NFL Hope For The Future Rankings: 2025 (I—X)

Just who do you think you are?

Nothing so stimulates a fanbase with bonhomie and rosy-tinted vistas of the future as the blissful ephemera of the NFL schedule’s midsummer motionlessness. Unless of course you root for a team whose rookies, free agents, or veterans have run afoul of the law or of their coaching staffs due to silly, easily avoidable, usually inexcusable stupidities such as not backing fast-enough away from the recreational explosives we detonate to celebrate our independence. Or if you are a supporter of a traditionally impecunious outfit who cannot seem, impoverished and near-skint as all NFL owners are, to find it in their monetarily-constituted hearts to guarantee certain salary aspects of a fresh-faced rookie. Or if you are a fan of another Ohioan franchise whose run of dismaying player alliances and allegations of disgraceful criminal conducts by said players only ever seems to surplus itself and never subside. There is light from above for all of these types, though, if they choose to look – the clouds may be just a bit thicker in the swirl of the firmament than for a team with Jayden Daniels or Josh Allen.

We need to look past a few different things here. For one, we need to divorce ourselves from the warm, enlivening glow that ensconces the teams who have done wonderfully most recently. Namely, those two teams we just saw in the Super Bowl. Yes, yes, don’t worry, Philadelphia Touchdown Brothers or Chiefasholic legal team, your enshrined idols are represented well and highly on this list. But are they as high as they possibly could be? You’ll have to read on to find out, but have forbearance: this list is purely based on what we have at hand, information-wise, as training camps proceed and the preseason begins to inch-by-inch illumine bits and pieces of what the teams that we know well from 2024 will look like in 2025. How the hell are we halfway through the decade, anywho? Looking back at the half-decade that has now come and mostly gone, we can draw a few conclusions about teams that stabilized around the high-water mark of Super Bowl competition and triumph in these past few years - in particular, whether the frequent flyers to the venue that hosts the big game are still firmly within their “window,” or whether they have begun to, are clearly in the process of, or have categorically completed the inevitable defenestration that follows the closing of said championship window. (Spoiler alert - good teams usually stay good.) It would be a deliciously compelling and indiscriminately gripping turn of the page if the Eagles and Chiefs were to suffer hellacious hangovers from their Super Bowl junket and miss the playoffs entirely, opening the way for teams like, say, the Commanders and Broncos to seize the ruler-less reins of the division, but c’mon - you remember the 2022 offseason. You don’t bet against the Chiefs. And unless you like losing money, or are unswervingly certain that the 2025 Eagles are about to compose a stuporous symphony in imitation of teams like the 2016 Broncos or 2013 Ravens who failed to reach the playoffs in their post-SB seasons, you don’t bet against the defending champs. Even if you try to factor in the intangible facts that this team under Sirianni - and before, under Pederson, during the embryonic iterations of the Jalen Hurts Offense and the sagging senescence of the Carson Wentz Offense - has collapsed after prolonged stretches of brilliance in the past, it just doesn’t seem likely that a team with the OL and DL of the Eagles could up and fail to qualify. Lots to look forward to, Bird Gang.

But what about the other teams? There’s 30 of them, after all, and it’s not the case that anyone who doesn’t own a Patrick Mahomes or Saquon Barkley jersey has naught but everlasting despair to look forward to over the next season and beyond. Recall how close the Rams were to plopping their own Sol and Rams Royal-coded throne cushion atop the throne which eventually proved to belong to the Eagles, in the darker, drabber, but no less majesty-bespattered colors of Midnight Green, black and white. Recall how well the Packers matched up with the Eagles in their Week 1 Brazilian deathmatch and again at season’s end (at least for the Packers), keeping the teams’ Wild Card game within one score until halfway through the fourth quarter (it would have stayed within reach for the cheesemen even longer if they’d done the smart things and gone for 2 down 13, but we’re not going to get into that here). Recall, indeed, how the Commanders defeated, yes, defeated the Eagles in Week 16 despite a banner day from their free agency halfback that looked like it might equal or exceed the single-game rushing record early on. All these teams have clear paths upward, if their good players stay mostly good and their young players continue to progress. At least, that’s what fans of these teams should think. Yeah, yeah, we know that, when it’s all said and done, a lot of the teams that were good last year won’t be good this year. Rookies who flashed promise in year 1 will fail to build on their dynamic debuts, players with a few years under their belt who supporters have been clamoring for to “take the next step” will prove that they’ve either hit a ceiling or already begun descending like a helium-leaking balloon from their careers’ apogee, and elder veterans who have authored seasons of splendor and excellence will begin the slow or swift decline towards retirement. In the back of all fans’ minds, and a little less far back in the mind of us at Personal Vowels, this implicit darkener of aforesaid rosy vistas lurks, fattening on eventuality and contingency and waiting with arachnoid probity to burst forth as losses pile up and rosters show themselves to be less than the sum of their parts on paper. We know this will happen to fans of a fair share of franchises in 2025 - but it isn’t worth dwelling on in July or August. Or, for that matter, most of September. Let the solstice pass before administering rites of any finality upon the warm body of your team of choice.

“Summer is not for rules,” said John Facenda once upon a time. During the season that this quote was spoken, some fifty years ago in 1975, a number of parallels to 2025 could be observed - the future can echo in the past, as the past echoes in future. A multi-time champion was entering a year with a chance to three-peat, only to finally fall to a superior opponent who had comparable experience but far less tread on the tires (Chiefs-Eagles, meet Dolphins-Raiders); a contained but organized labor dispute led to disruptions in the usual, established cadence of camp routine (in 1974, a veterans’ strike aimed at rectifying a convoluted and now defunct aspect of pre-1993 free agency, in 2025 a rash of second-round picks failing to promptly sign their contracts sight-unseen as a tactic in securing, 100% successfully, more guaranteed money for their rookie contracts’ durations); in the league at large, a passing game that seemed to be falling further and further behind an ascendant group of passing defenses; and a surging focus on the importance of running backs, in 2025 as a reaction to a protracted period of seemingly intentionally-enforced marginality, in 1974 as a continuation of the way football had more or less always been, spiked by massive seasons from the game’s greats (Henry & Barkley, meet Simpson and Harris). Entering the following season, a new champion was crowned (Eagles ‘24, Steelers ‘74) and a new dynasty seemed in the offing. But someone placing a friendly wager in 1975 would have been just as ill at ease betting against Miami having a chance at taking a third Lombardi in four years as that person’s son or grandson would have doing much the same with the Chiefs of Andy Reid and Patrick Mahomes. And in both of these years, as in all years, if they wanted to look beyond the two most recent Super Bowl winners, they wouldn’t have had to look far for other good teams on the rise. Hope is important in football. And many teams have many reasons to be hopeful. Let’s look at with whom and where the most hopefulness resides.

It is truly few teams in number that can lay claim to the magnificent adage “Hope Springs Eternal.” But these Commanders are one such band of brothers. Following what can only be described as the single greatest rookie quarterback season in NFL history – maybe with a caveat or two regarding the “Super Bowl Era” lest we are accused of impugning the legacy of another capital city passer from the late 1930’s – the Commanders seem firmly fixed on a trajectory pointing upwards towards ever-greater conquests. True, the last we saw of this team was a ground-game-driven bludgeoning at the hands of Team II on this list, but even getting to the point where they had the privilege of such a playoff pulverization deserves special mention. How many teams ever win multiple playoff games in a season? And how many have ever done so with a rookie quarterback – a person who usually gets better at their craft in the coming seasons?

The answer to that first query is 158 teams, over all of NFL history, and the answer to the second is 4 – over all of NFL history. And Jayden Daniels almost doubled-up the nearest competition on completions, to say nothing of the frankly spectacular 5:1 TD:INT ratio he authored despite facing hostile road crowds all three games he played in and an avalanche deficit in his final appearance. The thing to remember about this team is this – they went to the playoffs in 2020, were seen as possible division champion repeaters in 2021 before their defense fell apart, and had moments of awesome offensive production in 2022 and 2023. They actually went 8-8-1 in 2022, which is better than most remember that team being, but cratered in the standings the following year, dropping to an almost-league-worst 4-13 in ’23 despite a 12-game stretch to start the season when maybe,-maybe-not QB Of The Future Sam Howell average 278 passing yards per game. The team, inured to high levels of passing production that rarely afforded them the privilege of winning games, dissipated dramatically over the final five games, when Howell failed to crack 200 yards once. The defense, which had been bad all year, continued to be bad, giving up 34 points per game to end the year. The foundations of a formidable offense were clearly there, even if the defense was degenerating into despondency. Because the Carolina Panthers existed, Washington could only hope to get the second overall pick, and by the time draft season rolled around it became quite clear that Jayden Daniels was the pick. So what exactly could the consensus #2 QB of the 2024 draft do for Washington, who by essentially every meaningful metric was worse than Chicago the year prior and logically had a stronger claim to “needing” the best QB? What can you do, Jayden Daniels?

All Daniels did was make his new owner, his new-ish (second-year) head coach, and all his offensive teammates look as good as any of them ever had – including, most importantly, Terry McLaurin, nominal WR1, whose longtime languishings on worse teams had often caused his numbers to inflate through high-volume targets, as the act of playing the part of the only reliable playmaker on an impoverished offense sometimes does to good receivers. Now, with a good quarterback and more than enough help in the run-game and around him in other receivers, his efflorescence to élite status awoke explosively, shattering his former personal bests in catch percentage and receiving touchdowns (13, second in the league). McLaurin’s July 31st trade request may be genuine or just a tactic, but Washington’s bright outlook isn’t predicated solely on him. The additions of elder veteran Zach Ertz from Arizona, Atlantan- and Philadelphian castoff Olamide Zacchaeus from division rival Philly, and erstwhile fantasy football PPR messiah Austin Ekeler from Los Angeles made for an almost wholly reborn crew of secondary route runners and handoff ramblers. Despite passing for slightly fewer yards than in 2023, when the defense was giving up a billion points a quarter, the team (I say “team” instead of just “Daniels,” as a mostly-Marcus-Mariota-led disembowelment of that Panthers team who’d more or less caused the Commanders to pick Daniels instead of Caleb Williams and a Week 18 sweep-up of the corpse of Mike McCarthy’s Cowboys by the same QB2 resulted in an additional 4 touchdowns and 366 yards) threw for 4 more touchdowns and reduced their interceptions incurred by a remarkable 12. All of this refocusing of resources had the resulting return of a 20-point upwards boom in passer rating, taking them over the 100-point threshold in that statistic for the first time in 10 years. It wasn’t just the passing game that flourished in newfound feasibility with the addition of the crown jewel Daniels and his diamantine if on-in-years new additions at RB and WR. The team rushed for 2,619 yards – 891 of them from their young quarterback – to finish 3rd in rushing league-wide. Third-year superhero Brian Robinson, Jr. added 799 of his own to go along with a team-leading 8 touchdowns. All of these offensive rocket-takeoffs made for a 20-spot jump in scoring offense, from 25th to 5th. An incredible and irresistibly propulsive accomplishment for a rookie-led unit. The defense, though by no means as inspiring – and very clearly the unit that proved the difference against bullyball merchants Philadelphia in the two teams’ one-sided NFC Championship tilt – also took a huge step forward, finishing 18th in scoring instead of, well, last. Their 43 sacks were tied for 11th, and their meager number of 7 interceptions doesn’t really seem like it could get worse. In so many words, the Commanders are ahead of schedule in their Jayden Daniels Era buildup of competitive weaponry. And they’re not done building by any means – additions of Niners odd-man-out Deebo Samuel, at one point in his career irreducibly in the conversation for best YAC receiver in the NFL, and Von Miller, at one point in his career irreducibly in the conversation for best pass-rusher in the NFL and still a solid option as a rotation player on must-throw defensive downs, seem like upgrades on ingredients like Zaccahaeus and Clelin Ferrell, decent chess-pieces who either outgrew or are still growing within their roles on the team, respectively. The best is almost certainly yet to come.

Palpably Unfair Facts:

• Among all qualified rookie QBs, only Cam Newton scored more fantasy points in a rookie season than Daniels, and only five QBs threw more touchdowns - all of them threw at least 1 more INT, too. JD was the best rookie QB ever in the regular season.

• The Commanders’ dreamlike, oceanically offense-driven waltz through an unsuspecting NFC represents only the third time in NFL history a rookie QB led his team to multiple road wins in the postseason, a uniquely radiant gem of an accolade he shares with 2008 Joe Flacco (bad) and 2009 Mark Sanchez (worse). Daniels was the best rookie QB ever in the postseason, too.

• Becoming the best second-year QB ever would require two things: defeating Dan Marino’s 48-passing-touchdown mark and defeating Patrick Mahomes’ 50-passing-touchdown mark…sort of. It seems odd to include Mahomes on a list of “best second-year QBs ever” since he didn’t play his rookie year. In a weird way he didn’t have the pressure of “avoiding” a “sophomore slump.” Daniels does. Just remember: this team would not be #1 if I thought they weren’t up for the challenge.

Nothing could stop the Eagles once they’d taken the field against their old Super Bowl foes the Chiefs in New Orleans on the night of February 9, 2025. They, like KC’s previous opponents in the big dance from San Francisco, had lost a fourth-quarter comeback heartbreaker against the red and gold dream-destroyers. They, unlike the Niners, figured out that the way to slay the monstrous dragon that is the Chiefs under Patrick Mahomes and Andy Reid is by an NFL equation of the Milwaukee Protocol – an anti-rabies methodology enacted after a patient has contracted the almost-always-fatal virus that involves throwing massive amounts of multiple different kinds of anti-viral medications at the virus-stricken, in the hopes that at least a few of the regimens will have effect. It isn’t pretty, it’s not a certain cure, and not every patient or doctor is willing or able to receive or administer it, but it has worked. And that’s what the Eagles did in the Super Bowl – they threw out style points and just tried to beat the living hell out of Mahomes and the Chiefs, on offense and on defense. They did whatever it seemed like it was going to take. It wasn’t stylish or suave, the Chiefs had to be off their game, and there aren’t many teams that could hope to emulate the effectual approach either due to defensive inadequacy or offensive identity – but this team did it. They Killed The Beast, when so many others, including their former selves, Just Couldn’t. 

The Eagles played cruel football against the Chiefs, and the Commanders, and for the most part against the Rams and Packers, and for the preceding 13 games or so against the full gamut of the NFL. They won three of their four playoff victories by at least twelve points, or more than a touchdown and field goal. They beat every team they played after Week 4 at least once, with their only loss in that period coming to Washington after Jalen Hurts left the game early and which they avenged with Chthonian ruthlessness in the conference championship. At times – many times – they made it look ridiculously easy. So how could this be the same team that lost to the Buccaneers by 17 points and to the lowly Atlanta Falcons, albeit by the thinnest of margins, in the season’s first quadrant? How and why did it take so long for the Eagles to realize that they were good enough to just shuttle the football forward between their mountainous tackles, behind their Brobdingnagian guards, with their insurmountable center leading the way, nigh-endlessly?

Frankly, your guess is as good as mine. Sometimes, I posit, teams are so good at winning with uncomplicated, straightforward football that they psych themselves out, thinking that surely they have to operate with a bit more risk-taking or outside-the-comfort-zone play to continue their winning ways instead of persisting in tried and true, potentially monotonous, perhaps less-than-thrilling patterns of ball-playing. To Nick Sirianni’s everlasting credit, he did what coaches more steeped in offensive wizardry may choose never to do – take the ball mostly out of his quarterback’s hands. Kyle Shanahan wouldn’t have done that. Andy Reid wouldn’t have done that. Sean McVay wouldn’t have done that. But someone like Vince Lombardi, after whom the trophy hoisted by Nick Sirianni, Jalen Hurts, and Saquon Barkley was named, would have and did. It doesn’t need to be pretty. And while we’re on the topic of Saquon Barkley, isn’t it amazing how valuable good running backs are to good teams? Hopefully Barkley’s unbelievably, bordering on inconceivably dominant year, which featured the most rushing yards ever by a running back in one season, combined with the elder-statesman-heroism of Derrick Henry on a well-oiled offense for the first time in four years will remind the mostly lapsed NFL that, while decent-to-above-average running backs on decent-to-above-average teams will typically not make much of a difference, dropping a great running back onto a good-to-great NFL roster will propel that running back to HOF consideration levels. In retrospect, obviously Leonard Fournette wasn’t going to work on Jacksonville, of all teams. But what if the Cowboys had waited a year to draft him instead of Ezekiel Elliott? What if Christian McCaffrey had been healthy for all of 2024? We have precious few instances where we don’t need to play the ”what if” game with great or potentially-great running backs – Saquon’s nuclear conquests on the 2024 Eagles are one such merciful instance of RB actualization. (Whether Will Shipley is Earnest Byner to Saquon’s Kevin Mack remains to be seen.

Defensively, while the team didn’t pile up the types of all-time numbers we associate with teams like the ’85 Bears, ’00 Ravens, ’04 Pats or other such superpowers of playoffs past, they succeeded in making Mahomes look like late 80’s John Elway playing one-on-53 against the Big Blue Wrecking Crew or the Hogs. It was odd that they couldn’t do similar against the agreeable but plausibly inferior likes of Jordan Love’s Packers and the Los Angeles Rams, but perhaps after 19 games of hanging by the most frayed of competitive threads, the Eagles were the copybook Grond to the Chiefs’ and Commanders’ tottering, destabilized Gate of Gondor. Cooper Dejean’s entry into the starting lineup helped enkindle a no-fly-zone-esque defense of utterly miserly navigability to enemy passers, surrendering less than 3,000 yards through the air, picking off 13 passes and imprisoning opponents to 155 passing yards per game across their final 13 regular season games played (or all games after their week 5 bye). Only once did the competition surpass 225 yards passing against them in this span – their lone loss to the Commanders. While they were less unforgiving against the aerial game in the playoffs, they made up for it with 6 interceptions and a mammoth 16 sacks – 4 per game – on their way to Super Bowl LIX’s easy win. While Washington will probably prove their stiffest competition in returning to the Big Game, this team’s identity and ability is no longer in question.

Palpably Unfair Facts:

• Jalen Hurts won the Super Bowl despite throwing fewer touchdowns than any Super Bowl-winning QB (excluding Peyton Manning and Nick Foles, who missed time due to injury or backup status in 2015 and 2017) since Ben Roethlisberger in 2008. Is that the reason the Eagles won, or is that something they had to overcome to win? 2025 may help us know better.

• No team in playoff history scored as many points as these Eagles (145, an average of 36 per game). While their 77 points given-up are not nearly as historic, this does mean they won their playoff games by an average of 17 points. Tyrannical.

• With the successful deflection of legislation that would have criminalized – ridiculously – the Tush Push, expect to see the Eagles use that play to the point of utter exhaustion, exasperation, and extinction of opposing defenses. This offense will be monomaniacally indomitable in short-yardage in ’25.

Perception has utterly usurped reality with regard to the three-time-reigning AFC champions. No team in history has gone to three straight Super Bowls with the third and most recent (we’d say “final” but it’s quite likely the run of royally running circles around the rest of the conference in the playoffs is very far from over) Super Bowl appearance acting as one that gives the team a chance to three-peat – except for the 2024 Chiefs. Even with a loss, they have still just completed either the best or second-best three-year run in modern NFL history (a case could maybe be made for the 1971-1973 Dolphins, whose triplicate Super Bowl soirées began rather than ended with a loss and was followed by back-to-back wins and a perfect season). Of course, by winning a Super Bowl in 2025, the Chiefs would lay claim to the greatest four-year run in NFL history, bar none. Of course it’s possible. Patrick Mahomes, remember? 

Social media, highlight culture, meme-able moments and algorithmically-fueled negativity – none of these things are ever remotely on the side of a team that has just suffered a hiccup on national television, far less a grave and public stumble just steps from the summit on their way up the mountain of an even more glorious immortality than back-to-back Super Bowls can confer. We were reminded of this inexhaustibly irritating, schadenfreude-spurred, intellicidally-ignorant fact once it became clear that the Chiefs were not going to win a third straight Super Bowl. Lost in the verminous vortex of eager detractors to the Taylor Swift-associated outfit was the fact that by winning the AFC Championship alone, the Chiefs had completed the greatest three-season span of play in history. No team before had ever gone into a Super Bowl with a chance to three-peat. And no one else will for at least two years. One team and one team only going into 2025 has the chance to equal the feat only ever achieved by the 1992-95 Cowboys and 2001-04 Patriots, namely the winning of three Super Bowls in four seasons. That’s the Chiefs.

You know, the Chiefs. THE DYNASTY??? Whether or not a Super Bowl loss in the midst of what certainly appears to be a still thriving prime for Patrick Mahomes constitutes the “end” of the Chiefs’ 2020s dynasty isn’t a question I want to explore at this time. What I do want to remind people of, though, is that the Chiefs could very easily be #1 on this list. The notion that the Chiefs’ 15-2 record, fueled by an undefeated 11-0 record in a profusion of tense, defensively-decided one-score games, is somehow unsustainable more or less misses the point. What’s unsustainable is not the Chiefs’ winning the one-score games, it’s that their wins will continue to come by only one score. 2023 and 2024 have been dry, hard tack for the Chiefs offense, bedraggled and tousled by unreliable pass catchers and receiver injuries as they have been. What seems more certain than the Chiefs taking a large step back in the Wins column is the possibility that we’ve seen the worst that the Chiefs offense can be – i.e., scoring between 16-30 points while allowing the opposition to score between 15-29 points, or however many points they can afford to give up while still winning. It’s the elusively ineluctable reality of this team. They don’t have PhD’s in blowing people out – they do, however, have PhDs in playing Winning Football.

From a defensive standpoint this team seems unlikely to reach the same heights they did at points in 2023 and throughout 2024. Giving up 38, 14, 29 and 40 points in their final four – admittedly with the first game on that list coming without anything close to the “starting lineup” in the game while the superstars rested – is probably equally misleading. Losing key starter Justin Reid to free agency along with rotational DL pieces Derrick Nnadi and Tershawn Wharton will probably manifest early in the season as the team attempts to work in veteran pieces like S Mike Edwards (of years-prior Tampa Bay Super Bowl rivalry) and DL Jerry Tillery (from Minnesota, entering his age 29 season, fourth team in seven seasons, and third different AFC West franchise alone) as fresh grist for the Spags mill. More than capable already at linebacker, the team fortified their front- and back-end defensively with selections of DT Omarr Norman-Lott from Tennessee, DE Ashton Gillotte from Louisville, and CB Nohl Williams from Cal, all in the second or third rounds.

The reason they couldn’t add higher-queue-rating players on defense in the first round is because of their selection of Ohio State OL and national champion Josh Simmons, a direly-required upgrade over the pinwheel of stopgaps the team employed at left tackle throughout the ’24 season. Blood-curdling names like D.J. Humphries, Kingsley Suamataia and Wanya Morris are hoped to be bygone nomenclatural apparitions from whom Mr. Simmons will liberate the sinistral segment of the offensive line. Simmons is probably as sure a bet as any of the other OL taken in the first round when you consider how strong this tackle class was and how little was separating the eventual consensus #1 OT pick, Will Campbell, from the rest of the pack. But while it is the most fundamentally foundational piece of the line, the tackle position isn’t the vanguard of glamor for the offense. That’s the quarterback and his weapons, and while nothing is wrong with Patrick Mahomes, it became clear at some point in 2023 that this team needed Rashee Rice to be really good to make up for a Travis Kelce accelerating into the crepuscule of his career more swiftly than once seemed possible and a WR room weighted worrisomely down by the inability of pieces like Skyy Moore and, horror horroris, Kadarius Toney to provide plus-level production. Xavier Worthy, meanwhile, was a victim of fan amnesia regarding just how good he was at times in 2024 due to prolonged struggles of the entire offense to score points in bunches like they had in previous years, but lest we forget, he authored a play on his final touch of 2024 which saw him get entirely behind the world champions’ defense with blinding speed that just may be a harbinger of highlights to come. C’mon, man. Be honest with yourself. This team will be fine.

Palpably Unfair Facts:

• KC needs one player – probably Rice, whose pending suspension I’d be remiss not to mention – to differentiate himself for this collection of contributors to be serviceable-to-superior. It is a virtual certainty they will be better on offense next year.

• The Chiefs played almost a full season without their WR1 or WR2 and still went 15-1 with their starters. 17-0, amazingly, seems far more plausible than this team falling to 8-9 or further below the surface of 0.500.

• Travis Kelce won’t last forever. But he probably can be good enough for one more season. Another ring will almost surely equal retirement. The question will be what he chooses to do if i) they don’t win the Super Bowl and ii) he looks #washed. The NFL’s (and college football’s) news cycle resembles celebrity gossip columns more than ever, but this is drama I can vibe with.

They forced the issue. They kept Pushing Tush till the cows came home and the Chiefs said “Enough.” Then when the season truly hung in the balance, they tried something even more brazen – calling the same kind of play that they’d called to ice the Kingdom in their Week 11 showdown, but failing to attain cognizance, again, of just how Beautiful the Beautiful Mind of Steve Spagnuolo is. This team had it all in its hands with minutes to go in the third quarter of the AFC Championship, and had the game tied with less than four left. Then Dalton Kincaid happened. While the Bills are so far below .500 against their red-and-gold nemeses in the playoffs that any chance of them pulling even while Mahomes and Allen are still playing is beyond subatomic, the odds that this could finally be Their Year is not diminished. Who says Bills Mafia can’t power this outfit to eternity? 

MVP Josh Allen has never entered the season as MVP Josh Allen, though he certainly had a case for the regalia of best-in-show in 2020 and (arguably) 2023 for such honors. It is a question the answer to which I do not know as to whether knowing that your MVP season, the season which according to the horde of voters who have done nothing but fawn over highlights to the neglect of wall-to-wall solid play was greater than Lamar Jackson’s 41:4 or Joe Burrow’s 43:9 TD:INT ratios and superior to Jared Goff’s and Baker Mayfield’s 4,500-plus-yard seasons, was not enough to defeat a sub-4,000-yard passing, 26:11 TD:INT ratio year from Patrick Mahomes isn’t immensely discouraging. I have to think that having received the Most Valuable Player accolade, the focus on simply winning – not playing reckless football, doing things so as to minimize risk and claim triumph as often as possible, refusing to throw anything into double coverage or running through jungles of would-be tacklers with troublesome tendrils that may essay to cause a fumbled football to fall from Allen’s arms – should be utterly indefeasible. But being in the AFC comes with unbelievable burdens to bear – not least, the knowledge and reality that to even get to the Chiefs, you need to beat the Ravens or Bengals – or both. Miami, Pittsburgh, Houston, L.A. and Denver lurk fiendishly too. Gasp.

It is not a question of whether or not the Bills can reach the postseason at this point – it would be a gigantic, cataclysmic disaster if they didn’t win this division. Even with the potential stumbling-blocks of Miami, most likely in the Twilight of their Tua era, and a resurgent but still rebuilding New England posing odious challenges to the monarchs of the East, Buffalo has more than enough firepower remaining to dispatch these detractors in the regular season. Post-bye, they will no doubt be tested: after a Week 7 idle period and a Week 8 game against Carolina, the Bills face Kansas City, Miami, Tampa Bay, Houston, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, New England, Cleveland, and Philadelphia (they also play a New York Jets team in Week 18 that by this point will surely be in advanced and atrabilious stages of decomposition, but hey, still a game). Getting out of this 9-game stretch with a 6-3 mark would be beyond admirable – going 5-4 is more likely. To lose more than half of these games is not by any means out of the question. But the NFL isn’t a one-player game – the other teams have to face Buffalo, too, and warm-weather merchants Tampa Bay, whose offense could be among the league’s most excitingly explosive, will have to travel to the brumous confines of Highmark Stadium in mid-November while the Bills will get to ditch their icy climes to face Miami, Houston, Pittsburgh, New England and Philly. Even though three of those five locales are cold-weather fortresses themselves, none – with the occasional interconference objections from places like Chicago and Green Bay – present with the same frequency and furor the full might of wintertime inclemency as Buffalo, NY. The Bills get Kansas City at home for the second year in a row as well. Things set up nicely for this team in late 2025, in other words. If they can defeat Baltimore in Week 1, there’s really nothing insurmountable preventing these Bills from taking the true 1 seed for the first time since 1993. Of course, having a homefield advantage is no guarantee of victory against the Chiefs, as the events of 2023 proved.

As far as additions to the team go, the Bills took the tack that with their QB winning MVP, they were more or less good in the offensive department. Losing Mack Hollins and Amari Cooper, while not starters, leave more than a small gap in the wide receiver room that ascendant receivers Khalil Shakir and Keon Coleman, along with former Charger Josh Palmer, will need to fill – both for pass- and run-game success. Tight end has long been a strength of this roster, and another year in the system can only benefit last-play-of-the-season victim Dalton Kincaid. Losing Von Miller to Washington, who seem to be the up-and-coming team going into 2025 that Buffalo seemed to be going into 2020, shouldn’t cripple this team’s pass rush, but omni-injured Joey Bosa, another former Charger, does not figure to be an upgrade in that department; if nothing else, veteran Bills A.J. Epenesa, Greg Rousseau and Ed Oliver will be asked to continue being great, and exhorted to be even greater than before. The offense outside the passing game has serious diesel in the one-two-three running back rotation of James Cook, Ray Davis, and Ty Johnson, though I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t heavily invested in seeing Frank Gore, Jr. take snaps at some point this season. If there is a vulnerability that could metastasize into weakness on this team, it would seem to be in the turnover occurring in the defensive secondary from the 2024 offseason to now; teams like the Cardinals, Dolphins, Rams, Lions, and in the playoffs Ravens and Chiefs were able to find more than occasional success through the air. But a great quarterback, an MVP, should be able to overcome this – for the most part, Josh Allen was able to overcome these foibles by his corners and safeties. Even in the lone game he lost before the AFC Championship among those mentioned, versus L.A., he played with unabashed magnificence, completing only the second-ever game where a QB threw and ran for 3 touchdowns. It’s not unreasonable to say that all is possible with Josh Allen playing at his best. His best just needs to come on the biggest stage.

Palpably Unfair Facts:

• Otto Graham is the only other QB to reach the 3 & 3 passing-and-rushing touchdown mark. Interesting comparison there between him and Josh. They’d be indistinguishable if Josh could win 7 Super Bowls and an NBA Finals. (Yes, seriously.)

• It shouldn’t be seen as inveighing against Josh that his 2024 MVP was more of a Lifetime Achievement Award than a Heisman.

• Cornerback Maxwell Hairston (R1P30) was a clear draft-for-need add; he and Christian Benford will have their work cut out for them. It’s a godsend his late July training camp injury proved (probably, mostly) inconsequential.

Re-watching the final drive the Ravens had against playoff tormentors Buffalo, it seemed to me that the drive was too easy. As in, the drive should have taken longer. They plowed straight through the Bills’ defense in a way that seemed almost anticlimactic. Then, when Andrews dropped the all-important 2-point conversion, the game just felt abbreviated. It seemed like it should have been longer. But the Ravens had blown their timeouts – not unwisely, per se – before they absolutely had to, and after a failed Justin Tucker onside kick, the final he will ever perform for the Ravens, that was it. This team needs to snag more breathing room in big games instead of forcing perfect play in the most precarious positions.

 AFC Championship or bust. That has to be the credo for this entire team – perhaps most of all, their head coach – throughout 2025. If this team cannot get back to that stage, something will need to change. They just have too much talent, too dramatic a vial of dynamism, too exciting an avatar of athleticism at the QB position to continue justifying without consequences their seemingly endless failures to be at their best, or even close to their average, in the playoffs. Sure, they were pretty good in their convincing, overwhelming win over a punching-above-their-weight Pittsburgh Steelers team in the Wild Card playoffs, but this is par for the course for teams like the Ravens. They have better players than the Steelers, they should beat this team, and in fact they should have won by more than they did. It was only through the divinely comedic intercession of a truly cruel but pitilessly humorous member of the football gods pantheon who decided that a fourth-down heave into triple coverage with a pass intended for vertically ungifted slot receiver Calvin Austin would be the final, lethal nail in the Steelers’ 2024-25 coffin that the game did not become truly close for the Ravens, who did more or less what they always do against good teams (though the Steelers have given them fits in the past, so there’s that for them to hang their helmets on): flash highlight-material highs, let an annoyingly stubborn team hang around for long enough to author some highs of their own, but eventually overcome the subsequent lows that the Ravens themselves commit and win out through culture and toughness. These Ravens’ highs, to be sure, were probably the highest they’d ever been from a Ravens quarterback. Or, more precisely, a Ravens passer. It wasn’t as good as Lamar’s 2019 season where he threw for 3K and rushed for 1K, and his five losses as a starter more or less ensured he wouldn’t win a second-consecutive MVP to equal his 2023 attainment, but as a passer he was precisian and pristine. He became the second quarterback after 2018 Aaron Rodgers – because of course – to start all of his team’s games and finish with at least a 10:1 TD:INT ratio. Utterly ridiculous. Derrick Henry, the prized free agent signing of the preceding offseason, worked miraculous magic of his own from the tailback position, rumbling royally and redemptively after a couple down seasons for an also utterly ridiculous 1,921 yards and 16 touchdowns. Remarkably, only the second of those measures was a franchise record, as Jamal Lewis’s 2,066 yard 2003 season blasted any chance Henry had of setting records out of the Chesapeake water. Lamar Jackson added 915 yards of his own on the ground that could have easily been Henry’s – Jamal Lewis had the relatively enviable backfield company of rookie Kyle Boller, whose repugnant passing capacitance and nonexistent rushing danger made for more opportunities for Lewis – and, in turn, many of those 16 touchdowns Henry scored on the ground could easily have been Jackson’s in previous years when the offense was even more firmly focused on the #8-wearing former Louisville Cardinal. But the well-tempered steel of the Ravens’ two monsters on offense was strong enough for both to inscribe incredible, historic seasons in the storytelling tablets of their respective positions – Jackson as the only quarterback to throw over 40 touchdowns and 4 or fewer INTs, Henry as the only running back of 30 years of age or more to exceed 1,900 yards rushing. It should be asked whether, with 79 measly yards separating the final tally of Henry’s season-long production from the 2,000-yard rushing mark, the Ravens couldn’t have scrounged up the proverbial change of 20-or-so more carries from the metaphorical couch of the 2024 season to get Henry over the hill. It would have been poetic and invigorating, to know that a running back who has endured so many carries to this point over his career could do it. The Ravens have at times been accused – rightly, since it is a simple fact – of not having Pro Bowl-caliber wide receivers. That was true, for the entire history of the team, but was finally and mercifully put to an overdue quietus by the election of Zay Flowers to the NFL’s all-star game roster in 2024. Even though he didn’t really have a great season (73 catches, 1,047 yards and 4 touchdowns) the voters apparently decided that enough was enough and took a Baltimore wideout to the climactic place that all good receivers who have excellent years go: The Pro Bowl Games, Presented By Verizon. It should be said that Zay is a joy to watch and looked far better at points in his ’24 season than his decent numbers may indicate – still, for Zay to make the Pro Bowl as the first Ravens receiver to achieve such honors in the same year that Lamar Jackson became the first 40-and-4 TD:INT QB while accounting for over 5,000 total yards and did not win MVP isn’t necessarily ironic, but it is interesting and sickeningly coincidental. Those who have gone where no one has gone before – Ravens WR to the Pro Bowl, a Ravens QB to over 5K – deserve to be rewarded, recognized, and remembered. But there are things that the Ravens want to disremember, to forget, as well. Namely, their tortured, almost unthinkable history with two-point conversions from their tight ends in big games. This season began with a loss to Kansas City that, were it not for a micrometer of Isaiah Likely’s person being adjudged out-of-bounds, may have been a win – John Harbaugh was signalling for the two-point conversion instead of the tie from Tucker. They lost in Pittsburgh in Week 11, when a late two-point conversion that began as a run for Jackson evaporated with a flailing pitch to either Likely or Mark Andrews, the nearest receivers. Then in Buffalo...well, you know. Andrews. This team is good enough – it needs to be good-er soon-er.

Palpably Unfair Facts:

• 164 more rush yards – 79 for Henry, 85 for Jackson – would have given the Ravens a 2,000-yard RB and a 1,000-yard QB.

• John Harbaugh knows how to coach a team for roughly ~19.5 games. He needs someone to teach him about playoff timeouts.

• Lamar Jackson is thirteenth – last – in passer rating among QBs who have thrown 150+ playoff passes since 2018. The parallels between Lamar and Peyton are growing obsolete with Lamar’s poor postseason performances in 2023-24 and 2024-25. He hasn’t had a scorched earth, annihilate-everything-in-front-of-me postseason like Peyton’s ‘03 yet - he needs one.

It simply cannot be easy for Joe Burrow. When he is playing poorly, his defense is playing decently well. When Burrow is playing decently well, his defense is playing below-average. And when he is committing prolific and graphic crimes against pass defenses to post MVP-level numbers that would rank among the very best of any NFL QB’s career, his defense is somehow playing even worse than the competition being victimized by Mr. Shiesty. Zac Taylor, who frankly has never proven, nor had to prove, his lasting aptitude as a head coach when not paired with the former #1 overall pick, has no more excuses left. Like the Ravens, this team needs a deep playoff run to return to relevance. Unlike the Ravens, whose corvine caudillo and franchise leader John Harbaugh has a winning record over 24 playoff games in 12 postseasons (and a ring), the Bengals’ appetite for radical change may be hastened along and incited to immediacy with a failure to achieve this goal in 2025.

I’ve talked about how the Ravens’ final drive against the Bills seemed like it didn’t last long enough. They got down the field too quickly for their own good and weren’t quite warm enough to lay it all on the line for a single play, which they needed to do as the two-point conversion is a one-time deal. The misfortune of football is how fleeting it is, how compartmentalized and finite the action is, and how ephemerality-suffused the whole of the sport is. Take the Bengals, to draw a larger portrait of the temporal tyranny of the game of ball. What’s the last memory you have of Joe Burrow in the playoffs? And when did this memory occur? If you said anything more recent than January 29, 2023, you’re misremembering, and if you’re recalling anything earlier than late in the fourth quarter – less than a minute left in the game – in the 2022 AFC Championship, you’re going too far back. The last time that Joe Burrow touched the ball in the playoffs to date was on a 3rd and 8 which ended in a Chris Jones sack. One Skyy Moore punt return and Joseph Ossai hit later and the Chiefs were on their way to the first of two consecutive Super Bowls. Due to the relative non-drama of the Chiefs-Jags and Bengals-Bills playoff games, too many people were taking the Mahomes-Burrow matchup for granted. The 2022 AFC Championship was a battle of two rosters, yes, but also two QBs whose destinies diverged thereafter. Since their hideously painful, excruciating-est of last-seconds losses to KC in that game, the Bengals have not been back to the playoffs. It seems unreal that Joe Burrow, who at full health may be the best pure passer in the game today, was last in the postseason when Patrick Mahomes only had one Super Bowl ring and wasn’t even the defending AFC Champion, but it’s true. In the interval between then and now the Bengals have had two seasons derailed by issues pertaining to, though in neither instance the fault of, Burrow: in 2023, his health, and in 2024, the team’s collective inability to get their QB into the winner’s circle because of defensive pauperdom. It’s astounding to look at Joe Burrow’s game log and know that most of his best efforts simply weren’t good enough to make up for his lugubrious defense. For instance: against divisional adversaries Baltimore in Week 5, 30-of-39, 392 yards, five touchdowns, and a 137.0 passer rating – three point loss. Another puncture: against the same team a few weeks later, on Thursday Night Football, Burrow threw the ball 56 times, completed 34 passes for 428 yards and four touchdowns, did not turn the ball over and went over 100 on the passer rating scale again – one point loss. His second-to-last pass was a perfectly-placed strike to the back right portion of the endzone over the heads of two defenders which could not have been placed more perfectly by a Hostage Rescue Team sniper – the Ravens defenders could not have timed their jumps worse if they’d mistimed the bounce of a trampoline, but that’s neither here nor there. It was his last pass that the field general would plead with the football deities to have back if he could do such – his tight end, being mugged by two overzealous Ravens who could have been called for holding or DPI by a more officious ref, dropped a high pass that would have made their one-point difference in score a winning instead of a losing proposition. That TNF defeat to the purple birds’ noxious all-purple digs kicked off a catastrophic three-game omnishambles where Joe Burrow, despite throwing for over 1,000 yards, 10 touchdowns and a mere 1 pick, lost all three games. The inhuman ineptitude of this defense becomes unbelievable when you remember this is largely the same team, minus a few defensive backs, that stymied Kansas City again and again in 2021 (when they defeated the Chiefs in the championship game) and 2022 (when KC had just enough in the tank to motor past the jungle cats).

It makes sense that Zac Taylor, who is not off the hot seat by any means, would fire onetime star coordinator Lou Anarumo after the DC’s D sunk so abysmally low. It’s not always clear who deserves more credit for the heights scaled by the offense when a great QB is paired with a great play-caller, but for whatever reason, the consensus seems unchallenged and established that Zac Taylor isn’t in the same category as guys like Andy Reid, Kyle Shanahan or Kevin O’Connell. Far be it from me to attempt to challenge or substantiate such a precis, but I do know this – I trust the Bengals a hell of a lot more with their three key pieces in the passing game under contract, a feat I wasn’t sure the Bengals would be able to pull off, but here we are in July with QB and WRs 1 and 2, Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins, locked up for the next several seasons. It’s good that they’ve gotten that taken care of. But what’s keeping the Bengals from climbing higher and higher still – above teams they’ve proven able to beat in the playoffs with aplomb and éclat, Baltimore and Buffalo – is their withered, wayfaring defense, which needs, far more direly and desperately than anyone has admitted, Trey Hendrickson and rookie Shemar Stewart to get to camp and help kick the defense into midseason form before midseason has come and gone without enough wins on tap again.

Palpably Unfair Facts:

• Burrow joins Dan Marino (1986) and Drew Brees (2012) as the third QB to throw for 4,500+ yards and 40+ TDs...and miss the playoffs. That should be enough in any era - but imagine that not being enough to cut the mustard in 1986!!!

• Ja’Marr Chase joins Calvin Johnson (2012), Julio Jones (2015) and Isaac Bruce (1995) in surpassing 1,700 receiving yards while missing the playoffs. 2012 was clearly not a year where offensive transcendence equated to playoff opportunity.

• Cincy allowed 34 PPG in their losses and 18 in their wins. Burrow threw 22 touchdowns and only 3 INTs in those losses. Do the math and you find that he threw 21 touchdowns and 6 interceptions in their wins. Some of this is chasing points and game-flow related, yes, but still - that’s 3 total picks over those 8 games they didn’t win. He played better in his losses!

We move now from “Teams Firmly In Win Now Mode” to “Teams Who Miiight Be In Win Now Mode But Who Have More Than Enough Lush Green Country Stretching Out Towards Their Football Horizons In Front Of Them To Spend A Season Or Two Continuing To Build.” It’s a working title. But it feels especially apt and tightly tailored to team #7 on the list - one Minnesota Vikings. The last we saw of the Vikings, they were having their Nordic asses handed to them by the chill Californian vibe that the Los Angeles Rams incessantly inundated the passing pocket of Sam Darnold with. The notion that Sam Darnold was the sole, or at least the chiefest, reason for the inability of the Vikings previously propulsive passing offense to get out of neutral versus an opponent that looked at points in the season to be supremely inferior is one that, while potentially reductive, does not seem groundless. After all, Kevin O’Connell has had success with a long list of quarterbacks, few of them with the pedigree or expectations of Sam Darnold replacement-slash-QB of the Future J.J. McCarthy. Like I said - I trust the coach here. They would have kept Darnold if they didn’t think McCarthy would be a more cost effective and higher ceiling evolution. This is the spot that the Vikings have been stocking the workshop for since O’Connell arrived. Now we get to see the QB artist mold the clay.

Think how wonderful it must be to be the Vikings QB1 under this regime. Implicitly you know you are good; Kevin O’Connell will not work with an untalented passer. And you will probably be told explicitly, by coaches, teammates and legions of high-minded scribes and fans, that you will become even better than you already are. This is a charmed life, and you need look no further than the decidedly less-exciting passers with names like Darnold and Dobbs and Jaren Hall that have played capably to insanely capably under the former Rams OC. That knife cuts both ways, by the way - take a look at Matthew Stafford’s numbers in 2021, when he still had O’Connell as his OC, and then look at what he’s produced the last three years. It’s the Sean McVay Tree, sure - but O’Connell’s quite the branch. A way that O’Connell could firmly and lastingly separate himself from his mentor would be to develop a young QB.

Would it be more than a bit surprising if, in Year 1 of the Purple Scare (Red Scare? McCarthy? This thing on?), J.J. McCarthy clearly equalled or exceeded what The Darnold authored as the Vikes ball-thrower in 2024? Yes, it probably would. This guy isn’t simply a second-year QB, he’s a second-year QB who did not get to spend a season on the bench truly learning at the knee of a salty vet - rather he spent a lot of it on the edge of a training table ensuring that his surgically-repaired meniscus’s rehabilitation went to plan. Remarkably, this afforded him the lordliness of being the only QB ever selected in the first round of the NFL draft to miss his entire rookie season due to injury. Mind you, this thing has been happening since before WWII, when modern medicine wasn’t really modern medicine, so it’s mind-boggling to think that no one has ever missed his whole rookie campaign with an infirmary order. (Ki-Jana Carter, a Bengals running back picked first overall, also missed his entire rookie season with a slivered knee, but he was a running back. What a different time the mid-90’s were.) Let’s suggest that McCarthy is able to get to, say, 75% of the greatness emanated by one Darnold, Sam in the preceding year. Well then, this team will almost certainly be in the playoffs. They have the added bonus of being in the NFC North, which, outside the Packers (who have their own incursion of stagnation demons to fend off) is undergoing turbid and division-wide fluctuation in the sphere of who is coordinating and executing the offense of each team. If we’re gonna handicap the Vikes for having a new “foundational piece” on offense (I’m limiting that category to QB1, OC, and HC), we need to handicap, perhaps much more so than the Vikings, the teams in Detroit and Chicago, who have replaced their OC and HC/OC, who I anticipate will take as long or longer to get on the same page as their QB1 as Kevin O’Connell will with McCarthy. It’s worth remembering that a good season from third-year wideout Jordan Addison, who has been knocking on the 1,000-yard door the past two seasons, would give the Vikings a good claim on having the best one-two punch at WR in the NFL - better than Cincinnati, better than Philadelphia, better than anyone else you care to mention. On his best day, Justin Jefferson is as good and better even than former LSU teammate (astounding, still, that the two best receivers and sometimes-best-QB were all on the same college team at one point) Ja’Marr Chase. Combine these two with Lions transplant T.J. Hockenson and perennially-underrated Packer transplant Aaron Jones and, even in a division with names like Amon-Ra St. Brown, Jameson Williams, Jahmyr Gibbs, Josh Jacobs, Jayden Reed, Matthew Golden, D.J. Moore, Rome Odunze, Cole Kmet and Colston Loveland, the Vikings have a solid shot of being the best offense in the NFC North, if not the NFC, with strides from #9.

Defensively, this team has very much worked wonders since the arrival of Brian Flores as DC in 2023. The brilliant former Patriots, Dolphins and Steelers defensive brainiac immediately did away with an offensively vanilla scheme inherited from dismissed DC Ed Donatell and retooled the unit to do two things, and more or less only two things, incredibly well: blitz and play drop-8 coverage. The defense, now one of utter extremities instead of steady-as-she-goes prosaicness, finished 8th against the run. In 2024, the defense got even better - much better - by maintaining and improving upon its ground game stinginess, finishing 2nd behind only Baltimore and up-leveling their passing D, leading the league in interceptions forced (24 - five more than second-place Houston). A high number of departures on that side of the ball - namely starter Camryn Bynum and key rotators Jonathan Bullard, Shaq Griffin, Jerry Tillery and Jihad Ward - have sapped the team’s depth, but stars in the secondary like Byron Murphy, Harrison Smith, Josh Metellus and big-upside front-seven pieces like Dallas Turner and reigning havoc-play champion Andrew Van Ginkel are all spoken for. A still-young, giddily-promising offense with a well-constituted, veteran-led defense gives the Norsemen a formidable formula for 2025.

Palpably Unfair Facts:

• Sam Darnold is the only QB in league history to throw for over 4,000 yards, 35 or more touchdowns, and a 100+ rating and subsequently find himself on a new team the following year. Big shoes, J.J.!

• The Vikings have never had a plus-level rushing game under Kevin O’Connell (ranked 27th, 29th, and 19th in ‘22, ‘23 and ‘24). That needs to change in 2025 to give McCarthy (and the defense) room to breathe, learn, and come into their own.

• Minnesota’s pre-bye week opponents for the 2025 season had a combined 2024 winning percentage of 0.41. Their post-bye opponents clocked in at 0.59, a remarkable difference in strength of schedule pre- and post-idle week.

The Murphy’s Law season that the football gods visited on San Francisco in 2024, notably after the team finally managed to string multiple successful seasons together from 2021-2023 without so many catastrophic injuries that it derailed the course of the franchise’s long term planning as had been the case from 2017-2020, felt unjust and undeserved for a team that has come so desperately close to immortality so many different times. The fact that these brushes with Lombardi ownership involved unaccountable tumbles from double-digit leads made them all the more exquisitely excruciating. Viewed through that lens, finishing 6-11 and not even getting the chance to squander a large advantage over a postseason opponent is, comparatively, a mercy; it’s also a testament to the resilience of this roster and the tried-and-true track record of bouncing back from these kinds of seasons that few are pointing to 2025 as a rebuilding year, or 2024 as the “closing of the window.” Of course, one might ask why the Niners seem to be endlessly dealing with recurring spats of injury to star players, but I digress.

The 49ers had a 2024 season that looked to an outside observer like a weightlifter who was overtraining and not giving themselves ample rest between sets. This team maxed out in 2021, they maxed out in 2022, and they maxed out in 2023. Their 2021 set was an arduous wringing-out of the maximal possible production from an assemblage of contributors that were great at playing complimentary, tough football without being a house-on-fire-status offensive dominus; their 2022 set was even more glorious, featuring an unheralded rookie QB who took over late in the season and gave a tottering team a second wind, nearly equalling their season “PR” under Kyle Shanahan; and in 2023 they went further than they ever had in a single “set,” taking the Chiefs to overtime in the Super Bowl, before, as has become custom, being vanquished again. In 2024, their overexertions and overtrainings and proverbial overdraft charges on their own athletic capacities and human limits finally came home. They needed rest - they’d accelerated in unfettered adventurousness, redlining through a succession of stop signs that would have stonewalled other teams dead in their tracks, for three straight seasons, and had to reconstitute themselves more wholly than a single offseason could permit. This will not be a consolation for the 49ers themselves, nor for the legions of fans - many of whom have not witnessed a pixel of a Super Bowl championship year, the most recent transmission of which was broadcast in January of 1995, more than a year before the author was born - who have lived under the oppressor’s yoke of knowing that a large lead in the postseason is not merely no guarantee of victory, but more often than not an inexorable harbinger of defeat. The 49ers, and specifically Kyle Shanahan himself, have been the victims of history - the torment-destined playthings of evil and mighty deities named Brady, Mahomes, Stafford, and Hurts. It seems too easy to compare them to the early 1990’s Bills, but non-intuitive comparisons are still apt. In a way, the Bills are the team of the early 1990’s, not just despite their Super Bowl failures, but in a perverse way because of them; they are certainly more interesting and compelling than teams like the forgettably effortless 1991 Washington Redskins or the raucous and over-lionized ‘92 and ‘93 Cowboys. The 49ers may be the team of the early 2020’s after a similar fashion - remembered, and indeed revered, not because their failures are failings, but because their failures are tragic, haunting, indelible, and Orpheus-like in their proximity to an invincible victory.

But one way that the 49ers are not like the 90’s Bills is in the shape of their losses. True, they lost badly to the Eagles in the ‘22 conference championship after losing two QBs and having to sunset their passing plays, but their other losses came after they led - indeed, dominated - the opponents for three-plus quarters. The same holds true for Shanahan’s Falcons, of which he was OC, in 2016. Your lead, 25 points, whateva happened there. This team has let opportunities get away, but they’ve always been up to the challenge. And that’s why this team can be staggeringly scary for enemy coaching staffs in 2025. Because for the first time since 2021, this team isn’t entering the season having to negotiate a playoff team’s strength of schedule. In fact, they have the single easiest schedule in the entire league, worse (better, for the Niners’ purposes!) than other long-term lease-holders of rooms in the NFL’s competitive cellar like the Saints, Patriots, Titans, and Panthers. Six games - only six, barely a third of the schedule - will be played against teams that had a winning record in 2024, and four of those will be against intradivisional opponents in Seattle and Los Angeles. The other two will be against Tampa Bay and Houston, neither of whom made it further than the Divisional playoffs, neither of whom won more than 10 games in the regular season. A salubrious and convalescent Niners roster, particularly one with near-top-strength pieces like Brandon Aiyuk and Christian McCaffrey who spent extended periods of last year’s regular season recovering from injury, could go through a schedule like this like a scythe through dry grass, as many, including veteran reporter Tim Kawakami, mention the season-long sequence of softball opponents as being possibly the easiest in Scarlet Red-and-Metallic Gold memory. The question, as with all teams, will necessarily be the roster - its continuity, its players’ availability, these players’ capability to dissolve any lingering phantoms of defeatism from the lost year of 2024, and whether they can bring their ceilings and floors a smidgen above the ceilings and floors of their opponents on most Sundays, Mondays, Thursdays, Saturdays, and any other days the NFL deems fit to schedule a contest between its teams on. We know that when they’re all off the injury list, this defense is ferocious, bloated with playmakers, and energetically predatory against opposing offenses, and we also know that when the “main guys” are in, leastways in the past, the offense is more adept at execution and more giftedly-endued than most other units in the NFL. Having lost versatile, at times unorthodox, offensive weapon Deebo Samuel, the Shanahan scheme will need to rely more on the talents of their running backs to get tough yards after contact and after-the-catch, and will need their receivers to be aggressive at the catch point (rarely a bugaboo for Shanahan teams, which frequently and unflinchingly position their pass-catchers very near imminent collisions with perfectly-timed deliveries acting as the medium to forestall big hits) and exacto-knife-sharp in their routes to make Brock Purdy’s life incredible again.

Palpably Unfair Facts:

• The 2024 San Francisco 49ers saw 27 different players lose at least one game to IR designation. 27!!!

• Brock Purdy led the 2024 49ers in rushing touchdowns, which you don’t want, and in passing touchdowns, which you’d expect.

• Rookie Kurtis Rourke is the second IU quarterback to grace the roster of a Kyle Shanahan 49ers team. Suitably Mullens-ian.

While he’s not the only good player on the Steelers, Aaron Rodgers is THE beacon of optimistic fire that this team has been missing. Pittsburgh’s stretch of “true” quarterbacklessness does not extend beyond Big Ben’s final year (2021), but the clear knowledge that the Steelers were not in the same category of offensive firepower or air superiority as the Chiefs, Bills, Ravens, Bengals, and even worse teams like the Chargers and Texans has existed for much longer - at least since the beginning of the decade. While few are expecting Rodgers to return fully to his super-premium 2010a self, there’s little to firmly suggest he can’t be pyrotechnic from the pocket again and more than good enough to get this team up around 10 or 11 wins - while, importantly, being more exciting than Steelers teams of recent vintage, who had to scrape, claw and batter opponents into playing their own worst versions of football so that PIT could win by being slightly less shitty. What is holding Aaron back from being the QB of the Present that Mason Rudolph, Kenny Pickett, Russell Wilson and Justin Fields never were is simple. It’s the same grievous ague that is beating on the doorway to the soul of almost all of this team’s star players, leaders, and even coaches. One word. AGE.

It’s a shame, to be blunt about it, that Rodgers wasted two valuable late-career years pissing away his talents on the New York Jets. I’m not saying that he definitely would not have torn his achilles in 2023 if he’d gone to the Steelers, nor am I saying that he would have been better in 2024 on Pittsburgh than he was with the Jets the same year, nor am I saying that the Steelers made a mistake by sticking with Kenny Pickett for a second year after few flashes of upside but a decent number of wins in year 1, nor, most paramount of all, am I saying that Rodgers would have been, or will be in 2025, the same MVP-proximate playmaker that he proved himself to elementally be over all those seasons in Green Bay if Acrisure Stadium instead of MetLife had been his home for the entirety of his post-Packers plunderings. What I am saying is that it’s more likely than not that the last two seasons of the Steelers, more or less purgatorial as they were with the incompleteness of the roster that clearly pointed to deficiencies at QB and inadequately dangerous playmakers around the quarterback carousel to mitigate the position’s shortcomings as the Garoppolo-era 49ers or Alex Smith Chiefs, would have been markedly more successful with Aaron Rodgers - or at the very least, more fun. And I think Jets fans would be near consensus in agreeing that they’d trade in the disastrous 2023-2024 seasons that had Aaron Rodgers on the roster for true rebuilds, with or without Saleh, Wilson, and Douglas at the reins. Hindsight is 20/20, though, and at the time - specifically in the offseason between 2022 and 2023 - both franchises appeared to be in possession of a clear-cut leader at the throwing-the-ball position that could take them places. They were both wrong - the Jets because of Aaron Rodgers lasting 4 plays, the Steelers because Kenny Pickett didn’t have any lasting talent or roster-elevation capes that a first-round-pick would be expected to have. Rodgers was able to flash a decent amount of gas-tank reserve in his lone healthy season in New York and despite the everlasting morass of entangled dysfunctions that is the Jets probably played as good a season as any Jets QB has in this century. Being able to bring most or all of that to Pittsburgh will make this team better immediately. The principal question in need of an answer is probably more about whether Arthur Smith can return to his 2020-2021 playcalling brilliance, when he had nary a bare shelf in his supermarket of offensive weapons and elevated the game-management skillset of Ryan Tannehill into one befitting a fully-blown conductor of scoring symphonies. Rodgers can do that, no?

A bigger issue than the offense, which seems to be in a great spot with offseason additions of Jonnu Smith (an old Arthur Smith chum) and D.K. Metcalf, will be the ability of the defense to show up in big games. The last we saw of this defense against the two championship-caliber offenses, they were either giving up easy touchdown through the air to the Chiefs on Christmas Day or giving up interminable clock-devouring drives to the Philadelphia Eagles in such a nebbishy canvas of insufficiency that they only gave their offenses two drives - two! - in the second half of their December 15 game against the eventual champs. They also had no answers whatsoever for a team they have beaten more often than not and always given a difficult time, the Baltimore Ravens, when they met for in Baltimore between their ill-fated contests against the Eagles and Chiefs as well as in their showdown in the Wild Card playoffs, permitting the birds to rumble for a combined 519 rushing yards on a brain-burdening 88 carries across the two games. To cap the month-plus of malaise they allowed their other relevant divisional rival Cincinnati to defeat them 19-17 in the regular season finale, capping off an unacceptable feeble 0-5 finish to the season that saw them at one point at 10-3 and with a chance for the second-seed in the conference available and within reach. The defense’s issues have manifested again and again down the stretch under this regime, and even though come-and-go pieces that have been decent in coverage like Minkah Fitzpatrick (lost in the trade that allowed them to acquire Smith from Miami), Patrick Queen (signed from Baltimore and perceptibly past his speediest last season in Pittsburgh), DeShon Elliott (another former Dolphin/Raven - are these the only teams the front office scouts?), Demontae Kazee and Donte Jackson have been good enough to coast when playing mediocre to good offenses, their liabilities in tackling hard-nosed backs on bully-ball teams have been glaring and unmistakable in many different playoff losses since 2016 - the last time, incredibly, that this team won a playoff game. One player who was not on that team that defeated the pre-Patrick Mahomes Chiefs in Arrowhead Stadium back in January 2017 was T.J. Watt, who despite being the best defensive player they’ve had this century has never won a postseason game with Pittsburgh. Their best two defenders over the latter half of the Tomlin era, without question - the other being their starting DT, Cameron Heyward - are in serious danger of never getting to a Super Bowl before getting to Canton. It must be stated with unvarnished starkness - the “mystique” of the Steelers is no longer a sorcerous aura that can impel them to wrest victory from the best teams in the league. It is hoped that though defending juggernaut offenses has been THE issue the last few playoffs that Rodgers can be the rising lifting all ships, adding playoff offensive firepower while giving the defense a bit of rest. Old age hath yet his honour and his toil.

Palpably Unfair Facts:

• No Steelers quarterback has ever thrown for 4,000+ yards and a TD:INT ratio of 4:1. Aaron Rodgers has done this 9 times.

• The presumptive Steelers starters at QB, WR, and TE were not on the team the previous year nor were drafted by the Steelers.

• The Steelers have a 0.45 win percentage in December and January since 2017 - including a 0.00 playoff win percentage.

If there’s a team besides the Chiefs and Eagles that the last three-to-four NFL seasons have “been about,” supposing you had to focus on one, it’s the Detroit Lions. No team has been more compelling due to the combination of factors that colored their football calendars. Rise from deep, history-burdened irrelevance? Check. Emergence of invigorating, thrilling personalities? Check. Redemption story for a former first-overall pick who looked to be in the fast lane to the dustbin of bust history? Check. Ascendance to top-shelf, unquestioned contender status, paired with shimmeringly beautiful transformation of team, town and fan culture? Check and check. Super Bowl victory? X. No check. This team’s window isn’t one any of us want to close, aside from some callous, insular, parochially unpleasant fellows pulling for Green Bay, Chicago or Minnesota, ostensibly, but the shutting-up of the lion’s den’s master bedroom bay window view on realizable postseason glory is an action against which this team, newly bereaved of OC par excellence Ben Johnson and at-times embattled but culturally muscular DC Aaron Glenn, must do ferocious, convincing battle in 2025. Having failed to shut down postseason opponents who suddenly gained the look of eagles and thrashed an overmatched defensive unit in both their 2023 and 2024 playoff bow-outs, the Lions face the added pressure of proving that their offensive thaumaturgy which spellbound the NFL and detonated opposing defenses was not merely the exclusive doing of Ben Johnson. It is time for Jared Goff to carpe the diem. It’s time for Jahmyr Gibbs to turn fully into Marshall Faulk 2.0. It’s time for Jameson Williams to evolve into the 2025 version of 2010 DeSean Jackson. And it is time, above all, for Dan Campbell to cement his legacy as a lasting supreme football commander and quartermaster general of the Honolulu Blue armory.

Nothing that the Lions did in the latter half of 2022 or throughout the seasons’ entireties in 2023 and 2024 matters. Not that any team’s past matters, frankly, but the Lions are facing this reality more unequivocally than any other team in the NFL going into the 2020’s halfway-point season. In the prisoner-of-the-moment, ever-shifting, highlights-and-social-media-clips world in which we live at this present historical moment, the Lions are positioned as pitilessly as any team to be the butt of cruel ribbing and raillery if they don’t start off fast - like, FAST - on offense. There’s something inherently inviting about a coach like Dan Campbell, tough-talking no-nonsense and burly-built as he is, and Jared Goff, with his Rams-era struggles and less-than-superhuman leanness, for ill-humored humorists to pick at, especially for disgruntled fans of teams that these Lions have crushed into quivering pulps over the last two-plus seasons. The preemptive antidote to such potential brickbats is, of course, winning - and winning with style. No one’s been better at that over the past several years than the Lions, but without the intriguing genius of a playcaller like Ben Johnson on the sideline dialing in the flavor, the onus will fall hard on new OC John Morton and the foundational bones of grit and guts built up under Campbell since his arrival.

The good news is that the Lions’ armamentarium of game-breaking badasses is well-furbished with incendiary ammunition. Goff has been nothing short of consummate as a distributor of the football more or less since he touched down in southeastern Michigan, and the ballcarriers around him have had a big hand in his success. Amon-Ra St. Brown is probably the consensus third-best wide receiver in the league, which may sound like it’s damning with faint praise, but it is not - it’s an extraordinary status to inhabit as a former fourth-round pick that few foresaw as more than a WR2 or WR3 when he was drafted. He is firmly in the heart of his prime and could, if things go a certain way, lead the league in yards, catches, and touchdowns - effecting the “Triple Crown” that belongs currently to Ja’Marr Chase - and capture a third-straight First Team All-Pro designation at season’s end. It would probably be better for the Lions if he didn’t see quite so much volume, though, and if instead he lent some of his production to Jameson Williams, who has been knocking more and more forcefully on the door of the elite WR club as he’s learned more about the workings of an NFL offense and as he has developed more and more into a pro wide receiver. As things stand, he is already an amazing weapon, going just over 1,000 receiving yards despite not even catching 60 passes, the first and to date only time any wide receiver has done that this decade. Tight end Sam LaPorta has not enjoyed the same sustained rise to ever-more-glorious summits of productivity enjoyed by St. Brown and Williams, seeing his targets and receptions drop by 30% and 25% respectively from his rookie year of 2023 to 2024, but he’s without question one of the premier tight ends in the league today, who can be relied upon to break tackles and get open downfield like a young Rob Gronkowski when he’s needed. But the player who has a chance to be truly, uniquely special in 2025 is third-year back Jahmyr Gibbs, who exhibits a case study as one of the rare players who was awesome in college and has immediately translated most if not all of his playmaking electricity to the pro gridiron. He has a ways to go to meet Pro Football Reference’s career minimum to be counted on the all-time list for yards per rushing attempt, but through 475 career rush attempts he sits at 5.5 yards per rush, which would beat Jamaal Charles’ career record for running backs by .1. He has also caught 52 passes in each of his first two seasons, acting as the ultrarare, Alvin Kamara-esque back who truly can run with toughness while comprising a legitimate, receiver-level threat in the passing game.

The team’s defense is what scares Lions fans, however. As sometimes happens with high-profile defenses, the defensive unit is not lacking stars, but does seem to lack a high floor. Injuries can explain much of this - no team outside the Niners were hit harder by injuries. Aidan Hutchinson has been as good a pass-rusher as almost anyone since he entered the NFL, being 12th in sacks since 2022 despite missing the final 12 games of 2024. The addition of Marcus Davenport in 2024 was itself diminished in duration when the former Saint injured his triceps, ending his season even earlier than Hutchinson. Following their 47-9 carpet bombing of a listless Cowboys team, the injuries became ludicrous: by the time they took on the Chicago Bears on December 22, they had 21 players on injured reserve - 16 of these on defense. They treaded water admirably until their ill-fated meeting with Washington in the divisional playoffs showed their injuries to be beyond the powers of man to overcome. It was a classic check-back-next-year year for their defense - here’s hoping that the return of the wounded and the addition of DT Tyleik Williams allows them to support their offense better than the undermanned unit we saw for most of 2024.

Palpably Unfair Facts:

• The Lions’ 2024 +222 point differential was tops in the NFL, and the first time they’d topped the league in PD since 1952.

• Jared Goff has averaged - averaged - 4,416 yards, 30 touchdowns and 10 interceptions over his 4 seasons in Detroit.

• John Morton, OC for the Lions, is not the same as Johnnie Morton, WR for the Lions from 1994-2001. An easy mistake to make.