lawrence about last week, coming off the Jags’ win over the 49ers, after he said that Coen’s offense is helping elevate the players.
“I don’t even feel like we’re all clicking yet, so there’s a lot more to come,” Lawrence says. “But just the way we game-plan, our plan for Sunday, what we are setting out to do is very planned, very detailed. It takes a lot of work during the week to get it all dialed up, but we have answers for everything. And that’s the biggest thing, preparing us for every possible look and giving us good stuff to set up a good play more often than not.
“It puts a lot on our plate during the week but I think come Sunday we know we prepared the right way and feel confident.”
And they sure had the answers against Kansas City, with Lawrence’s dime to Brian Thomas Jr. on the game-winning drive a good example,with the quarterback leveraging a matchup he liked, and taking advantage of it.
The Jags are also coming up with more than just schematic answers. There was Devin Lloyd’s field-length pick-six near the goal line, then Lawrence’s stumble, recovery and touchdown to win the game. All of it has given the team, as the QB said, an ever-growing confidence.
“I think it’s a belief he has in us and obviously we have in him as well,” Lawrence says. “There are a lot of things we can do better offensively, clean some stuff up, and we’re gonna have to as the season goes on. But the belief and confidence is there as a team, just finding a way to win. That’s hard to do in this league … The way he thinks and attacks every week has spread throughout the team for sure.”
That belief is a two-way street. You don’t make as aggressive a trade as the Jags did on draft night, moving up for Travis Hunter, if you don’t think you’re close to being a very real contender. The deal was an affirmation of belief in the team’s core of Lawrence, Thomas, Lloyd, Walker Little, Anton Harrison, Travon Walker, Josh Hines-Allen and Tyson Campbell.
Belief that, over the last few weeks at least, has started to look justified.
It’s worth giving Cam Ward a little run here.
The No. 1 overall pick’s first month of NFL games haven’t been smooth. But as Sunday’s game unfolded, one asset that Ward brought with him to the NFL—his levelheadedness—showed up in a very big way.
There were plenty of reasons to lose faith. The Titans were 0–4, coming off a 26–0 loss to the Texans and down 21–3 on the road in Arizona. Ward remained unfazed.
“His first half wasn’t great. We didn’t play as well as we needed to play in the first half,” coach Brian Callahan told me postgame. “And he just came into halftime and, whether this made a difference or not, I don’t know, I just looked at him and said, ‘Just put your eyes where they’re supposed to be, read the key and make the throw.’ That’s really what it comes down to. I thought he did that the rest of the second half, which was super impressive.
“He didn’t flinch either, bounced back from a rough start and found his way into making the throws we had to have in big moments and that’s what we’ve been waiting to see from him.”
Some of those throws were big ones—like his shot to Calvin Ridley for 38 yards in the final minute to set up Joey Slye’s game-winning field goal. But more were the layups he knew he had to take, which is where having his eyes in the right places would come into play.
“Honestly, the biggest thing is I started to play the way I needed to play,” Ward told me. “I took the completions. I wasn’t doing that early in the game. I was iffy, I was in-and-out about it. Through the game, I started to take the completions, get my guys the ball, Chig [Okonkwo] made plays for us, Gunnar [Helm] made a lot of plays for us. I had to get those guys the ball and they made plays.”
The accountability that Ward showed was why he could get away with saying what he did about the state of the team a week ago: “We ass.”
Because he was truthful about how he was playing, he could be truthful about the team, too.
“I just think we needed that, we needed it to be known that we weren’t complementing each other on both sides of the ball,” Ward says. “The biggest thing is that the guys in the locker room, they respected it. They know how I feel when we’re not on our P’s & Q’s on offense. We’ve got a group of individuals who take it to heart, but the good way, in holding each other accountable, being resilient.
“We did that today.”
And now maybe they’ll be on their way, with their rookie quarterback out front.
Speaking of the Travis Hunter move, the Browns’ strategy definitely looks like it’s working out.
It was the result of a real look in the mirror at where the roster was last year, and the toll that losing three first-round picks in the Deshaun Watson trade had taken. With their core aging, Cleveland needed an infusion of young talent, and trading the second overall pick was a way to accelerate the process.
We can now say the first steps have been good ones. Defensive tackle Mason Graham and linebacker Carson Schwesinger look like long-term cornerstones. Running back Quinshon Judkins is already the team’s bell cow, and has given the Browns tough yards and big plays. Move tight end Harold Fannin Jr. is a bona fide weapon. Dylan Sampson has brought versatility to the running back room. And Dillon Gabriel looks like he belongs, even if the third-round quarterback isn’t the long-term answer under center.
Schwesinger has played 97.7% of the team’s defensive snaps, more than anyone in the front seven, and Graham’s at 76.2%, leading the defensive tackles. Fannin’s been on the field for 72.4% of the team’s offensive snaps, alongside David Njoku. Sampson’s more of a spot player (20.2%), while Judkins has been the lead back and starter since entering the lineup.
And the Browns have the Jaguars’ first-round pick next year, too.
Now, there’s still the inconvenient reality that Cleveland needs to find itself a quarterback, and that won’t be easy. But whoever that quarterback winds up being in 2026 might find a pretty nice situation. Speaking of …
The Bengals’ Tuesday trade for Joe Flacco is pretty self-explanatory. Their belief in Jake Browning waned over the past three weeks, with his arm strength seeming to die out, and his ability to see the field not quite the same, two factors that resulted in a number of turnovers that Cincinnati couldn’t come back from. So, they sent a 2026 fifth-round pick to their division rival, the Browns, with a 2026 sixth-round pick coming back with Flacco.
We’ll see whether or not Flacco can operate behind Cincinnati’s maligned line—the Bengals’ array of skill talent should help to mitigate that problem, at least a bit.
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Regardless, though, this should give Cincinnati a better chance to compete for an AFC playoff spot, and with several teams in the conference dealing with injury issues, just the opportunity to get into the bracket with Joe Burrow at quarterback is gold. So, I see this as a very worthwhile swing, with very little investment required. Cincinnati’s schedule the rest of the way is no layup, but it is manageable, to the point where nine or 10 wins are on the table.
Also, the Bengals just got a whole lot more interesting.
I’m really blown away by how bad the Jets’ defense is, allowing 31.4 points per game, over 140 yards rushing per game and an opponent passer rating of 114.3.
That unit is not talent-deficient. Robert Saleh and Jeff Ulbrich had really good groups there, and the core of Quinnen Williams, Will McDonald IV, Jermaine Johnson II, Jamien Sherwood, Quincy Williams and Sauce Gardner is intact, even though a couple of those guys have been banged up. It makes you wonder, with Chris Harris on staff, whether Aaron Glenn might move on from DC Steve Wilks sometime soon.
Remember, Glenn witnessed such a move in Detroit during Dan Campbell’s first year, and it’s actually how Ben Johnson wound up becoming the offensive coordinator there.
In case you’re wondering, firing Bill Belichick after this season would cost the University. of North Carolina $20 million. Could they go through with that? Sure. But it might make more sense to get closer to the end of the guaranteed money, which runs through 2027, and see where things go.
