Tyler Shough Shines, Bijan Robinson ‘Struggles’ — and Week 2 Got the Reason Backwards

The winners-and-losers column has a reflex, and the reflex is lazy: reward the quarterback who moved the ball, bury the running back who didn’t, and call it a verdict on the men. This week that reflex reached for Tyler Shough and Bijan Robinson and got the reason backwards. One of them is being praised for something that was mostly his own doing. The other is being blamed for something that almost none of it was.

Start with Shough, because his is the harder story to see. He is not a highlight machine and he did not become one on Sunday. What he did instead was decide — quickly, coldly, correctly — again and again, in one of the loudest buildings in the sport, for a franchise that spent a whole season learning it could not trust the position. That is not a stat. It is a temperament, and temperament is the thing Shough has been forced to build the long way.

The tape says it plainly. He spread the ball to seven different receivers and never forced it into the noise; when Baltimore brought pressure he stayed on schedule instead of off it, and Chris Olave became the release valve who kept converting. Then, when the game asked for nerve rather than arm, Shough put his own body over the line on a fourth-down sneak and held the ball just long enough to break the plane — the single unglamorous act that decided the afternoon. NFL Research charted a passer who was, remarkably, calmer against the blitz than without it.

You only value that if you know what it cost. Shough is twenty-six and arrived here the slow way — Oregon, then Texas Tech, then Louisville — and Texas Tech is where the body kept breaking: a collarbone one year, a shoulder the next, a fibula that ended a third. Drafted in the second round, he did not even open last season as the starter; he inherited the job with the Saints buried and losing, at one and seven. A man who has spent that many autumns getting up off the turf does not flinch in a hostile stadium. He has been somewhere worse.

Now Robinson, filed under the opposite heading for a performance that was barely his. Nineteen touches, eighty-one yards, no daylight anywhere — that is not a back who struggled so much as a back who was stranded. Atlanta scored three points and gave the ball away four times; its quarterback room caved in until an undrafted rookie was throwing a pick-six on his first professional pass. Robinson did what the situation allowed, which was almost nothing, because the situation allowed almost nothing.

So the column is right about the outcomes and wrong about the causes, and the causes are the entire point. Shough was handed a functional plan and rewarded it with composure; Robinson was handed wreckage and got charged for the smoke. Credit the first man for his character — it is real, and it was earned in worse places than Baltimore. Do not mistake the second man’s box score for his talent, because right now the two have nothing to do with each other.

The uncomfortable part for Atlanta is that none of this is new. It is paying a running back at the very top of his market to run behind an offense that keeps folding in front of him, and no amount of touches fixes a huddle that cannot hold. New Orleans has the opposite problem, the good kind — a quarterback who keeps looking steadier than his draft slot every week he plays. One team found something on Sunday. The other keeps burying it.

Tags: NFL, Atlanta Falcons, Bijan Robinson, New Orleans Saints, Tyler Shough