Sage Rosenfels column: Why a meaningless Week 17 game still matters
There are a plethora of situations during Week 17 in the NFL. A few teams are in the playoffs and have already clinched home field advantage or byes; others are postseason sides looking to improve their seeding. Then there are challengers who need the win to get in, or have a chance. Lastly, there is the largest group - teams which make up half the league - which have nothing to play for. These teams and players I’d like to focus on today.
The goal of every NFL franchise is to win the Super Bowl. With salary cap rules in place, each team does have, at face value, an equal chance of appearing every year. Obviously, it doesn’t feel that way to Cleveland Browns fans, but they do indeed have a shot to bring home a Lombardi Trophy just like the New England Patriots.
When teams have been eliminated from the playoffs, NFL players still must go out and perform. There is always a risk of injury, just as if they were in the postseason hunt. But a Super Bowl ring is no longer a possible reward for that risk. So, what’s it like to be on one of these teams heading into that last game of the year?
I started two Week 17 NFL games. The first was in Miami, in 2004. Dave Wannstedt had already resigned as coach two months earlier, and I was getting my first career start, playing at Baltimore. The coaching staff, it was assumed, was to be replaced in the coming weeks and uncertainty was abound. The team also had me, their third-string quarterback, getting the nod for the first time in his life. Perceptually, there really weren’t a lot of good reasons for my teammates to put one’s body in harm's way that day.
My second “meaningless” Week 17 start was with the Houston Texans, as we were playing the Jaguars to finish out the season. We were 7-8 and out of the playoffs, but were improving under Gary Kubiak, in his second year as head coach, and trying to be the first team in Texans history to not have a losing record.
The two situations were very different, but the effort of the players was equal.
Luckily, in both situations, I was on teams with players who took a tremendous amount of pride in how they did their job each day. These teams also had a lot of respect and appreciation for their head coach (Jim Bates was our interim chief in 2004).
Respecting your head coach is a key element to competing well in these types of games. Football is a sport where “laying it on the line” cannot be easily seen by the untrained eye. Yes, there are the occasional plays when we see a cornerback avoid getting involved in a dangerous tackle, but those are a rarity. There is a difference between going hard, which every NFL player does on nearly every play, and putting your body at risk of great physical injury. The only way to be successful as a team is for the vast majority of players to “lay it on the line” each week. If the game you are playing in doesn’t have the same urgency as for a playoff-bound squad, the team with the greater “will to win” usually does. It takes a coach connecting with their players throughout the year to bring out maximum effort on every play, and what it takes to be successful in both football and in life.
For every NFL coach, your resume isn’t just reflected in wins and losses; it’s also how your players compete to win. For those who are a part of the hiring and firing side of the sport, the way a team competes when it doesn’t matter says a lot about the people who make up the roster and coaching staff. A coach who can get their players to push the envelope during these types of games gains great respect from general managers and owners around the league.
Conversely, NFL players learn very early that everything you do on the field is your resume. If you want to be employed, every snap you take inside the lines is dissected by every team around the league. Even when a game doesn’t matter, or is a blowout, your performance on meaningless plays is still extremely important in your overall evaluation. I was told very early in my career that even though I was playing on one team at the time, my other possible employers were every other NFL side. Each franchise is always scouting and critiquing every player on every play. It’s important, even if it’s a few snaps at the end of blowout loss, to always compete every play as if your job depended on it.
Even though pride is considered a deadly sin, it’s a word regularly used in these types of situations in sports. On both the Miami and Houston teams, our best players took great pride in their craft. Players like Zach Thomas, Junior Seau, Jason Taylor, Andre Johnson, and Demeco Ryans had high levels of expectations for themselves, and their teams, every time they put on their cleats. Playing in “meaningless” games hurt their pride because they didn’t want to be associated with unsuccessful teams. As a result, they were always in the mindset to win every time a score is kept, be it during practice or game time. Losing sucks, and it hurts the players who have Hall of Fame-level aspirations even more. Having a team filled with players with high expectations is the key to winning these types of games.
If an NFL franchise has coaches the team respects and believes in, and players have a high level of pride, it has the two most important aspects needed to win the last “meaningless” game of the season. Even if every player has already bought flights to head to a beach the day after the season concludes, they also know that they are paid to win each of their 16 regular-season games. Anything short of putting it on the line for your team, and yourself, is simply unacceptable in most NFL circles. No player, coach, GM, or owner wants players who fold when times are tough. The NFL is made of men who don’t give up, even if a game doesn’t necessarily matter to anyone else. Every game counts to these types of men. It’s how they are wired. If they didn’t have a high level of expectation for themselves or the people they put themselves around, they wouldn’t have made it to the NFL in the first place.