Ranking the 9 dumbest mistakes from a Sunday in NFL Week 14 that we still kinda can’t believe

God bless the NFL. It gets a lot of flak, most of it well deserved, but as Week 14 reminded us, it knows how to put on a damn show.

In a few short hours on Sunday afternoon, we saw:

*inhales deeply*

That’s the good stuff. A mix of otherworldly talent, some good old-fashioned luck, and a little ineptitude to top it all off.

But let’s focus on the last part of that. As exhilarating as Sunday was, it wasn’t without its share of screwups, some of which could end up having playoff implications. You just gotta love this dumb, beautiful game.

Not that it mattered with Washington in Mark Sanchez-led free fall, but this was vintage Eli Manning. He made some inspired throws, elite even, including a beautiful deep shot to Corey Coleman for 30 yards two plays before this one.

That pass set up the Giants at Washington’s 3-yard line. After a run for no gain on first down, Washington came storming at Manning on the next play. He saw it coming and should’ve realized that there was no escape. Instead, he ran backward until someone finally clipped his ankle and brought him down for a loss of 14 yards.

The Giants had to settle for a field goal on that drive, putting them up 10-0. Against any other team this might have been a costly play. But Washington is, well, Washington. The Giants took a 34-0 lead into the locker room at the half.

Miami wasn’t really in a position to give up field position to a Patriots team who needed just one win to clinch the AFC East. Despite this, the Dolphins gifted New England a pair of possessions that began inside the Miami red zone thanks to their inability to block the Pats’ punt return unit.

The first block came on an Albert McClellan jail break that shot the ball into Ramon Humber’s hands.

That gave the Patriots the ball at the Miami 18. Five plays later, Tom Brady would hit Julian Edelman to give the visitors a 13-7 lead.

One quarter later, McClellan broke through again, earning what’s sure to be a king’s ransom of butterscotch candy when old man Belichick comes around with his weekly awards this week.

This time, the Patriots were unable to turn the Dolphins’ special teams failure into points because [skip to No. 4 on this list].

Results were mixed for the Bills’ rookie quarterback Sunday. He ran for a 101 yards and a touchdown, but throwing the ball he was only able to muster two bad picks. But at least having the quarterback throwing the ball, even poorly, is somewhat defensible. Trying to purloin the Philly Special, almost getting the kid killed, and wasting his best asset in a goal-line situation is not.

Leading 14-6 with a third-and-3 in the second quarter at the Jets’ 13-yard line, the Bills dialed up the Philly Special, you know the one where the quarterback goes out to catch the pass.

It didn’t work. Allen ended up hitting the ground hard in the end zone, one of many hits Allen absorbed on the day, but the rare hit that wasn’t coming from a pass rusher.

He’s lucky he didn’t get hurt. Worse, it was a bad play call. When your quarterback can run as well as Allen and you only need 3 yards, there are better plays to run.

It proved to be a turning point for the Bills. They had been moving the ball well on that drive and had to settle for a field goal. Losing the game 27-23, it’s the kind of decision that could have cost them the game.

First came a Matt Ryan unintentional backward pass:

That seemingly pushed the Falcons out of field goal range on a 26-degree day in Green Bay where a frozen football proved challenging for both sides. Dan Quinn wasn’t ready to accept that; instead, he trotted veteran kicker Matt Bryant out to attempt a 53-yard kick. As he took the field, Fox announcers ominously opined that the 43-year-old was not only dealing with a back injury, but that he hadn’t made a kick from that distance kicking to this side of the field during pregame warmups.

So that made it a little less surprising when this happened.

Bryant didn’t just miss the kick — he left it so short it barely cleared the end zone after one bounce. Green Bay took over at its own 43-yard line, which is good. The Packers then gained -10 yards with their newfound field position, which is extremely bad.

If Philbin wanted to make a statement that he was nothing like the man he replaced, recently deposed head coach Mike McCarthy, he sure picked a funny way to do it. McCarthy infuriated armchair quarterbacks by flat out refusing to challenge plays — he only did it once this season. Philbin threw TWO challenge flags within the first 90 seconds of his interim coaching career.

Both challenges were questionable catches by Falcons receiver Julio Jones, representing 47 yards in total. The first one actually seemed like a decent call to challenge. It looked like Jones never really had possession. The second one was iffy too, but the side judge was standing right there to make call.

Philbin probably isn’t going to get the full-time coaching gig in Green Bay once the season ends, but he at least put his name in the record book — the fastest instance of a team using both its challenges ever.

Brady did a lot of great things against the Dolphins. He threw for a season-high 358 yards and three touchdowns as he led his team to a 33-28 lead with 16 seconds left on the clock.

But the Dolphins were able to pull off a miraculous comeback win on Sunday — a comeback that, at best, should have pushed the game to overtime if Brady hadn’t made a costly mistake two quarters earlier.

A blocked punt gave Brady the ball at the Miami 15-yard line with 30 seconds to play in a 27-21 game. He drove his offense to the Miami 2 with 14 seconds to go, burning his team’s last timeout in the process. But Brady didn’t realize the Pats had no way to stop the clock facing third-and-goal, and when he took a sack with nine seconds left in the half, New England was powerless to freeze time and find a way to get Stephen Gostkowski onto the field for a chip-shot field goal. Instead, the clock ran out and New England was forced to watch as a possession that drove deep into the Miami red zone ended with zero points.

It was an uncharacteristic mistake from the veteran quarterback, but he owned up to it after the game.

Between Brady’s error and Gostkowski’s missed extra point and 42-yard field goal, the Patriots left seven points on the board in a game that may have torpedoed their quest to secure home-field advantage in the postseason. That’s not the Patriot Way (tm).

Washington signed Mark Sanchez a day after losing Alex Smith to a broken leg. He was just supposed to be a backup to Colt McCoy. Why did they do it? Ostensibly because of a familiarity offensive coordinator Matt Cavanaugh had with him from his days as the quarterbacks coach with the Jets (yeah, that worked well).

When McCoy broke his leg two weeks after Smith, Sanchez became the starter. And it went exactly as you might have expected it to — poorly. Thanks to Sanchez’s work with a coach who was so familiar with him, Washington was trailing the Giants 40-0 at the half when they replaced Sanchez for the equally impressive if slightly less infamous Josh Johnson.

Oh sure, they could have sign Colin Kaepernick, but head coach Jay Gruden had some bullshit excuse for why they didn’t.

With or without Kaepernick though, it’s well established that the Washington franchise is a bad organization all around, from the team’s name to anonymously trashing Kirk Cousins so they could lowball him. Let’s not forget the whole Reuben Foster signing a couple weeks ago either.

That this team is rotting from the inside is one reason this mistake isn’t ranked No. 1 on our list. The other is that Washington was cooked the second Smith went down, while the next two teams are trying to nail down a playoff spot.

If Ben Roethlisberger could have returned from his rib injury before the Steelers were trailing the Raiders, why didn’t he? According to Mike Tomlin, they didn’t want to interrupt the “rhythm and flow” from the Josh Dobbs experience. (Dobbs threw for 24 yards and an interception.)

Whoops. Had Roethlisberger gone back in a “series or so sooner,” as Tomlin suggested he could have, they might not have had to worry about the Raiders making a comeback in the first place.

Once Big Ben re-entered the game, he led the Steelers on a six-play, 75-yard touchdown drive and another drive that could’ve tied the game, but didn’t.

Of course, you can also partially blame kicker Chris Boswell, who missed a 40-yarder to tie it at the end of regulation. He slipped on the shitty field though, another potential scapegoat.

We broke down this decision in detail here. But it’s such an uncharacteristic mistake for the Patriots to make, it has to be pointed out again. The Patriots really thought the Dolphins were going to try a Hail Mary ... from 71 yards away with Ryan Tannehill. That’s why Gronk was in there, as he usually is to go for the jump ball on those plays.

Bill Belichick defended the decision after the game:

“Yeah, well they could throw it deeper,” Belichick said after the game when asked why Gronkowski was in the game. “They could have run the Desperado-type play, which is kind of an in between 20-yard pass, then it turned into a Desperado.”

Or maybe he just didn’t give the lateral much chance of working. Either way, the decision to put Gronk on the field instead of Devin McCourty, a surer tackler than Gronk, ended up costing them the game. But at least Gronk got to see a 69-yard touchdown nice and up close.

It’s not often we get to put the Patriots at the top (bottom?) of this list. So let’s just savor it before they win their next five straight games and go to the Super Bowl again.