The most unpredictable trends and moments from Week 6

While Osweiler might have made more throws than just about anyone would have expected on Sunday, we can probably let some air out of his performance. His two interceptions on either side of halftime, both to Bears cornerback Kyle Fuller, were straight out of the Bad Brock playbook. They set up the Bears for one touchdown and cost the Dolphins a shot at three points, and the resulting 10-point swing was enough to help push the game into overtime.

More notably, the 6-foot-7 Super Bowl winner was helped out by a ferocious game from Miami's receivers. With Osweiler checking to screens throughout the game, the Dolphins racked up 274 yards after catch on Sunday, most notably on Albert Wilson's two long touchdown catches. Miami's YAC total was the most for any quarterback in a single game this season and the fifth most of the past decade. In terms of percentage of passing yards, 72.1 percent of Osweiler's yards were generated by his receivers after the catch, which is the 10th-highest total for a passer with 40 or more attempts over that time frame.

The Dolphins have placed an emphasis on receivers who can create after the catch -- they were fourth in average YAC heading into the game -- but this was an incredible outlier of a performance against a team that had been fifth best in the league at preventing yards after catch heading into the game. The Dolphins routinely made what had been the league's best pass defense by DVOA flail after the catch. With Osweiler getting the ball out quickly and Khalil Mack slowed by an ankle injury and successful double-teams, the Bears failed to record a sack and knocked down the quarterback just four times on 44 dropbacks. If you don't rush the quarterback and don't tackle after he gets the ball out, even Brock Osweiler can beat you.

The Dolphins would have the most terrifying red zone defense in football

What the Dolphins are doing in the red zone is unsustainable ... except they keep sustaining it. The goal of a good red zone defense is to keep teams out of the end zone and hold opposing offenses to field goals. Doing that was enough to win the game for the Patriots on Sunday night. Opposing offenses have nine touchdowns against just three field goals when they get into Miami's red zone this season, the sort of ratio a defensive coordinator would hate to see next to his team.

What makes this notable, though, is that the Dolphins have faced 21 red zone possessions. The average NFL team outside of South Florida turns about 12 percent of opposing red zone possessions into stuffs, which are when it doesn't allow any points. That average team has two stuffs this season. Miami has nine. Opposing offenses have failed to score on more than 42 percent of their trips inside the promised land against the Dolphins.

As you saw on Sunday, they are mostly doing this by creating takeaways. They forced two turnovers inside their own 5-yard line, with Jordan Howard losing a fumble at the 1-yard line before the Dolphins picked off a terrible pass from Mitchell Trubisky in the end zone for a touchback. While Drake's fumble at the 1-yard line took much of the postgame attention, Howard's fumble earlier in the game was equally as painful.

It's going to be tough for the Dolphins to keep this up, but I would have said that before the Bears game, and Miami keeps on going. Over the past decade, no team has racked up more than nine red zone takeaways over a full season, with the 2012 Patriots topping those charts. The 2017 Dolphins went all season without a red zone turnover. Outside of their own red zone this season, the Dolphins have essentially a league-average takeaway rate at 2.5 percent. (The average is 2.4 percent.) If Miami was really a takeaway factory, you'd figure it would start doing it before getting into the shadows of its own end zone.

Even if the red zone defense doesn't quite stay this good, though, the Dolphins have a talented enough secondary to keep taking away passes and are in the thick of the AFC playoff picture. Even after losing a heartbreaker to the Bengals last week, the Dolphins still have a 21 percent shot of making a return trip to the postseason, according to FPI. With the Lions, Texans and Jets on the schedule over the next three weeks, the Dolphins could start a winning streak.

The Texans would be in first place in the AFC South

As someone who was quite optimistic about the Texans heading into the season, it wouldn't have shocked me to believe that Bill O'Brien's team would be atop the AFC South and in position for a playoff berth after six weeks. I'm also not going to pretend for a moment that my optimism has been warranted. This has been a bad team through those six weeks, one that has managed to cobble together a three-game winning streak on the generosity and mistakes of its opponents.

The Texans lost to the Patriots in Foxborough during the opener. Here's what has happened over the five ensuing games:

• Facing a Titans team without Marcus Mariota or either of their starting offensive tackles in Week 2, the Texans laid an egg, allowing Tennessee to score a touchdown on a fake punt in which the Texans simply didn't cover the gunner on one side of the field.

• In Week 3, the Texans allowed Eli Manning to go 25-of-29 for 297 yards with two touchdowns in their home opener. They drove inside the New York 35-yard line seven times and came away with three field goals before two late touchdowns to make the score look close. Deshaun Watson also was picked in the end zone by Alec Ogletree.

• To get their first win in Week 4, the Texans needed to be gifted a short field by Colts coach Frank Reich, who curiously chose to go for it on fourth-and-4 from his own 43-yard line in overtime with 27 seconds to go.

• In Week 5, the Texans failed on a brutal fourth-and-goal playcall early in the game, dropped a pick-six, blew their clock management late before Watson threw a horribly timed interception, and then needed Cowboys coach Jason Garrett to punt on fourth-and-1 from the Houston 42-yard line in overtime before a catch-and-run from DeAndre Hopkins set up a game-winning field goal.

On Sunday, the Texans comfortably led Josh Allen and the Bills 10-0 at halftime. Buffalo had 69 offensive yards, while the Texans were about to get the football. A score might have put the game out of reach. Instead, the Texans racked up as many first downs as giveaways (two) over their next five drives, scoring zero points in the process.

On their sixth and final drive of the half, Watson fumbled again, but the Texans recovered. Houston then rode Hopkins and a 41-yard pass interference penalty to the Buffalo 1-yard line, only to be pushed backward to the 8-yard line by a run for minus-1 yard, a pass for minus-1 yard and a false start. Watson missed a third-down throw, and the Texans -- now trailing 13-10 -- had no choice but to kick a game-tying field goal. And then Nathan Peterman happened ...

Brock Osweiler and Nathan Peterman would throw touchdown passes within an hour of one another

The Bills got back in the lead because the Texans couldn't stop Peterman. The oft-ridiculed Bills backup came in for an injured Josh Allen, who took big hits on consecutive plays and suffered what appeared to be an elbow injury. (Allen was not injured as a runner, but it's worth mentioning here as an aside: The Bills need to teach him how to slide. It's one thing for a quarterback to lay out for a touchdown, and Allen has been effective as a runner, but he's taking unnecessary hits while scrambling for meaningless yards on second downs in the middle of the field.)

Peterman played well enough for the Bills to take the lead. After the Bills kicked a field goal to make it 10-6, Peterman picked up a short field and converted a third-and-11 with a perfect fade to Zay Jones to give the Bills the lead. On the next drive, Peterman converted a third-and-3 and a third-and-15 to take valuable time off the clock while the Texans trailed before the Bills eventually punted with 4:08 left.

You know what happened next, of course. After the Texans tied the score, the Bills took over with 1:34 left and two timeouts. With the Houston defense totally unafraid of Peterman making accurate throws downfield, the Pittsburgh product threw a brutal pick-six to Jonathan Joseph to hand the Texans a 20-13 lead. The Bills even had a chance to tie the score with 1:16 to go, but Peterman badly overthrew LeSean McCoy in the middle of the field on a checkdown for his second interception in 12 pass attempts.

At this point, Peterman is approaching historically bad levels. In an era in which quarterbacks throw interceptions less frequently than ever before, Peterman has thrown 10 picks on 82 pass attempts across the regular season and playoffs. Tyrod Taylor, whom Peterman replaced last season, has thrown just seven picks on 541 passes since the start of 2017. Alex Smith has thrown seven interceptions on 709 pass attempts over that same time frame. Smith could throw interceptions on each of his next 90 pass attempts and still have a better interception rate than Peterman since the start of 2017.

The Jaguars would allow 40 points to the Cowboys

If I told you the Cowboys would have put up 40 against Jacksonville, you might have imagined a scenario in which Blake Bortles perhaps literally self-destructed and left Dallas with a bunch of short fields, or a game in which Ezekiel Elliott threatened the single-game rushing record. Neither really happened. The Jaguars turned the ball over only twice in Sunday's 40-7 loss in Arlington, Texas, and Zeke racked up only 106 yards on 24 carries, though the Cowboys ran for 206 total yards.

Instead, the Cowboys pressed small advantages across the board. They recovered all three of the game's fumbles. Dak Prescott threw for only 183 yards, but he racked up 82 rushing yards and a touchdown to go with two passing scores. The only receiver Prescott hit more than twice was slot receiver Cole Beasley, who took advantage of blown coverages and mismatches against the likes of Tyler Patmon to rack up nine catches, 101 yards and two touchdowns.

Since their triumphant win over the Patriots to go to 2-0, the Jaguars have faltered. They're 1-3, and the offense has been a bigger problem than the defense. Since he threw for 376 yards and four touchdowns during the Week 2 win over the Patriots, Bortles has spent the next month struggling to find any traction. He has posted a 75.5 passer rating over the past four games, with four touchdowns against six interceptions. He offered virtually nothing in the 9-6 loss in Week 3 to the Titans, when even a decent game would have resulted in victory given that an injured Marcus Mariota could barely spin the ball.

Bortles racked up meaningless yardage against the Chiefs in Week 5, so when the situation-adjusted Total QBR algorithm looks at his numbers, it pegs Bortles for a mark of 37.1 over the past month, placing him between C.J. Beathard and Josh Allen in 30th place. He's looking up at both Eli Manning and Case Keenum over that stretch.

You can blame the injuries along the offensive line for those problems, and Bortles is indeed taking heat. He's being pressured on 33.7 percent of his dropbacks, which is 25th in the league. The line isn't about to get any healthier. Jacksonville is already on its third-string left tackle with Cam Robinson and Josh Wells on injured reserve, and it signed colossal Giants washout Ereck Flowers to potentially fill in once he learns the playbook. Andrew Norwell, Brandon Linder and A.J. Cann have all missed time with injuries.

The defense will eventually help out with takeaways. The Jags forced turnovers in 17 of their 19 games last season, missing out only on a pair of midseason games against the Colts and Bengals. Over the past month, they've forced only two takeaways, both coming against Mahomes during the loss to the Chiefs. The Jags forced 17 fumbles last season -- six from Yannick Ngakoue alone -- but had created only one fumble all season before the Cowboys fumbled twice on Sunday. Jacksonville didn't recover either of those fumbles, but you can't recover a fumble without creating one. The Jags need to start creating takeaways and protecting Bortles to get back atop the AFC South.

Philip Rivers would be a viable MVP candidate

Let's finish up with Rivers, who seemed to get painted with the same brush as Eli Manning over the past few years in terms of throwing his team into two or three losses per season. Over his past 16 games, Rivers has a case as the best quarterback in the league. His numbers are instructive. Since Week 7 of last season, Rivers is 352-for-539 passing for 4,584 yards with 33 touchdowns and eight interceptions. His 106.2 passer rating is third among qualifying starters over that time frame behind Drew Brees and Jared Goff, while he trails only Carson Wentz with a Total QBR of 74.1. (Wentz, at 74.4, has taken 114 fewer dropbacks.)

As always, Rivers has done that while shuffling through offensive pieces. His offensive line is already beat up. Hunter Henry is out for the year. Travis Benjamin is missing. Keenan Allen has only one touchdown. His wideouts dropped catchable balls that cost the Chargers 115 yards and two touchdowns in the Week 1 loss to the Chiefs. Melvin Gordon dropped a red zone pass into Christian Kirksey's hands for an interception in Sunday's 38-14 rout of the Browns, Rivers' third pick of the year.

Rivers is always going to inspire memes. Nobody else in the league is like him or could imitate him if they tried. You couldn't -- and wouldn't -- teach someone to emulate that looping passing motion Rivers has made work for more than a decade. Outbursts and angry facial expressions that might seem corny or manufactured from other quarterbacks feel genuine when they're coming from Rivers six or seven times a game. Some quarterbacks scare you when they look downfield and fire. The viewer at home can sense the open receiver before the camera even whips downfield. Rivers is the only quarterback who gives you that same feeling on shallow crosses.

The Chargers are 11-5 over those last 16 games. Their five losses are to the stiffest competition. In 2017, they lost to the Patriots in Foxborough, the Jaguars in Jacksonville, and the Chiefs in Kansas City in their one truly disastrous game of the span, when Rivers threw three picks. This season, their losses have come to the 6-0 Rams and the 5-1 Chiefs. If they keep beating the teams they're supposed to beat, the Chargers will be back in the postseason. And if he keeps throwing four touchdowns for every interception, Rivers should be considered for MVP.