Welcome to The MMQB’s 2023 Bad Takes Week

MMQB writers and editors will once again be sharing their worst NFL takes all week. Surely, no one will mind.

Author:
Mitch Goldich
Updated:
Jul 21, 2023
Original:
Jul 17, 2023

Welcome back to The MMQB’s Bad Takes Week, a quadrennial (for now, I guess?) follow-up you didn’t know you needed. To offer a quick refresher: Back in the summer of 2019, we decided to round up our worst takes and dish them out for public consumption. Now, largely because it’s July, we’re doing it again.

We all have bad takes. That one idea we just know would improve our world, but is way too complicated to actually pull off. The contrarian argument that maybe begins as a performative defense of a silly idea but morphs into The One Hill You Would Die On.

And now, like a Summer Olympics or a presidential election, we’ve decided four years is an appropriate amount of time to pass before returning to the world’s stage.

We will have new posts every day this week, and we’ll update the bottom of this page with every link so you have them all in one place. The first one went live Monday morning, if you want to read Conor Orr’s harebrained idea for the NFL’s version of NBA Summer League—preseason football games in May.

We gave all our writers and editors a chance to weigh in. They could think as big or as small as they wanted, from the larger structure of the league to individual rules and game situations. At least one will be an argument over pedantry.

And if you are sitting there ready to make the joke that every week is Bad Takes Week at The MMQB, save it. We heard all those jokes four years ago.

A graphic of Bryce Young in a practice jersey, an NFL ref signaling a safety, Harrison Butker kicking a field goal and Mike McDaniel looking at a play sheet. — A preview of some takes our writers and editors will foist upon the world this week.
Jim Dedmon/USA TODAY Sports (Young); Bill Frakes/Sports Illustrated (referee); Michael Chow/The Republic/USA TODAY Network (Butker); Jasen Vinlove/USA TODAY Sports (McDaniel)

Before we get to the new takes, let’s have a look back. Here are links to all our bad takes from 2019.

Conor Orr: Eli Manning Shouldn’t Get a Pass for Ducking the Chargers in the 2004 Draft

Jonathan Jones: NFL Teams Should Uniformly Stop Retiring Jersey Numbers

Kalyn Kahler: The NFL Should Get Rid of Kickers, Who Are No Longer Relevant to the Modern Game of Football

Albert Breer: Let’s Build a Stadium in New Orleans That Can Host the Super Bowl Every Year

Andy Benoit: NFL Overtime Should Give First Possession to the Team With the Most Total Net Yards

Mitch Goldich: Actually, Ties in the NFL Are Fun

Mark Mravic: The NFL Should Get Rid of Replay Reviews Entirely

Jenny Vrentas: Make the NFL Pro Bowl a Flag Football Game

Gary Gramling: Death to the NFL Wild Cards

Some pretty bad takes in there! But one item, you may have noticed, stands out: Jenny Vrentas’s actually came true. Yes, in June 2019, she wrote, “We’ve joked for years that the Pro Bowl is a flag football game. Why not officially make it that way?”

Jenny, who is now a reporter for The New York Times, was reached for comment and she said, “I’d like to say it was a moment of profound prescience, but as many things in the NFL are, it was an obvious solution implemented years too late.”

Not to drum up any controversy, but one could imagine critics arguing the fact that her take came true means it wasn’t truly a bad take. Given a chance to respond to those strawmen, Jenny said, “I agree!!”

Jenny did note that at the time, writing in the piece: “This brings me to my take, which the editors at The MMQB assured me was bad enough for Bad Take Week despite my believing otherwise.”

So obviously the pressure is on, as I chaired this year’s official Bad Takes Committee. We tried to stick more strictly to bad takes. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as we did putting them together. And if one of them comes true within the next four years, maybe that’s a decent hit rate or maybe that’s how we’ll know it’s time to try this again.