NFL schedule and results: Complete coverage of Week 9

Cowboys owner and general manager Jerry Jones could not declare definitively whether he expects Romo to start next week, but he did say, “we certainly wouldn’t put him on that plane and take him to London and fly over and fly back if we weren’t planning on him playing,” per David Moore of the Dallas Morning News.

Jones even offered up his wife’s first-class seat on the flight to Romo, bumping her to coach. “Gene will sit up in the bulkhead. Romo will lounge on the way over,” he supposedly joked.

Bengals player Devon Still took the time yesterday to pay tribute and offer support to Lauren Hill and her inspirational story on Sunday. He, along with everyone else in America, was rooting for Hill.

A great gesture from the man who has captured the hearts of NFL fans everywhere (and Leah, too!)

Shaun Suisham and Brad Wing are our favorite football superfriends. One is a mild-mannered kicker from Canada, the other a cocksure punter from Australia. If they’re needed in a fight they’ll be there, even if they need to tag team a single Ravens player.

Everyone is a lot bigger than them, OK? You mess with one specialist you mess with every specialist.

SIZZLE! SHRED SO HARD UNIVERSITY

(Actually, this is pretty lame air guitar. Who plays air rhythm guitar?)

There’s something inherently sack-able about Joe Flacco. It’s not that we want to see him hurt, he’s an elite quarterback after all -- it’s just that he tends to live his life upright. This works really well in most situations, but being really tall and not bending at the waist makes for a long way to fall.

Lattimore was once thought of as a top NFL prospect before suffering a second knee injury. He opted to head to the NFL a year early despite the injury and was selected in the fourth round of the 2013 NFL Draft by the 49ers. San Francisco had a deep roster and plenty of draft picks, so the selection made sense for the future. The 49ers didn’t need to rush Lattimore and could give him time to fully recover. Lattimore sat out all of last season and opened this year on the physically unable to perform list. He was only recently medically cleared and practiced for the first time this week. He felt pain in the knee after practicing twice, leading him to contemplate his future.

A standout at South Carolina, Lattimore was the Sporting News Freshman of the Year and a second-team All-American in 2010, with 1,197 yards rushing and 19 touchdowns. After tearing a knee ligament in 2011, he returned for the 2012 season and was playing well before dislocating his right knee in a game against Tennessee.

The Pittsburgh Steelers set a season record on Sunday night: The longest distance needed for a first down. Yes, that isn’t a typo, they needed 39 yards to convert on fourth down. How does a team reach this point? Well it’s simple, completely fail to block for your QB.

19 yards lost to sacks.

We can forgive a player not knowing his quarterback is injured, but when you’re the left tackle ... that’s pretty bad.

Expect Peters’ “awareness” rating in Madden to take a strong hit this week.

1) Well that was kind of disappointing

Last season’s regular season bout produced a big Patriots comeback and an overtime classic. This year’s version ... well it was kind of dull. Neither quarterback was at his best (though the scorecard goes to Brady), and instead we got a lopsided outcome that turned on Broncos mistakes more than anything. The Patriots capitalized, certainly, but the story was more that the Broncos didn’t show up. Manning was relatively shaky, both running games were moribund, and Wes Welker hurt his team with a bad drop that turned into an interception. Welker was targeted eight times in the game, and managed just three catches for 31 yards off those looks.

Final stats: Tom Brady, 33-53, 333 yards, four TDs, one INT

Peyton Manning: 34-57, 438 yards, two TDs, two INTs

Bill Belichick doesn’t care about your rules, written or unwritten. Is it completely bad form to try a ludicrous fake play when you’re up by 22 points with five minutes left? Yes, and Belichick does not care at all.

This kind of fake is impressive in its audacity. It’s not so much a football fake as a line shift in hockey. It’s weird to see the Patriots burn this at a meaningless point in the season, but Belichick has never let future concern get in the way of trying to make an opponent look foolish.

Trailing 13-10 with under five seconds to go and facing third-and-goal, the 49ers called a QB sneak for Colin Kaepernick ... and chaos ensued:

The ball came out of Kaepernick’s hands at some point, and the Rams emerged from the pile with it, with the refs ruling it a fumble recovered by the Rams. Replays showed Kaepernick struggling to hold the ball off the snap, eventually taking control of it, and lunging forward with the ball before losing it as he went toward the ground.

That’s ... how ... do you do that:

The Rams’ ensuing field goal made it 13-10, which ended up being the final scoreline, so you could argue this shank helped cost San Francisco the game.

Following Washington’s loss to Minnesota Sunday, Griffin’s first game since a Week 2 ankle injury, Gruden called McHenry’s report “totally false,” according to The Washington Post’s Dan Steinberg.

On the Comcast SportsNet postgame show following the loss, Griffin also responded to the report:

When refs announced an unsportsmanlike conduct on 49ers WR Bruce Ellington for “throwing the football at” a member of the Rams after fair catching a punt, we thought we were going to see something juicy on the replay. We saw this:

I think everybody agrees that athletes shouldn’t be allowed to angrily chuck things at their opponents, including the ball of the game they were playing. As enjoyable as it was to watch Chris Dudley flip out and hurl a ball at Shaq’s back after getting dunked on, we can all agree it’s unsportsmanlike and uncalled for and could lead to unnecessary injury, if the ball is thrown hard enough.

The Raiders’ first touchdown of the day in Seattle came on the ground, quite literally:

No one ever really had possession there, but various players from both teams booted the loose ball far enough that Oakland was able to dive on it for a score. That counts!

It’s 27-7 New England. Tom Brady and Peyton Manning have remarkably similar lines -- both have thrown for 178 yards on 27 throws, Brady with 18 completions, Manning with 16 -- but Brady has two TDs and no picks, while Manning has no TDs and an interception.

(That said, Manning has led comebacks before, we hear.)

Any field goal that hits the uprights gets referred to as a “doink.” However, this Brandon McManus 41-yard field goal attempt ended up being short enough to hit the crossbar, and DOIIIIINK:

Plus the camera shake!

What the helllll was Tavon Austin thinking? He chose to catch a short field goal attempt, took a step out of the end zone, then ...

It was baaaarely not a safety because his forward progress before he got tackled ...

Julian Edelman set a new Patriots record with his fourth career punt return for a touchdown. It’s likely he won’t forget the wild play it happened on either.

Broncos punter Britton Colquitt dropped the snap, the Patriots somehow failed to block it -- then New England sprang Edelman with a possible block in the back. Odd all around, but it counted.

It took a while for Richard Sherman to get his first interception of the season, but it was worth the wait. If this is the kind of return he was holding in his back pocket, we’ll forgive that it took nine weeks to get here.

The tip drill is nothing new. The one-man tip drill? That’s neat. A one-man tip drill for a pick-six? Unbelievable.

We all knew Bruce Irvin was astoundingly athletic, but he raised the bar on this play.