Week 12's big questions: Jets, Cowboys, kickers, tanking

There was always some risk in acquiring Aaron Rodgers at 40 years old, but even the skeptics wouldn't have imagined this. With Year 1 lost to an Achilles injury on the opening drive, Year 2 has now claimed the New York Jets' head coach, general manager, and offensive play-caller. (That last one, Rodgers' friend Nathaniel Hackett, still has a job, but he doesn't call plays anymore.)

The Jets are 3-8, and the fact that GM Joe Douglas lost his job this week was only surprising in its timing. Why fire an executive with only six games left and after the trade deadline? It's not like he could make anything worse.

The likely explanation is that Jets owner Woody Johnson, currently being compared unfavorably to infamous Knicks owner James Dolan, wants the next guy to deal with Rodgers as his first order of business. That is to say, figure out how to best ensure Rodgers is no longer a Jet. That won't be easy: The NFL's complicated salary-cap mechanisms essentially mean the team can take a huge dead-money hit (about $49 million) in 2025 or take a lesser hit next season while pushing more of the dead money into 2026.

An incoming GM would, presumably, rather rip the Band-Aid off all at once, but it would make little sense to enter a full rebuild when players like Sauce Gardner, Breece Hall, and Garrett Wilson are still on relatively cheap contracts.

There's no easy solution. Luckily for the next GM, the owner probably has some thoughts.

The Dallas Cowboys at least know who their quarterback will be next season: Dak Prescott, once he returns from the hamstring injury that will keep him sidelined for the rest of the year. What's less clear is who should be handling those duties for the remainder of this 3-7 season.

Owner/GM Jerry Jones has insisted the job will remain with Cooper Rush, who's proven to be the ideal backup: competent but not good enough to create an actual quarterback controversy. What's strange is that, even in a lost year, the Cowboys haven't turned to Trey Lance, the former first-round pick they acquired last year from San Francisco for a fourth-round pick.

Leaving him on the bench seems like a significant waste of a decent pick. But then again, the Niners gave up three first-round picks and a third-round pick for the No. 3 overall slot used to select Lance in 2021, and they gave up on him quickly, moving on after he appeared in eight games over two seasons. The next time a draft expert says a quarterback prospect has limited experience but all the tools and a high upside, the proper response will be, "But Trey Lance."

It wasn't that long ago that the NFL seemed to have an army of robot kickers who never missed, even from great distances. Like, a few weeks ago. But the regression has been swift and brutal. Five of the league's most reliable kickers in recent years, Justin Tucker, Jake Elliott, Dustin Hopkins, Younghoe Koo, and Evan McPherson, all had glaring misses in Week 11, and all are under 74% for the season. The bad weather hasn't even hit yet.

Is there a reason why these straight-ball hitters are all pulling hooks and slicing fades like they're at TopGolf? Bad shipment of cleats? Awkward group session with a sports psychologist? Probably not. But the wobbly kicks are undoubtedly going to give a few head coaches pause come playoff time.

The NFL has generally avoided the scourge of tanking, as evidenced by the fact it's never bothered to implement a draft lottery. Even once all hope is lost for a season, it's not unusual for a bad team to win a final game that costs them a couple of spots in the subsequent draft.

But 2024 is shaping up to be a weird one: There are nine teams with two or three wins through Week 11, meaning almost a third of the league remains in contention, so to speak, for the 2025 first overall pick. The Carolina Panthers, with the worst point differential in the league at minus-143, are currently in line for the eighth overall pick based on strength-of-schedule tiebreakers despite their 3-7 record. Meanwhile, the 2-9 Jacksonville Jaguars, with a minus-108 differential, would draft first overall based on present standings.

Next April's draft isn't thought to contain the kind of high-end quarterback prospect that might cause teams to bench their starters amid tanking fever, but the difference in value between the first and ninth picks remains vast.

Carolina, in fact, moved from ninth to first overall in 2023 to take QB Bryce Young at the cost of two first-round picks, two second-round picks, and wide receiver D.J. Moore.

And with so many teams still in the mix to be near the top of the draft, a rogue win here or a well-executed loss there could make a huge difference for any team's eventual April position.

All of which leads to a couple of questions. Will we see an outbreak of teams in the final month that are trying to lose? And, given the performances of some of them so far, would we be able to notice?

Scott Stinson is a contributing writer for theScore.