Cheers to the bag-getting all-star that Davante Adams shoved, while Ron Rivera should save some blame for himself

Welcome to this week’s edition of Four Verts! A photographer is working his way into a nice payday and a couple of older coaches are having contrasting experiences this season. Let’s dive in.

Man what a come up for that guy who got hit by Davante Adams

Winning the lottery has to be an incredible feeling. It doesn’t even have to be the Super Duper Billion Dollar Hunger Games lottery, just a little something that can keep a person going for a few years. Not to go overboard in making light of the guy who got shoved by Las Vegas Raiders receiver Davante Adams, but wow what a time to fall into some serious cash.

Adams pushed a random guy on the ground who happened to be in his way after the Raiders lost a close game, where they blew a 17-0 lead to a divisional rival. It might be the accidental come up of the year. Adams seemed to immediately realize that he was in hot water because he apologized twice after the game. Not directly to the guy, but he did in the media conference following the game and again on Twitter, where he hoped that his message would reach the man he pushed.

This is one of the more hot-headed acts that we’ve recently seen on an NFL field. This is way different than what happened with Bobby Wagner and the guy who ran on the field during Monday Night Football last week. This was after the game, and the guy Adams shoved was just trying to get wherever he needed to be. Minding his own business and he got wrecked by an angry all-world athlete after the game.

It appears the guy who was on the receiving end of Adams’ rage knows the game plan for this situation. Get. The. Bag.

Our unlikely main character has filed a complaint with the police and released a statement on his health, saying that he preliminarily has non-life threatening injuries. That’s how you gotta play it. I'm not a doctor, but I'm going to guess that the man doesn’t have any non-life threatening injuries. He got up right after Adams shoved him, but it’s all about playing the game here. If he plays the game right, he can be in for a good chunk of change he didn’t previously have.

The Kansas City police department announced Wednesday that Adams was charged with misdemeanor assault. He’s not going to go to prison, he’s too rich for that, but it does set an annoying legal battle for him moving forward.

This act doesn’t mean that Adams is an irredeemable jerk or anything, he just made a bad mistake in a heated moment. It was dumb, but forgivable. It’s not like Adams is a player who has a history of this. We can move on from this story without making grand accusations about his character. He tried to apologize, even if the execution of that apology was similar to the Raiders’ last offensive play of Monday’s game. Luckily, no one was seriously injured, so we can examine where this is kind of funny.

Man, I hope Davante Adams doesn’t see this.

Ron Rivera is as much to blame for the Commanders struggles as Carson Wentz

The Washington Commanders (1-4) stink. That much is painfully obvious. They’ve barely put together a watchable product through the first five weeks of the season and it’s clear they’re one of the worst teams in the league.

When Commanders head coach Ron Rivera was asked about why they’ve fallen so far behind in the NFC East, Rivera blamed it on their quarterback play. Carson Wentz has largely been a disaster this year and he won’t be the franchise quarterback for the foreseeable future, but he isn’t the only one to blame for such a hapless season.

Rivera, the same person who made those comments, has a huge hand in how the Commanders' season has gone to this point. He walked back his comments about Wentz and said that he had a “bad day,” but this season has his stink all over it. Rivera has become too comfortable with familiarity over results. Jack Del Rio, the defensive coordinator who came to Washington with Rivera in 2020, still hasn’t figured out how to effectively defend the modern passing game. Andrew Norwell and Trai Turner played for Rivera in Carolina and have struggled when they’ve been on the field. Curtis Samuel hasn’t been the weapon the Commanders were expecting him to be when they signed him in free agency from the Panthers, either.

It's been staggering to watch Rivera’s unwillingness to drastically change his operations as he continues to fail in the same ways that led to his downfall in Carolina. This roster might be overrated in terms of the name-brand-talent-to-actual-production ratio, but they are playing way beneath the total sum of their parts. That comes back on the coach.

If Rivera wants to compare his situation to the rest of the division, he needs to start looking at the job that the coaches are doing. Philadelphia's Nick Sirianni has figured out how to coordinate one of the best offenses in the NFL by building it around the strengths and limitations of a unique quarterback in Jalen Hurts. The New York Giants' Brian Daboll has been scraping together extremely stressful wins, but he’s solved crucial puzzles at critical points in games — like how to run a quarterback-less offense in the NFL (thank you, Saquon Barkley). Dallas' Mike McCarthy and Dan Quinn have made life easy on Cooper Rush by limiting what he can do on offense and having a dominating defense on the back end.

The Commanders clearly have a quarterback problem, but the guy who isn’t providing any solutions on how to work around it shouldn’t be criticizing his starter for the entire world to hear. That street runs two ways. Rivera hasn’t been good enough at this job to be taking shots at anyone. His formula has become stale and unless he changes something about his approach, the Commanders will certainly have someone else leading their inevitable rebuild in 2023.

The Bills are just too good

The Bills are the scariest team in the NFL. It’s tough to fathom how damn good they’ve been without all of their available talent. Safety Micah Hyde is out for the season, while fellow safety Jordan Poyer has missed time along with defensive tackles Jordan Phillips and Ed Oliver. And cornerback Tre’Davious White hasn’t even played yet this season!

And Buffalo is still wiping teams off the map. Just total obliteration. The Bills have a plus-91 point differential through five games, absolutely blowing away the second-place Philadelphia Eagles and San Francisco 49ers, who are each plus-47. The Bills have one loss on the season, by two points to the Miami Dolphins, and that's become an outlier as the weeks progress. This team has three wins by at least three scores: 31-10 against the Rams; 41-7 against the Titans and 38-3 against the Steelers. Even if at least two of those teams have struggled this season, blowouts of that magnitude don’t happen often in the NFL.

The Eagles might have the sole undefeated record in the NFL, and they are assuredly a good team, but the Bills have put together another string of dominance. They even mounted a three-possession comeback against the Baltimore Ravens in a torrential downpour. Sure, this Ravens defense is not the most feared unit in the league, but storming back in a literal storm with Lamar Jackson on the other side of the field is a difficult task to complete.

The ceiling on these Bills is Super Bowl champion. It’s even easy to make the case that they underachieved last season. Losing to the Urban Meyer Jacksonville Jaguars was way beneath them. They seem determined to make sure a performance like that doesn’t happen again.

Josh Allen and head coach Sean McDermott have created a juggernaut, something that looks like it can go toe-to-toe with Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs, both in this Sunday's meeting and for the foreseeable future.

They took a dice roll when they drafted the raw, talented Allen out of Wyoming. He has become one of the most dynamic quarterbacks in NFL history. Allen has been so good that he has functioned as the focal point of their passing and rushing games — and the running game still has a lot of room to improve.

That’s the scary part of where the Bills are. As good as this team has been, they still have a whole lot of room to get better in regards to their personnel and how they call their offense. The secondary will get healthier and Ken Dorsey might be able to pick up some tricks on how to take some of the burden off Allen. For now, he doesn’t quite need it and the Bills are rolling.

Mahomes appears to be the only man who can feasibly stand in the way of the Bills owning home-field advantage throughout the AFC playoffs, and we’ll find out Sunday if he can cut through the best team in the NFL.

The Texans defense is … kind of not bad?

The Houston Texans haven’t gotten off to the start they were hoping for, but there has been one bright spot amid their 1-3-1 record: their defense is performing pretty well.

The circles of NFL evolution have come around and two-high defenses are back, and so is longtime two-high guru Lovie Smith, the Texans' head coach. According to Ben Baldwin of The Athletic, the Texans rank 14th in expected points added per play (0.022) this season — a big improvement from ranking 26th last season (0.077).

Defensive performance can be a product of who they're facing, but the Texans’ improvement on that side of the ball shouldn’t be glossed over. Their only bad game came against the Los Angeles Chargers. They’re fresh off of holding Trevor Lawrence and the Jacksonville Jaguars to just six points on the road — the same offense scored 38 on the Chargers a few weeks ago.

Perhaps the most interesting part is the Texans have done this with what looked like a square peg in a round hole. Derek Stingley Jr., the third overall pick in last spring's draft, is one of the better man coverage cornerbacks to come out in recent years, but Smith still has the stain of a failed experiment with Darrelle Revis during his time as head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. It was reasonable to doubt how Stingley would fit in Smith’s defense.

It’s been an amazing fit so far. Smith still plays a lot of Cover 2, but Stingley’s ball skills and range have made it an excellent fit for him. He has the burst and acceleration to clamp down on windows that quarterbacks think they can find along the sideline in Houston’s Cover 2 looks — and his athleticism has shown up on several pass breakups and his first career interception, which came against Jacksonville on Sunday.

It feels like the resurgence of two-high defenses and Cover 2 came around at the perfect time for Smith to again lead a quality defense. Or maybe the Texans have played a lot of crappy offenses to the season. (We all watched the Broncos-Colts Thursday night “game.”) The Texans played both of those offenses, if you’re really trying to poke a hole in the improvement they’ve shown so far.

Smith was looked at as a short-term head coaching option in the offseason after Houston's Josh McCown plans fell apart, but his form of defensive expertise has been a positive for a young defense that’s trying to find what works for it in the current NFL landscape. Tracking how this defense performs with Smith, Stingley and the rest of the Texans' pieces this season will be fascinating.