Week 15 NFL Powerless Ranking: Jags are better without Meyer... but still lose

Welcome to this week’s NFL Powerless Rankings. We’re in the home stretch of the NFL season, and we know the contenders from the pretenders at this point. We’ll talk about the contenders later because this list is about the less fortunate teams in the league. Let’s check out the worst of the worst from Week 15.

The Bears-Vikings game got pushed back to Monday because of COVID. Chicago has won five of the last six battles with Minnesota, and the Bears faithful are hoping this will be six out of seven.

Detroit got its second win of the season in Week 15, and that’s two Ws in the last three games for the Lions. In their 30-13 win over Arizona Sunday, they even looked like a regular, functional team. Jared Goff showed up to play this week and put Detroit on his back, passing for three TDs and connecting on 21 of 26 attempts. This win over one of the better teams in the league (regardless of who was out) shows this Lions team is fighting and trying to finish the season strong. First-year head coach Dan Campbell can’t ask for much more than that out of this team.

The Texans took full advantage of the bad Jacksonville Jaguars, beating them down 30-16 in Week 15. Davis didn’t have his most prolific performance of his rookie year, but he did get his first victory in the NFL. After firing former head coach Urban Meyer a few days ago, the Jags are just playing to get to the offseason now.

Let’s just pencil the Giants in on this list for the remainder of the season. They lost to division foe Dallas, 21-6. Daniel Jones might not be great, but it’d be hard to convince anyone that Mike Glennon is much better. Glennon had three INTs and passed for 99 yards against the Cowboys. The Giants have a lot of work to do in the offseason if they plan on turning this ship around.

The Jets on Sunday became the Miami Dolphins’ sixth consecutive victim, losing 31-24. Zach Wilson was subpar passing yet again, though he did score his second rushing TD of the year. Putting up a fight is good, but eventually you want to see a team find a way to get over the hump in these close games.

Jacksonville’s season was a strange one, to say the least. They finally got rid of the coach who thought he was still a college coach, so the future is much brighter now, believe it or not. They did lose again, and this time to another bad NFL team, falling 30-16 to the Texans. Luckily the Jags were already in rebuild mode, so it shouldn’t be difficult a transition for the next permanent head coach the organization brings in. If the new coach pulls a Costanza and does the opposite of everything Meyer did, he should make it through at least his first season.