Week 3, already has been energized by the professional debut of No. 1-overall draft pick Baker Mayfield, who came off the bench and led the Browns to their comeback win over the Jets on Thursday night.
But wait, there’s more. There some marquee matchups, highlighted by Bill Belichick’s Patriots taking on his former defensive coordinator Matt Patricia and the Lions on Sunday night, Ryan Fitzpatrick and the Bucs testing whether they’re for real when they play the Steelers on Monday night and a battle for L.A. with the Rams and Chargers facing each other.
With that, here’s a look at The Post’s High Five for Week 3:
Teacher vs. Pupil to watch
Bill Belichick is not new to this, but Matt Patricia is.
When Belichick’s Patriots play Patricia’s Lions on Sunday night in Detroit, it will mark the fifth chapter in Belichick’s “teacher vs. pupil” series during his wildly successful tenure in New England.
Patricia, who was Belichick’s defensive coordinator 2012-17, was hired as the Lions head coach in the offseason. Belichick is 11-4 against his former Patriots assistants and 13-8 overall.
He’s 5-0 against Bill O’Brien and the Texans, was 5-3 against Eric Mangini, who coached the Jets and Browns after leaving New England, 1-0 against Romeo Crennel and 0-1 against Josh McDaniels, who’s back with New England as the offensive coordinator after a short stint coaching the Broncos.
Belichick is also 2-2 against Nick Saban, who coached with him in Cleveland, and 0-2 against Al Groh, also a Browns assistant for him.
McDaniels told reporters in New England during the week that coaching against his mentor “was tough, because you know you came from a place that really gave you your foundation.”
“[Patricia] knows our system very well [but] you have to balance that out,’’ McDaniels said. “You can’t try to get every guy in your building to know everything that [the Patriots] are doing, or could do, or you could potentially overwhelm them. There’s a balance there.
“He knows a lot of us here, we know him, he’s a great friend and a good person and we’ve had a lot of great memories to work together over the years. I’m sure he’s going to be eager to have the opportunity to compete against some of the guys that he’s been with for a number of years, as we will. That’s what it’s all about.’’
Patricia, speaking on a conference this week, said, “You just try to keep it to the game” instead of thinking about going up against his former boss.
Making the matchup even more daunting for Patricia is the fact his team is 0-2 having allowed a league-worst 39 points a game and playing a Patriots team still ticked off at being manhandled by the Jaguars last Sunday.
Oh yes, and then there’s facing Tom Brady.
“[I have a] lot of obviously great memories and great situations where every single day it’s kind of going against each other,’’ Patricia said. “I think he’s just a phenomenal player and an even better person. So the practice part of it was always fun, for the love of the game. So it’s a little bit different now.”
Enigmatic WR to watch (Part I)
If this Josh Gordon thing is going to work anywhere it’s going to work in New England. The risk is worth the potential reward.
The Patriots last week gave up only a 2019 fifth-round draft pick to the Browns in exchange for the troubled receiver. Financially, they’re on the hook for only the remaining $697,058 on Gordon’s 2018 contract.
Whether he’s activated to play Sunday is anyone’s guess. The Patriots, of course, are nothing if not secretive.
When Gordon does play, though, the primary reason this might work is because the Patriots, more than any other team in the NFL based on their success and established structure within the organization, have more cache — both on the coaching staff and in the locker room — than any team in the league.
A player like Gordon is going to more apt to listen to Belichick and Brady than he might be with perhaps any other coach and quarterback in the league. Five Super Bowl rings carry a lot of clout.
If Gordon, whose troubles with substance abuse and lack of accountability over the course of his troubled career have been well-documented, is going to conform to organizational structure and be accountable, he has his best chance to do it while working with Belichick and Brady.
Some of these reclamation projects have worked out for New England and some have not. Should Gordon stay on the straight and narrow and work out for the Patriots, the combination of Brady-to-Gordon has potential to become among the most lethal in the game.
Gordon caught 87 passes for a league-high 1,646 yards and eight TDs in just 14 games in 2013, but in the four-plus years since, he’s been a ghost, playing in just 11 games since that 2013 season, having been suspended by the NFL for most of the past four seasons because of multiple drug violations.
Gordon, 27, missed three weeks of training camp this summer to undergo counseling and treatment, but he’s believed to be healthy and ready to play.
“Fundamentally, we wouldn’t want to bring a player onto our team that wouldn’t be able to help our team,” Belichick told WEEI radio early last week. “Obviously, they don’t all work out, but that’s the intent.”
Enigmatic WR to watch (Part II)
What a weird week it was for Antonio Brown, whose struggling 0-1-1 Steelers play at Tampa Bay on Monday night.
It began with the receiver not showing up for work Monday and getting into a Twitter spat with a former Steelers employee who questioned his worth to the team without quarterback Ben Roethlisberger. Brown tweeted, “Trade me let’s find out.’’
Brown eventually addressed his behavior later in the week in a session with reporters in Pittsburgh.
“Everyone in this locker room knows what I stand for, knows what I’m about,’’ he said. “I’m committed to this program and this organization. I’m fully here. I go to work every day, about my business, and I don’t take it for granted. My business is winning here. I come here to win. We ain’t winning, you damn right I’m pissed off.”
Steelers coach Mike Tomlin met with Brown on Tuesday and it’s believed Browns was fined for his Monday absence.
Brown said the words he had with offensive coordinator Randy Fichtner last week was part of frustration in last Sunday’s 42-37 loss to the Chiefs.
“I’m not on the sideline begging for the ball or making statements as you guys make,” Brown said. “I’m pissed off. We’re losing. We suck.”
Brown, who has 18 catches on a team-high 33 targets through two games, said his tweet was a byproduct of being ticked off that a former public relations staff member would be critical of him.
“As a competitor, man, I take this [stuff] serious,” he said. “This [stuff] is not a game to me. Cashing checks don’t even matter. I look at my assignments and my performance, that means a lot to me. When I go home, I weigh in on it. My family weighs in on it. To me, guys to think they can just disrespect me is out of order.”
Fitzmagic to watch
The Ryan Fitzpatrick detractors are waiting for the other shoe to drop. Many of those are fans of the Jets and Bills who Fitzpatrick, after great starts, ended up disappointing.
But through two games in place of suspended starting quarterback Jameis Winston, Fitzpatrick has been one of the stories of the NFL, leading the Buccaneers to a 2-0 record entering Monday night’s home showdown with the Steelers.
Fitzpatrick, on his seventh team in his 13th NFL season, was 27-of-33 for 402 yards, four TDs and one INT in last week’s win over the Super Bowl champion Eagles, whose defense the week before had held Atlanta’s Matt Ryan to 21-for-43 for 251 yards, no TDs and one INT. Fitzpatrick’ s performance followed a 400-yard passing game against the Saints in a Week 1 win.
On Sunday, Fitzpatrick joined Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes as two of the just three quarterbacks in NFL history with at least four TD passes in each of his team’s first two games of a season.
Winston’s three-game suspension ends after this week, but there already are Bucs offensive players calling for the team to stick with Fitz.
“It’s a quarterback’s dream to be in the huddle with those guys,’’ Fitzpatrick told reporters last week. “I’m getting to do it with the guys up front. I’m getting time to survey the field and pick and choose. It was another day. We had our struggles. It wasn’t perfect. There was a little bit more of a grind than last week. We had our lull for a little bit. But the guys stayed on it and made plays when they had to.’’
Struggling coach to watch
It has been a rough go for Jon Gruden in his return to coaching after 10 years in the TV booth. Gruden’s Raiders are 0-2 entering Sunday’s game at the 2-0 Dolphins, and with every passing moment he’s looking worse for his handling of the Khalil Mack situation.
Gruden, who had no interest in giving Mack the contract he wanted, traded him to Chicago, where the pass rushing demon has excelled already with two sacks, two forced fumbles and a pick-six.
The Raiders meanwhile have produced just two sacks as a team and were gashed for 168 rushing yards and two TDs by the Broncos last week.
“No, it doesn’t make me regret the trade,” Gruden said last week. “We made the trade. We made the trade, you know there’s going to be hindsight, 50-50, all that stuff, but we would have loved to have had him here. I’m not going to keep rehashing this.”
Mack — for whom Chicago traded two first-round picks, a third-round pick and a sixth-rounder — was signed to a six-year, $141 million contract that looks every bit a bargain a the moment.
“I would have loved to have coached him, loved to have had him here,” Gruden said. “But he’s not here, and you know, somebody’s got to step up. We’ve got to keep building our football team. We gotta do something, we gotta do something. We gotta get there. We gotta win some one-on-ones, maybe call some more blitzes. We gotta figure something out. We will.’’
Raiders fans still ticked off about parting ways with Mack are waiting.