NFL Hope For The Future Rankings: 2025 (XI-XX)

We continue on with the rankings of those teams who should be hopeful going into anno domini MMXXV - though we find these ones should be slightly less hopeful than teams I through X.

On the occasion of the Commanders defeating the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the Wild Card Playoffs, I thought it interesting how seemingly quickly the world was able to forget about the entire season enjoyed by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. It hadn’t seemed like all that long ago that they had gone into the Lion’s Den (Ford Field in Detroit) and beaten the Lions, pretty miraculously, 20-16, with a final drive by Mayfield that seemed to presage the eventual game-winning drive Jayden Daniels dumped on the one-and-done Bucs. In their Week 2 tilt, Baker Mayfield – yes, that Baker Mayfield! – gave the Buccaneers a 4-point lead over the Lions when the undersized QB ran in a touchdown from 11 yards out with 34 seconds remaining. On a designed QB run, no less. Liam Coen the courageous genius.

Those Buccaneers also suffered some bloopers in that game, and walked out of Detroit probably wondering to themselves just how the hell they’d won that game. This was the game that catapulted Aidan Hutchinson to the very top of the early-season DPOY conversation, as the Michigan Man sacked Mayfield 4.5 times. This cost the Buccaneers 39 total yards, which would have been about 15% of their total yards. The Bucs were ultimately outgained by the Lions 463-216, the Bucs putting up less than half of their opponents total yardage. Usually when a team ends up winning a game when they’re outgained that badly it’s because the winning team gets lucky on a pick six or a scoop-and-score or two, but in this game the Buccaneers managed to get by the Lions despite no defensive or special teams touchdowns, one Chris Godwin touchdown reception, a couple field goals and that Baker Mayfield Touchdown run to ice it. How rare is it that a team gets outgained by more than 2x, doesn’t score a return touchdown, and wins? Well, it’s only happened 19 times since 2000 – about once every season and a half – and few a few of these came from teams like the 2010 Patriots and 2013 Legion Of Boom Seahawks, all-time-great regular season teams whose ability to find ways to win even in the most unsightly of circumstances is beyond reproach. There are also terrible, terrible teams on that list, like the post-Deshaun Watson trade Texans in 2021, the defensively hopeless 2023 Washington Commanders and the offensively hopeless 2007 San Francisco 49ers. It is odd company to keep, statistically speaking. So where do the Buccaneers fall on this list? Are they a dominant Super Bowl contender or a lowly fraud?

The answer is that they’re probably somewhere in the windless, waylaid middle of the teams that populate that list – and of the NFL as a whole, as far as teams that made the playoffs last year go. The Bucs weren’t amazing on defense for much of 2024 – they had a horrible middle part of the season, with no team allowing more points between week 5 and week 10 – but they were good enough on offense to finish this 1-5 streak in the season’s middle parts with just a -6 point differential, much of that diminutive difference being staid from being far worse due to a 51-27 squashing of the Saints in New Orleans during Week 6’s Spencer Rattler debut. As a team ranked outside the top ten of teams with the most hope for the future, I am not counting on the Buccaneers becoming a dynasty, like the Chiefs are or the Eagles seem poised to do. But at the same time, I would much prefer to be a fan of the Buccaneers in this year and in years to come than a team like, say, the Los Angeles Rams, whose quarterback situation has been precarious for a few years now owing to the age of their QB1 Matthew Stafford and whose quarterback situation only grew more murky and nebulous with that passer’s absence from training camp practice on Monday, August 11. Hell, the guy is 37 years old and has a bad back – why anyone would take his coach’s word that “hE wOuLd PlAy In GaMeS iF iT wErE tHe ReGuLaR sEaSoN” is beyond me, especially when coaches like McVay, Shanahan, and their coevals have shown a repeated willingness to make a mockery of injury reports in the very recent past. Some of the guys from that Shanahan tree are even showing arm and expressing open disinclination to report truthfully on injuries. But lay that aside – why would someone who could choose between the two choose a team like the Rams to root for over the Buccaneers? The Bucs are 4x repeating NFC South champions with very little in the way of competition for their divisional suzerainty. They have a corps of players that know each other well and seem to only be getting better the longer they play together. They have a quarterback who, while not young, is still firmly in the midst of his glory days. And they have a lot of young players who can still grow into much better players than they currently are, even if they’re already pretty good. The Rams, on the other hand, have an aging QB with health concerns and a coach who has been publicly noncommital about how long he’d like to remain the Rams head coach, are in a division with at least two serious threats to finish above them in San Francisco and Seattle and an Arizona team that defeated this Rams team 41-10 last year, and just lost their main receiving threat for the past 5 years to said divisional rival Seattle after cutting him (that’s Cooper Kupp, of course). We’re not looking to the past here: yeah, the Rams won a Super Bowl more recently, and with this QB-HC combo, but over the next five to ten years, do you think they’ll do it again? And if yes, do you think they could do it in a year that’s not 2025? And if they don’t win it in 2025, do they have any chance of doing it with Stafford a year older?

I say, probably not. It’s not impossible, of course, but the Bucs are the better bet. This is the team that has summarily dismantled the Eagles, those guys who just won the Super Bowl, the last two times they’ve played. This is the team that has one of three 4,500 yard passers from the previous season and one of three QBs with 40+ touchdowns. This is the team whose defense allowed the second-fewest points in the NFL between weeks 12 and 18 last season and whose offense tied for the moast touchdowns scored in that same period. This is the team that, not once all season, scored under 20 points on offense. The Rams, by comparison, did that a lot last year. We know these teams won’t be exactly the same in 2025, as no teams are, but by golly I liked what I saw from the Buccaneers last year. To lose in the playoffs to the #1 team on this countdown, the Commanders, whose virtues and victorious conquests have already been hagiographically related, is not a mark of Cain. And as for the Rams, who did win a playoff game against the Vikings – albeit with more than a little bit of an assist from the Detroit Lions, against whose rock-hard defense the Minnesota Cadillac collided violently and lost most of its sheen and swagger in so doing - , they aren’t too shabby themselves. But this is a listicle, a very long and involved one, and writing a listicle involves ranking all the different teams from 1 to 32. I don’t claim to have any special knowledge of any of these teams, either; just a decent assuredness and confidence that I can tell which teams are broadly on the upswing and which are broadly on the downstroke. That’s all.

So if you see YOUR team ranked higher than you think, smile a little contentedly to yourself. If you see your team ranked lower than you thought they should be, don’t begrudge me for it. After all, part of prognostication and prophesying is taking risks and gambits that may not come true and living with the consequences. Not that there should be any consequences for this ranking, except to my credibility as an offseason scribe, and those are consequences I’ll accept. But I think you will find that most of these teams are positioned more or less where people far more intelligent and with longer sportswriting histories will slot them, if they played by the same rules I am in this exercise, namely trying to balance how good a team currently is and will be in 2025 with how well they could be if the dice don’t come up snake eyes for them. That means ranking teams with young quarterbacks who haven’t shown a whole hell of a lot higher than they should be on a traditional “Power Rankings” list, as you’ll see. In short these are the teams that are fun and have potential to be really fun. Let’s take a gander.

Did you forget that this team soundly defeated both the Detroit Lions and the Philadelphia Eagles in the 2024 season’s first stanza? Did you have erased from your memory the October-through-November midseason skid that this team endured which saw the offense score at least 20 points in each game yet still only go 1-5 before their bye? Did you have this team’s post-bye week 6-1 annihilation spree that featured the team averaging 32 PPG while winning by an average of 15 points Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind-ed out of your noggin? If so, you’re probably not alone, but by all that is holy what a disservice this team had done to it - partially by themselves - by their defensive ineptitude in mid-2024. A few more defensive stops and this team easily could have been 13-4, or better. Baker Mayfield has blossomed into a bona fide concertmaster in one of the NFL’s premier offensive orchestras despite a defensive-minded head coach who at times has failed to get this defense to even equate to the sum of its parts, and though they face the same uphill slog that the Lions face, having lost OC wunderkind Liam Coen to the Jaguars, the intact preservation of all the other key coaching components of offensive coordination, as well as all major playmakers and starters, give the Bucs a highly attractive path back to the South championship - and very likely beyond.

Consider the following statement: Baker Mayfield has the potential to finish his career as the greatest quarterback in Tampa Bay Buccaneers history. Seriously. Another 5-ish seasons of high-level play and a Super Bowl victory - no sure thing, of course, but play along here - would put him ahead of Tom Brady in franchise passing numbers and equal in playoff success. This would mean of course that, assuming Dillon Gabriel, Shedeur Sanders, Kenny Pickett and/or Joe Flacco don’t usurp Baker’s Browns numbers or win multiple playoff games with the team themselves, Baker Mayfield will be the best QB in the history of two NFL teams (since their 1999 return, for the Browns). It seems that for a few years there people simply forgot about Baker Mayfield, the former Heisman Trophy winner and #1 overall pick in 2018 who got drafted by the NFL’s Bad News Bears and set the then-NFL record for touchdowns thrown by a rookie quarterback, suffered through the silliness that was the Freddie Kitchens HC Era in Cleveland without losing his mind, played a full season under Kevin Stefanski where his stats looked almost identical to Joe Montana’s 1989 MVP season, kept trucking through merciless, throwing-motion-affecting injuries for another season in Cleveland, beat Josh McDaniels off of two days’ preparation in mid-2024 after flaming out on a terrible Panthers team, then finally washed ashore in Tampa Bay with an opportunity to beat out ostensible Tom Brady replacement Kyle Trask, which he promptly did before stringing together the two most productive seasons of his career. It’s an interesting and fruitful time to be a former first overall pick whose initial team gave up on you - Jared Goff and Baker Mayfield, R1P1s in 2016 and 2018, are the only two quarterbacks to pass for over 4,000 yards in both 2023 and 2024. And it seems ludicrous that either of their teams would give up on them so unceremoniously as their former draft-ers - the Rams and Browns - did.

Of course one of the reasons that Jared Goff and Baker Mayfield have enjoyed so much enviable success is because of the insulating and ennobling infrastructure their new squadrons have erected around them. Both are cushioned comfortably in their well-protected pockets by good to great offensive lines, are bolstered in their downfield barrages by apt to amazing pass-catchers, and can be spelled and supported by capable to overwhelmingly effective ground games. These once-wayfaring passers have been richly rewarded for undergoing the slings and arrows of promises perceived to have been unfulfilled in the cities which plucked them out of their collegiate climes. But they of course are only part of the puzzle, despite their exhortations to productivity. In Tampa Bay, the issuance of touchdown strikes from the hand of Mayfield has gone to 13 different receivers since 2023, including five new faces in 2024 (that will happen when you level-up your touchdowns thrown from 28 to 41). The addition of one of the surest things in football in the 2025 draft, that being a Ryan Day-era Ohio State wide receiver (Emeka Egbuka), all but assures an even more lethality-tinged and downfield-driven passing attack in 2025, not to mention that this will be the third consecutive year Mayfield is playing in largely the same system. I say “largely” the same because change, and at times disruptive vicissitude, in the offensive coordinator chair for the teams that Mayfield plays for has followed the Oklahoma product like an inescapable haze. He lost Dave Canales, who helped him reignite his stagnated career, after 2023; now he loses Liam Coen, who then enkindled that reignition into a dazzling aerial inferno, to Jacksonville. Baker Mayfield has been more or less the kingmaker for OCs looking to be HCs over the past two years. Will we look back at the mid-2020s as the age when the Todd Bowles Coaching Tree overtook the Sean McVay Coaching Tree? If Mayfield can make his third OC in three years (his ninth in his career) look as good or better than his previous two, then there’s a chance it’s true.

Surprisingly, the chiefer reason for concern on this team is probably the defense. Despite finishing a more-than-workable 7th in 2023, they dropped to dead average in 2024. This is mostly due to a turgid turn of inefficacious defense between weeks 5 and 10 which saw them give up over 300 yards passing per game while picking off only 3 passes. They were bad against the run, too, surrendering 121 yards per game on the ground during the same stretch. Even though Todd Bowles follows in the great tradition of coaches like Jim Caldwell, Tony Dungy and Marc Trestman in emulating Calvin Coolidge by demonstrating so few sings of life on the sideline that their shuffled footsteps up and down the sideline are usually the only thing marking them out from the first down markers, he must have given one hell of a speech to his defense during the week 11 bye, because thereafter the D permitted a mere 215 yards passing per game, 59 yards rushing per game, and 11 total touchdowns over their last 7 contests before their Wild Card loss. This is the Todd Bowles defense that we know and love. Assuming the offense takes a small, but not unmanageable, step back (perhaps from 4th in scoring to around 8-10) and the defense doesn’t forget how to play coverage in midseason, this team should be a massive favorite in the NFC South. By the way...this team is undefeated against the Eagles since 2024. We’d love to see Round 3 in the playoffs.

Palpably Unfair Facts:

• Baker Mayfield has thrown 77 touchdowns in two years in Tampa. That’s 5 more than Tom Brady in his final two with the Bucs.

• Tampa Bay led the NFL in first downs gained last year despite finishing with the 10th-most turnovers.

• The Bucs’ D surrendered 273.9 yards per game over their last 7 regular season games - fewer than Philly’s 278.3.

But only if a lot of things go wrong for their Hyperborean archnemeses in the Motor City, the Twin Cities, and, honestly, the Windy City. Does it depress you to see the Packers come in last on this list? It almost does that to me, and I have no interest in any one of these teams outperforming any of their rivals or any rivals outperforming them. But someone’s got to be last in the North, and though Green Bay’s uniquely professional and meritorious management structure has led to over thirty years of sustained success (they hit some snags in the early 2000s, which people forget, but point stands), the playoff game Jordan Love failed to pull out against Philadelphia seemed to expose some serious flaws in both that quarterback’s game and the Packers’ roster composition as a whole. They still have not found a viable replacement to Davante Adams, nor has Jordan Love been as good as Aaron Rodgers has been through that player’s first two seasons as starter. But it is utterly insane to expect Love, whose delightfully identical early career as backup to Rodgers’ has made for thrilling theater, to be that good, that soon. But by way of further comparison, I’ll add: Rodgers won a Super Bowl in his third season as starter. Can history repeat, yet again? 

The answer is yes, it can. But more needs to be done to support Jordan Love and bring his supporting cast up to the standard, or close to it, that has been set by the prosperous pass-catching and ball-carrying corps of this team’s NFC North rivals. Despite a deep descent in offensive productivity over their final 3 games of 2024, culminating in their defeat in Philadelphia to the eventual Super Bowl Champions and depressed further by the generous inclusion of Malik Willis in their last game against Chicago, and despite Jordan Love looking at times like a quarterback who had retreated a step or two from where he left off in his ascent to upper-echelon QB in 2023, the Packers still managed to pass win 11 games and rise from 12th to 8th in scoring offense year-over-year. The drop in overall passing yards (Love, who also missed two starts due to a Week 1 injury, saw almost 800 yards and 7 passing touchdowns fall off from his 2023 numbers in 2024) was largely made up by free agent to beat the band Josh Jacobs, whose 1,329 rushing yards helped Title Town finish 5th in rushing. Their late-season rushing surge, punctuated by an indelibly potent 34-0 trash-compactor obliteration of the hopeless Saints on Monday Night Football the night before Christmas Eve, showed this team to be one of the more multifaceted offensive units in the NFL. But the defense showed its weakness late in the year, unable to get one final stop against Minnesota in the Vikings’ last hoorah of the 2024 season to give Love a chance at a game-winning drive, unable to stop a miracle drive by Caleb Williams in the season finale against Chicago (exacerbated disastrously by a horrible Matt LeFleur clock management gaffe and defensive horse collar penalty with an injured Jordan Love looking on) and unable, most crucially, to get a stop late in the game against Philadelphia when the score was 16-10 and within reach. Of course, the Eagles managed to score twice again after that score, and the Packers never did, so the blame does not lie solely on the defense. And despite their late regular season ills, the Packers holding the Eagles to two touchdowns and three field goals - the Eagles’ starters fewest points scored since their match against the Browns in Week 6 - is nothing short of a glowing triumph, given the paroxysms of productivity that team visited on its successive playoff victims.

On the other side of the ball is the offense. The Packers seem to inhabit a unique niche in the stratification of powerful offensive units these days, stretching back to the final season of the Aaron Rodgers era. There have been brief respites in the consistently-reached upper-middle-class quadrant of offensive productivity that the Packers have attained in these years, occasionally breaking through to the clear-cut “1%” of the NFL where the likes of the Niners, Chiefs, and Bills frolic. Still one of the most memorably well-etched moments from recent years, and one that should continue to inspire confidence in the ballsiness and brilliance of its doer, was Matt LeFleur’s decision to receive the ball first in the Packers’ 2023 Wild Card destruction of the soft-as-plush Cowboys, a day where the Packers offense looked as good as any in the NFL. They took a 32-point lead in that game with 10 minutes left in the fourth quarter. They had a four-point lead over the NFC Champion 49ers with under 2 minutes left in the Divisional, after an unpardonable missed field goal let the door stay open for a late San Fran comeback. In their first game after the playoff loss, in Brazil, they put up the second-most points the Eagles allowed all season, showcasing the badassery of a born-again Josh Jacobs and the high-functioning, mostly-mistake-free passing of Jordan Love...for about 52 minutes. Then, on 4th and 5, they had a chance to take the lead with a touchdown trailing by 5, but as LeFleur has been wont to do in situations where the opponent has 31 points and his team does not, he took the points. The Eagles’ 16-play march to destroy the rest of the clock left insufficient time for Love, who was injured, to steal a win.

The rest of the season was more or less a continuation of what we’ve come to expect from the Packers under this regime. LeFleur coached up his offense in the abbreviated Jordan Love absence, milking a run-heavy, pass-sparingly approach (run-heavy as in 90 rushes in two games run-heavy) to defeat two AFC South dumpsters in the Colts and Titans before Jordan Love returned, leading a near-comeback and playing brilliantly against Minnesota. They had only spots of bad play thereafter before their three-game skid to end the season, which itself felt more than a little bad-luck-tinged more so than bad-play-defined. And yet the issue persists: this team has been very close to the mountaintop with LeFleur, regardless of who the guy throwing passes is, but teams that have more abundant beef, more tested toughness, have defeated them again and again in the playoffs, despite Rodgers and Love frequently being the superior quarterback to their opponent. The answer has to be more esoteric than simply “this team needs a true #1 receiver,” right? Don’t get me wrong - Jayden Reed, Bo Melton, Romeo Doubs and above all Christian Watson, who needs to work hard in 2025 to stave off scheme-needy-guy comparisons to Chase Claypool and Sammy Watkins, are fine pieces - but since 2022, the locus of this team’s true superstardom amongst skill position players has been at QB (obviously) and running back. That can work, as the Eagles, who also have good-to-great and truly-special at QB and RB respectively, proved - but not if you don’t have something special on the perimeter.

Palpably Unfair Facts:

• Malik Willis was the highest-rated quarterback to start a game in 2024. He threw 33 total passes in those two heroic starts.

• Jordan Love had a weird season. He compressed all 11 of his interceptions into his first 8 starts, but also 64% of his touchdown passes.

• Josh Jacobs caught a touchdown pass for the first time in his career last year. He’s averaging one score every 233 receptions.

Media weaselings of Sean Payton aside, what’s not to like about these Denver Broncos? They have a prized second-year QB who would have won OROY if Jayden Daniels didn’t exist last year, they have a talented defense with both old and young playmakers, they have Sean Payton and his requisite cabinet of offensive curiosities (role-players), they have 2025’s version of Marques Colston (Courtland Sutton), and they’ve endured a long playoff drought made all the more bittersweet by the fact that their last moment of playoff victory was a Super Bowl win. So what exactly is stopping this team, which improved markedly on offense throughout the season last year, from being higher on this list, above teams whose windows have been open longer and may be frightfully close to closing? One, the fact that team #4 on this list disemboweled this team with joyless ease in the Wild Card round, and two, the Kansas City Chiefs sharing a division with them. Living like that must be like operating a reindeer meat food truck with Noma as your next-door neighbor. Sussing out whether these Broncos are “for real,” and if they’re the biggest and best test the Andy Reid Chiefs have faced in their division since Peyton departed, or whether the Sean Payton Broncos are just the most recent version of the Josh McDaniels Raiders, Brandon Staley Chargers, or Nathaniel Hackett Broncos is tough, but we like what we’ve seen so far in an admittedly limited sample.

Through three and a half games in 2024, it was looking like Bo Nix would never get around to throwing a touchdown pass in the pros. Then, mirabile dictu, the young gun slung a tuddy to crusty veteran Courtland Sutton for what proved to be the difference in a gleefully offense-free 10-9 win over Aaron Rodgers’ Jets. The team had ups and downs that never seemed to stabilize throughout the season, though, and eight of Nix’s 29 touchdown passes - 28% - came in two games against the flailing Falcons and the Week 18 Chiefs, who weren’t really the Chiefs at all (resting for the playoffs, because that always works). Like the visibly well-prepared team they were, they mashed inferior opponents, played evenly if at times rockily against their equals, and were soundly blown out by clearly better teams like the Ravens, Bills and...Chargers? The 23-16 and 34-27 final tallies may deceive the less-than-scrupulous peruser, but between these two teams with first-year head coaches (both of them retreads from NFC days gone by who enjoyed significant to fabulous success), the Chargers captured both contests, leading their first matchup 23-0 before a cannonade of consolation scoring occurred on the navy-and-orange side of the ball. They split with the Chiefs even though Nix played well enough to win both games - although, as a great NFL Films bit once enjoined, “you can’t lose on a missed field goal if you aren’t ahead” - and thoroughly beat the marooned Antonio Pierce Raiders both times they played. The AFC West is a steel cage that punishes its denizens time and again with uncompromising reminders of Who’s Boss. It’s like a Local IBEW union - seniority always prevails. And the senior chieftains are so deeply entrenched by this time that only a bloody seizure of power that leaves the old regime in tatters can hope to change the existing disposition. These Broncos may not be on the same level as, say, the Bengals - the only AFC team to dethrone the Chiefs this decade in the playoffs - but they have a lot of nutritious components they can use to bake a Chiefs-aimed haymaker in 2025 if they stay focused.

This team is not wanting for solid contributors on either offense or defense. While they lack a true star at running back, unlike our friends at 12 the Packers, they are one of the few teams in the NFL that is strong from 1-4 in the RB department. Rookie R.J. Harvey from UCF currently owns the unofficial “starter” spot, but their holdovers from 2024 and additions this offseason are all capable of toting the rock as a high-volume stand in (the others include J.K. Dobbins, Audric Estime and Jaleel McLaughlin). In the usual consuetude of Sean Payton’s offense, the backs are geared more to the demands of the passing game than the running game, but in the best tradition of the greatest Saints offenses, the run game too seems well-primed for a solid season too (as good as Bo Nix was as a rookie, the offense was fairly well-balanced, with the team rushing for over 100 yards in 12 games last season). In an even further simulation of the early-2010s-era Saints, the Broncos seem like they have dozens of pass-catchers - none of which are clearly in the “elite” level of the league’s receivers. But Courtland Sutton has been special at times in his career, and is more than adequate as a true X #1. But behind Marvin Mims, the nominal #2, there’s not really a ton to get excited about. Devaughn Vele showed a bit of promise in his rookie season last year, but no one besides Sutton and Mims caught more than 500-yards worth of receivage over the entire 2024 season (Mims only reached 503). Tight ends were barely even featured, with certified Payton Guy Adam Trautman (remember him?) leading the TEs with a ragtag 188 receiving yards, a paucity of pass-catching among that group that free agent Evan Engram, who’s been decent throughout his now lengthy career, will need to dramatically up-level. The third- and fourth-highest receiving players from last year, Lil’Jordan Humphrey and Javonte Williams, are now off the team. Not an ideal place for the offense to be with a second-year QB who seemed to hit his stride late in 2024, but what can you do? The defense has true starpower that the offense lacks, with reigning DPOY Pat Surtain II providing an incredible ROI on the new four-year $96M contract he signed before last season. Breakout players Zach Allen and Nik Bonitto, who made the Colts look so foolish on his signature highlight last year that it all but ended that team’s season in Week 15, seem extremely well-positioned to build on their fabulous 2024 seasons. Finding the suitably energetic Talanoa Hufanga as a replacement to 2024 departure and longtime team captain Justin Simmons figures to be a massive upgrade over the duo of JL Skinner and Devon Key they trotted out at SS last year. When in doubt, sign former 49ers, I suppose - Hufanga joins Mike McGlinchey, Dre Greenlaw, and D.J. Jones as one of four different starters who came to Denver from SF. Shanahanigans East!

Palpably Unfair Facts:

• The 2024 Broncos won a single game against teams with a winning record last year (excluding the Chiefs in Week 18, resting almost all of their starters). They averaged 17 PPG against winning-record teams (again excluding the W18 Chiefs).

• 40% of this team’s 2024 win total came against the woeful NFC South. Their in-conference wins came agains the New York Jets (5-12), Las Vegas Raiders twice (4-13), Cleveland Browns (3-14), Indianapolis Colts (8-9) and Chiefs backups (15-2/0-1).

• The Broncos don’t play two consecutive games in the same time zone until weeks 7 and 8 of 2025 (both home stands). A quick start seems difficult and perhaps unlikely.

It was foolish of the Bears not to clean house wholly and totally amongst their overmatched coaching staffs between 2023 and 2024, when they had the earliest chance to pair generational prospect Caleb Williams with a brilliant offensive mind and maximize his rookie value. Instead, they kept a clearly unqualified and game management-illiterate figurehead who would have been the wrong choice in any year to pair with a #1 overall pick - much less as a third-year former defensive coordinator whose defense had been terrible since jump street and whose former team was planning to fire him if he didn’t get hired elsewhere. While the Bears seem to have remedied their stupefying faux pas from 2024 by hiring the best offensive HC candidate in several years, it’s fair to wonder if the unnecessary damage done to this team’s confidence and winning-instincts by forcing them into exposure to the loserdom of Matt Eberflus and his radioactive decision-making isn’t too grievous to heal in a single offseason. The defeats this team piled up in 2024 that cannot be rationally explained weigh the list of last year’s losses down like cumbersome psychic baggage, and it will take a lot of smarts and success to wipe away the sins of the past regime.

The Bears, who have been in the NFL longer than any other team, have still never had a 4,000 yard passer. They’ve only had 5 seasons of 3,500+ yards passing. If Ben Johnson can’t fix this in one season in Chicago, the city might burn down for the second time in 150 years. Which would give the show Chicago Fire an interesting story arc, for once, but would do little in the way of finally removing the bears from their NFC dungeon shackles and back to the vanguard of the national sports conversation. Ben Johnson is a wonderful offensive mind - no one who has watched the Lions over the last four seasons could possibly disagree - and even though his apparently cagey approach to head coaching interviews over the past two offseasons have engendered skepticism and at times disingenuous-seeming aspersions about his archetypal suitability as a “CEO” of an NFL team (a puerile buzzword for modern NFL head coaches like John Harbaugh, Dan Campbell, Mike Tomlin, or anyone else who doesn’t seem to have that much schematic responsibility but comes off like a Man’s Man who Just Gets It), he’s as good an option to lead your team as anyone who’s been available to do so since at least Kevin O’Connell. I’d lump him in with KOC as well as Sean McVay and Kyle Shanahan in terms of potential. But the reason I fear Johnson may not be successful immediately, if ever, with Chicago has nothing to do with him. It’s because it’s Chicago. It’s not Ben, it’s Chi. This team has chewed up and spit out coaches and players for the better part of 30 years with one generational-defense-led NFC Championship ring to show for it, and offensively this team has done nothing of note to excite its fans aside from a couple lucky days from Mitchell Trubisky and Jay Cutler. Justin Fields was fun - he wasn’t good. Caleb Williams needs to be both - immediately.

If anyone can turn this ghost ship away from the cliffs, it’s Ben Johnson. And even though Ryan Poles has had an up-and-down tenure as GM, getting on base a decent number of times (Jaquan Brisker, Elijah Hicks), hit a couple doubles and triples (Darnell Wright, punter Tory Taylor, Rome Odunze), and might have a home run in the making in Caleb Williams, but he’s struck out a lot too - see Velus Jones, Keenan Allen, Chase Claypool, Travis Homer, basically every tight end, CB Tyrique Stevenson, LB Tremaine Edmunds...the list goes on. Add to this players who have been buried on the depth chart and look as though their football foliage may never blossom if they don’t have a huge leap forward in 2025 like Roschon Johnson and Tyler Scott and you clearly have a morass on your hands. But there’s hope this year with additions like ever-underappreciated former Falcons DT Grady Jarrett, DE Dayo Odeyingbo from Indianapolis and wideouts Devin Duvernay and Olamide Zacchaeus from Jacksonville and Washington, who aren’t accustomed to the usual Bears crypt-stench that invaginates unsuspecting Chicago draft picks and FAs and may be spared the typical descent to irrelevance by the intervention of Ben Johnson, and, who knows? You might have a real-life NFL team on your hands here.

This team is difficult to slot on this list for a number of reasons that transcend or overhang or underpin or other-verb the actual roster, with its players and coaches. I’ve never seen a truly scary Bears team in my life. Part of the reason thereof is because growing up in Indianapolis, and also being very ignorant about the NFL of the mid-2000s as I lived through them, the exposure I had to the Bears came in the form of Devin Hester highlights and Rex Grossman’s being unwatchably outclassed in the Super Bowl by Peyton Manning and his defense. After that, nothing the Bears did - until their defense proved a rich and fruitful canvas on which opposing fantasy football players could dump Pollockian dollops of production - seemed of much interest. Sure, they had a moment in the NFC Championship against Rodgers, but in that same game the highlights came in the form of Jay Cutler riding a stationary bike, Aaron Rodgers playing defense against Brian Urlacher, B.J. Raji playing offense against Caleb Hanie, and Caleb Hanie leading a heroic drive after the Raji pick six which was not followed up by a tying score. Anyway. The Bears need to stop being, well, Da Bears - the ones we know and don’t love having to watch, the ones that Aaron Rodgers claims a controlling interest in, the ones that have a 0.34 win percentage this decade (not being playoffless, though, as an 8-8 Matt Nagy-Mitchell Trubisky season proved in 2020), the ones that, yes, haven’t had a 4,000 yard passer in 106 seasons. The Bears are part of the shared heritage of footballkind. Even their enemies cannot detest them so badly that they want them to disappear. I don’t think all that many Packers, Lions, and Vikings fans actually even want them to stay boring and bad all that much - or rather, I don’t think an ultra-high number of those fanbases would be unconsolable if this team was actually good, for once. It would give them a more entertaining opponent. It may give their teams a more apt whetstone on which to sharpen their own skills. And it would just be good for the game. The procession towards being a punishing, powerful team begins with activating - not even unlocking, just activating - Caleb Williams out of the hieroglyphics-deciphering mess he found himself in with the old Shane Waldron offense. Maybe the defense can be better than 28th against the run, too?

Palpably Unfair Facts:

• Chicago joined the 2011 Buccaneers as the only teams in NFL history to start the season 4-2 or better and still lose 12 games.

• The Bears finished last in total yards and yards per play in 2024. They finished second-worst in first downs and passing yards.

• Caleb Williams should change his number back to #13. It’s ridiculous that aging role player Keenan Allen insisted on taking that number last year despite everyone and their 16-Inch-Softball-playing grandmother knowing Caleb was coming to town.

I’ll bet you didn’t watch a lot of Patriots games in 2024. I can’t blame you. The team was bad in 2023 and many thought they’d stay bad in 2024. For the most part they did, finishing a division-worst 4-13 in a season spiked by substandard coaching, a true lack of offensive weapons, and an aging defense that showed little of the intelligence or high-floor steadiness that defined the prior 20 years of Bostonian ball. But they did draft Drake Maye – a player who, going into 2023, several respected college football writers mused might be a better prospect than Caleb Williams – and whether or not you think Jerod Mayo got a raw deal from a meddling, voraciously publicity-driven owner, one cannot help being excited by the prospect of square-jawed Football Guy Mike Vrabel returning both to the NFL generally and to the site of his longtime home as a player in New England specifically. Let’s just be clear that Mike Vrabel is not part of the Belichick coaching tree; he never coached under the former Patriots coach, only played under him. Regardless, grit and umbriferous mandatory brushes with the media are decisively back in New England. But this team is bad, has been bad, and has to play a lot of good teams in their own division – not to mention their conference. I’d really love this team if it played in SEC Country, i.e., the NFC South. But they don’t. And a bare cupboard that places a lot of pressure on aging players at RB, WR and TE may not be quite enough for these lads to tread chowder in the coming season.

A lot has happened since May 28, 2025. That date is the date that Mike Vrabel provided a brusque and frankly forbiddingly clipped commentary on the news that Stefon Diggs, the team’s chief free agent pickup of the offseason, had been captured on video ingesting a mysterious pink substance on a boat with various different women. It could have been Fun Dip. (It probably wasn’t.) Bear in mind that this is the same day that Stefon Diggs actually signed with the Patriots (the news that the two parties had agreed in principle on terms had broken three days earlier). This isn’t how you want to start your tenure with a new team, and that goes for both Vrabel and Diggs, but dammit if this isn’t mouth-wateringly wondrous theater. Vrabel is a no-nonsense head coach, or at least has the reputation of one, a reputation bolstered by his cropped, jagged hair, his hulking build, his history as a player under Bills Cowher and Belichick and as a coach under Urban Meyer (lol) and Bill O’Brien (smaller but still audible lol), and his penchant for fielding grinding teams that didn’t care about passing totals or style points so long as victory was won. It’s worth noting that Vrabel is in one lifetime the individual reputed to have made Bill Belichick laugh in an otherwise lugubrious 2007 team meeting whose tension was soul-rending and eminently palpable before the then-linebacker delivered a singeing one liner that melted the team into hysterical laughter as well as the man who dealt the Tom Brady-Bill Belichick duumvirate its culminating playoff loss in the 2019-20 playoffs. A man of multitudes and manifoldnesses, indeed. This is the person, if I liked this team, that I would want coaching them. To take nothing away from an unsuccessful yet respectable year of Jerod Mayo as HC, Vrabel feels like the NE HC.

What do we have in this grab-bag of contrastive contributors underneath the new general, then? For one, we have Drake Maye, the third overall pick one year ago. Of all the rookie QBs taken in the first round last year, perhaps none cultivated a greater disparity between hard, recordable numbers (2,276 yards, 15 passing scores, 10 picks, 421 rushing yards and – most unattractive of all – 9 fumbles) and passage of “the eye test.” Take a gander back at the final moments of the Jets-Patriots game on TNF in Week 3. Inspect the well-orchestrated offensive possessions he compiled in his first start at home against Houston in those sweet Pat Patriot throwbacks, paying especial heed to his unwillingness to stop shooting, as it were, despite an early overthrow that got picked off. Look at how cleanly, nimbly and deftly he conducted his confederates in the Jaguars-Patriots game in London, where we really took off and showed that he at least has the munitions in his quarterback strongbox to be The Guy. That’s all you really need these days to have that position covered, after all – *a* guy who can be *THE* Guy if you environ him with capable playmakers; isn’t that what Stafford and Hurts and late-stage Brady are or were? And isn’t that what Mahomes has been from time to time? Who’s to say with the proper support system around him that the five-tool Maye can’t be something similar – The Guy who can distribute the ball to talented teammates and, maybe 5-10 times a game, do things with his physical gifts that a lot of others can’t? I feel that I saw enough last year to be confident about Maye having the mojo and moxie to do just that. I don’t have a ton to back this up other than an abiding Old Baseball Scouts From Moneyball-esque “he looks good” feeling, but I do think he can easily be the second-best quarterback in the AFC East this season. That might sound disrespectful to Tua, but it’s the sense I get. Draaake??

The bad news is that this team has a long way to go outside of QB (the QB obviously needs to develop a lot as well). The team in its present makeup relies on a near-doddering clutch of castaways ranging from Hunter Henry to Austin Hooper and from Kendrick Bourne to Mack Hollins, to name only the guys from other teams. Their homegrown options aren’t stellar either, with Demario Douglas trying to prove that he’s not simply the next Tyquan Thornton and Ja’Lynn Polk needing to seriously rebound from a horribly disappointing 2024 season which saw him start 7 games and only catch 12 passes. The concept here is that the addition of Stefon Diggs, who himself needs to show a lot to prove to his audience that he’s not well past his own prime (sneaky very old, Diggs is – he was a rookie in 2015), will both increase Maye’s passing abilities by virtue of being a new, big, reception-eating target as well as a coverage-attracting boon to the other receivers, who need to come into their own through easement of the suffocating opponent coverage they’ve faced to this point. The tight ends simply need to be moved on from at this point, barring some utterly unthinkable late-career renaissance by Henry and Hooper, whose last good seasons were in 2021 and 2019. The running backs look similarly dreary – Rhamondre Stevenson looked like he might be the next Antowain Smith or Corey Dillon back in 2021, but that was four years ago. Antonio Gibson had much the same outlook as Rhamondre Stevenson…in 2020. Five years ago. They did add Ohio State product and national champion TreVeyon Henderson into the mix, which is never a bad idea, but as a raw rookie he may take some breaking-in and getting-used-to in the NFL’s academy of hard lessons. The last truly great Ohio State running back to make an instant impression in the NFL was Ezekiel Elliott, TEN years ago. And he’s not even the first running back from Ohio State taken in the most recent draft! (Color me shortsighted for putting a baker’s dozen of eggs into the Trey-Sermon-Will-Be-Generationally-Great basket, by the way – why did that guy never take off, aside from a late-2023 performance against Pittsburgh when he was with Indianapolis?) The OL, if it can stay healthy, has the chance to be above-average, but there aren’t any true superstars aside from first-rounder Will Campbell here. The defense, which was 21st in scoring last year, has a decent secondary on paper, but they need so much more of a pass rush before I take them seriously as a unit that would have made Bill Belichick almost crack a smile.

Palpably Unfair Facts:

• Despite finishing a disappointing 23rd in passing D, the Patriots allowed the fewest yards after the catch to opposing teams.

• Even without any stars on offense, Maye finished roughly league average in on-target and bad-throw %. Good for a rookie.

• The most obvious COTY award ever would be one won by Vrabel for sweeping Buffalo and winning the East with a 10-7 record.

You might balk at seeing a team that finished so badly the previous year that it earned the number one overall pick in the most recent player selection meeting (draft) at the midpoint of this list. It’s a fair observation to make, but think about the drab darkness from which this team is extricating itself: endless blooper-reel plays from its QB, near-weekly manglings of its defense by bloodthirsty offenses wearing colors other than two-tone blue, an an unmistakable lack of identity on offense accentuated by loathsome sloppiness in the ball-security department (49 combined fumbles and interceptions). The 2024 season was about 14 games longer than it needed to be for this team – we knew exactly who these Titans were by the time Mason Rudolph spelled an injured and irretrievably lost Will Levis against Miami during a Week 4 MNF doubleheader, the perfect matchup for such an evening (Tyler Huntley versus Mason Rudolph? Be still my heart). The hope for this team is that Cam Ward finishes the season with something in the neighborhood of 20-25 touchdowns, 10 INTs or fewer, no major fumbling issues, and a few wins and a surplus of highlights. But this team needs so much more than just a precocious Ward to be successful, and has so few potential answers to their many pitfalls already on the roster, that we should probably just check back next season.

Nothing that the Titans did last year gave anyone any faith in their players or their coaches. They went 3-14, tied for worst in the league with Cleveland, but it’s the Titans who got the number one pick. And they did so with a kind of hilarious, inept aplomb. In one five game stretch in December, they gave up 42, 10, 37, 38, and 20 points. Three of those scores are significantly above the league-average for 2024 of 22.9 PPG – of course the Titans lost those ones, despite scoring 19, 27 and 30 points in them – but two of those are well below league average. And the Titans lost those games too, 6-10 against the Jaguars and 13-20 against the…Jaguars. To paraphrase and lightly repurpose the immortal words of power back Leroy Hoard: “If you need 39 points to win, I’ll get you 30. If you need 11 points to win, I’ll get you 6.” That’s what the Titans were and, until they prove otherwise, are – a team that is just expertly adept at losing, and nothing else. How else can one accurately characterize a team that in their Week 8 game against Detroit surrendered only 225 total yards and still gave up 52 points, or to instantiate another offending example, lost their season opener to Chicago despite holding the opponent to 148 total yards?

There’s only so much to say about the 2024 Titans, though. They weren’t bad in the same way that a team like the 2008 Lions were, or the 1976 Buccaneers. They were more of a new-age dumpster fire, a bad-but-not-memorable team that just happened to be the worst of a couple different disasters vying for the fleeting significant of holding the #1 pick. That the Titans won out on that proposition is less a testament to their own failures and more a showing of evenness around the floor of the NFL. No wobblers here. If nothing else, the Titans may have bottomed-out at a bad point for them in their own franchise history. Was Cam Ward really a #1 overall pick? The true fear for Titans fans should be that Cam Ward was simply the best option in a down year for quarterbacks, one situated in a midst of bad years (though 2024, last year’s, looks like it will be promising if people not named Jayden Daniels start to live up to their billing). On the topic of Cam Ward, let’s look at what he brings to the table. He jumped high up the boards between the college football preseason of last year to the date of the draft, bolstered in no small measure by the reduction in the number of times he tried to scramble: he halved this number from 120 to 60 in his senior season at Miami, losing some of the touchdown totals he produced at Washington State but almost tripling his yards per rush. Through the air, he was easily the best in the country, leading Division I in touchdown passes and lapping the ACC in per-attempt efficiency. He did all of this, to underscore his stellar year, without having the luxury of throwing to weapons like Travis Hunter or Tetairoa McMillan, high-first-round draft picks in their own right. He did have the privilege of winging it to his once and future teammate Xavier Restrepo, who finished as a consensus All-American in 2024, but if we want to chicken-and-egg this issue we’d have to note that he went undrafted in the 2025 NFL Draft and probably ended up back with Ward in the hopes that they could effect a low-budget Trevor Lawrence/Ja’Marr Chase impersonation as existing teammates with concrete chemistry. Whether this pairing will be closer to the Burrow-Chase partnership or whether this will be a reincarnation of the Mark Sanchez-Scotty McKnight debacle that the 2011 New York Jets grumbled through, amongst many other fiascos, remains to be seen. And yet questions persist in their swirling way around the former Hurricane and Cougar – was his meteoric rise in 2024 enough to validate his being the first overall pick over non-QB but more-sure-thing options like edge rusher Abdul Carter or tackle Will Campbell? Was he even the best quarterback available for the long-term, with other prospective passers like Jaxson Dart and Shedeur Sanders also on the board? Was anyone actually worth the first overall pick??? It’s hard not to see this draft as underwhelming in comparison to priors like 2020, 2023 or 2024, which produced a bounty of Pro Bowlers and more than a few elite QBs? These aren’t questions we can answer in a year’s time, and thankfully for Mr. Ward he simply needs to look the part and put up some close-to-gaudy numbers for a rookie to stave off pronouncements of doubt for at least a little while.

One of the guys who can help Ward accomplish this humble objective is Xavier Restrepo, who while plucky and a fun story is only one of many different ostensibly shoddy options in an ostensibly shoddy receiver room. With outrageous first-round backfire Treylon Burks suffering a broken collarbone in late July and subsequently receiving the “waived/injured” treatment from the team, the choices for Cam Ward to throw the ball to are wanting and worrisome. They do have Calvin Ridley, who despite getting on in years is still an extremely talented and razor-sharp route runner (he actually set a personal-best for yards per catch in 2024 despite an 8-target 0-catch apocalypse against the Colts), and have pieces in nigh-Unc-status Van Jefferson and Unc-status-proper Tyler Lockett. Tyjae Spears is a nice running back. Their defense is shrug emoji. Verdict: 3rd- or 4th-place in the South, 6-ish wins.

Palpably Unfair Facts:

• That unbelievable Lions-Titans game was truly from a different time. It’s only the second game since yardage records were kept that a team scored over 50 points while recording fewer than 250 total yards. And the other game came in 1941, which featured four different Green Bay Packers kicking extra points in a 54-7 blowout of Pittsburgh. Insane!

• Cam Ward is the seventh different quarterback the Titans/Oilers have picked in the first round. Excluding Jim Everett, who never played for them, the combined Weighted Approximate Value of all others – Pro Football Reference’s proprietary calculation of the total greatness of a player’s career – is 265, an average of 44. The average wAV for HOF QBs is 106.

• The single-season passing touchdowns franchise record for the Titans/Oilers, 36, has stood since 1961.

I struggled with where to place the Los Angeles Rams more than any other team on this list. The fact of the matter is that this team has a much better chance to make and win the Super Bowl than several teams in front of them. But this team’s expectations and ceiling have been recalibrated in a unique way since 2021. Winning the Super Bowl that year was cause for celebration. The 2022 season was a cause célèbre. Following up the team’s catastrophic title defense (probably the worst ever), the 2023 Rams snuck into the playoffs despite boasting a lowly 3-6 record at one point in the season, being swiftly marshalled out of the tournament by the resurgent Lions. The 2024 season saw the Rams fall to 1-4 before their bye before a 9-3 sprint to finish the season put them back in the playoffs where they crushed an out-of-gas Vikings team before losing in agonizingly slim-margined fashion in Philadelphia. But even though this team was within a hair’s breadth of tying and winning (with a no-sure-thing extra point in a snowy game) the game against Philadelphia in the divisional playoffs, the Rams offense had been on life support for much of the season’s latter half, scoring over 30 points only once in their final 13 games. The defense was damn good down the stretch, but is this a mirage, or a mark of lasting savageness?

No team is like the Rams heading into 2025. That’s because no other team has both won the Super Bowl while also plunging into deep mediocrity then rising up again like these Rams despite keeping most of the pieces around. When Sean McVay arrived in Los Angeles to begin the first of two of Jared Goff’s career renaissances, he was a revelation. Inconsistency in 2019 and a true down year for the offense in 2020 led to Goff’s being shipped off to Detroit, where he has since flourished. But in 2021, the return on that trade, Matthew Stafford, looked incredible, combining his best improvisational and playmaking abilities that had been on display with the Lions with a new functionality in the regimented structure of the McVay offense. But injuries and an overhanging, little-discussed sense that the team’s offense may not have kept up with the way the rest of the great offenses in the NFL are trending have combined to produce three straight less-than-divine offensive seasons for the Rams, with the 2024 season showing some of the most putrescent warts both early and late in the season. The season’s lone true offensive highlight, a 44-42 defeat of the Bills in which the offensive piled up 457 total yards, was quickly forgotten amidst a three-game stretch in which the offense failed to double their output of that single Bills win (801 yards to 457) and scored the same amount of points (12, 19, and 13 - 44 total). And throughout these contests it was evident that the prime mover in all this was Stafford, who did not succeed in surpassing 200 yards passing in any of the three contests. He threw a single touchdown and a single interception in the same period. What gives?

Stafford did up his game a bit in the playoffs, playing cleanly and within structure for the Vikings win and playing one of the best games of his year in Philadelphia after being forced to go pass-heavy in the poor footing afforded by the snow. But the QB who had taken 0 sacks over his final 4 starts in the regular season took 7 in his two playoff games, including 5 in Philadelphia, including one that all but lost them the game on 3rd and 2 at the Eagles’ 13, the doorstep of victory. 3rd and 2, and you take a 9-yard sack? Inconceivable. His two fumbles lost in that game probably didn’t help either. When you look at what Stafford has put on film over the past two seasons, or since his return from a 2022 injury that kept him out of that season’s latter half, you see a quarterback who can’t seem to put all of his good traits on display at the same time. The “college triangle” of “social life, good grades, enough sleep – you can only choose 2,” can be modified and applied to Stafford: Gaudy Passing Numbers, Low Interceptions, Few Sacks-and-Fumbles. At times in his Rams career, he’s been able to pull off the trifecta, but not recently. Nor has he been consistently able to even accomplish two at once: this team’s 10-7 record includes losses to Arizona, Chicago, and Miami – not exactly a Murderer’s Row of league titans – where he threw for less than 300 yards, no touchdowns, and one or more interceptions or lost fumbles. There’s also a fourth dimension – an extra axis – for Stafford’s game, and that’s his health. A lingering back injury that has persisted past the first preseason game is horribly worrisome. While the emergence of Kyren Williams as a capital touchdown maker for this offense helped mask the dampened passing numbers, he alone couldn’t turn this offense into something anywhere close to “elite” status, as the Rams finished alongside similarly offensively-challenged teams Kansas City, Los Angeles (the other one), and Seattle in rushing for over 100 yards 9 times in their 17 regular season games. Given that 17 teams reached that mark 10 times or more, it’s not a diss to say the team was below average in both rushing and passing last season. This for a team that had Cooper Kupp and Puka Nacua!It’s not entirely fair to say this team “had” Cooper Kupp and Puka Nacua – they didn’t in the same way they had Puka in 2023 or Cooper Kupp in 2021. Puka missed 6 games with injuries, as did Kupp (he appeared in 12 games but missed 6 starts). This once terrifying Rams receiver room hasn’t been formidable in near the same way they were in Sean McVay’s first five years with the team. Puka, to be fair, more or less equalled his per-game production from 2023 when he was available, but he has had trouble finding the endzone in his two seasons in L.A., no doubt a huge factor in Stafford’s lowered passing scores totals in the same period. But Kupp has been on the down-turn for a while now, with injuries no small part of the tumble. I illustrate this by pointing out that Kupp had more receiving yards in 2021, regular season and playoffs, than he has had in 2022, 2023, and 2024, regular season and playoffs, COMBINED. It’s not like he’s missed enough time to justify a discrepancy of that magnitude over that period. Having come to a similarly dim conclusion, Los Angeles parted ways with Kupp this offseason, signing Davante Adams to be his avowed replacement. Davante’s a future Hall Of Famer, but the geothermal eruption of nothingness that was the Allen Robinson signing in 2022 still hangs pendulously and pronouncedly over this team’s free agent wide receiver initiative – I have my doubts.

The defense, in short, has become the motor of this team. A gangbusters draft class on the DL that brought Jared Verse and Braden Fiske to the City Of Angels last year proved to be among the most prominent stories of the 2024 season, with both players receiving DROY votes. Verse was the winner of that merchandise, but both guys seem like the genuine article. They added depth with the further addition of Poona Ford from division rival Seattle, who as chance would have it was the team who snapped up Cooper Kupp. The team’s draft wasn’t one of the more exciting in the league – Rams drafts seldom are – but they did “win” in round 1 by fleecing the Falcons – more on that later – and drafted blue-blood prospects on defense from Michigan and Ohio State. This team seems balanced, if boring. The NFC West usually ends up being better than expected, though, and the Niners loom large.

Palpably Unfair Facts:

• L.A. became the 16th team since 1970 to make the playoffs after starting 1-4. Only one of those teams, the 2016 Brock Osweiler Texans, won a playoff game the following year.

• Stafford’s 20 TDs and 3,762 passing yards were his fewest ever in a full season. He threw 19 touchdowns in 8 games in 2019.

• Even with their issues on offense, L.A. won the NFC West in 2024. Seattle, with the same 10-7 record, missed the playoffs.

They got some nice new uniforms and updated colors, which made designing their Personal Vowels wordmark a lot of fun. But this team took a massive step backwards on offense from where they left off in 2023 despite their hot start. They’re in many ways the opposite of the Rams when it comes to the second half of their regular season: both are teams that won a Wild Card blowout before losing Divisionals with misleading final scores, but the Rams surged from a 1-4 start to finish 9-3 while the Texans transmogrified a 5-1 beginning into a 10-7 ending. It became clear at some point in the season – I might point to the 1-3 stretch between October 20 and November, during which the team lost to both the Jets and Titans – that the Texans, a team that looked to be on a vicious upswing in 2023 and which was continuing on that path in 2024 – was probably not in the same category as the Chiefs, Bills and Ravens, and was instead counted amongst the gaggle of good-not-great teams like Denver, Los Angeles (who to the Texans’ credit they defeated soundly in the playoffs), Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, whose ceilings might not be known with conclusive certainty but are pretty clearly south of a Super Bowl victory. A lot of that had to do with the supporting cast of, and quality of play from, their quarterback.

On November 5, 2023, C.J. Stroud played the greatest game of football a rookie quarterback has ever played. He threw for 470 yards, 5 touchdowns, and 0 interceptions – and the team won by only 2 points after a final strike to Tank Dell with 6 seconds left, so he wasn’t stat padding. To date, that has been the high point of his career. It would be the high point of almost anyone’s career from a pure passing vantage point, excluding only folks like Ben Roethlisberger (522-6-0) or Y. A. Tittle (505-7-0) on their very best days. But that’s kind of the problem for Stroud. Those guys Roethlisberger and Tittle had those games late in their career, at their very apex, and it seemed like an interval of coronation, a verification of their greatness, a laying-in of fresh gems in an already well-adorned work of quarterback metallurgy for two giants of the game. But Stroud’s work of utter aerial terror against a waterlogged-cardboard Bucs D on a random Sunday at 1 p.m. Eastern gave Stroud two, different, things: a resounding and deserved peal of league-wide applause for an unbelievable rookie whose greatness seemed both out-of-nowhere and well in the offing, and a burden of outsize expectations so staggering and so divorced from realistic outcomes that, to borrow a turn of phrase from Fitzgerald, he seemed a man “who reach[ed] such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax.” We’ve seen rookies have incredible games and unforseeably amazing debuts, even earlier in their careers than this game came in Stroud’s, before: Marcus Mariota famously threw more touchdowns than incompletions in his career debut, and later that season – almost exactly 8 years before Bucs-Texans ’24 - pulled a Stroud of his own by thrashing an overmatched NFC South opponent (the Saints) to the tune of 371 yards, 4 tuddies and 0 picks. But save for some moments here and there, most of them in his sophomore NFL season, his maniac flashes of all-time-greatliness seemed compressed and circumscribed to the confines of his early career waddlings from greenhorn high-draft-pick to franchise QB. It simply didn’t pan out for him. And even though Stroud certainly seems better than Mariota – though both were the second overall picks eight years apart – and has had far more playoff success even through two years than his Oregonian predecessor, it’s not unfair to wonder if his outlook outgrew his outlay before he had a chance to truly settle in to the NFL. Does that make any sense at all? In any case, Stroud was going to have a hard time following up the ridiculous bar he set for himself in his #frosh season at QB1 in Houston, and he did not outperform his first year with his second. He threw for fewer yards despite starting more games and, more concerning, looked for the second year in a row, along with the rest of his team, like a distant second-place, an entrenched silver medal, in the mono-e-mono divisional playoff loss that ended their season, this year to the Chiefs, last year to the Ravens. That’s the way she goes in the NFL – you don’t just have to be great, you have to be better than other prodigies of the forward pass, all of whom are one of the 32 best in the world.

Stroud’s downturn in passing was not solely his fault. Though his on-target percentage dropped from 74.8 to 73.3 – a seemingly small dip but enough to move him from about league average to 28th among qualified passers, in the same territory as struggling field generals like Joe Flacco, Mac Jones and Will Levis – the drop percentage among his receivers leapt forward in a bad way, rising from 3.8% to 5.1%. This moved him up from 28th in 2023 to 9th. That’s on the receivers. But the story of the 2024 Texans’ passing game essentially begins and ends with what happened to the offensive line. Stroud was relatively well-protected in 2023, at least for a team in a nominal rebuild, being pressured on 22% of his dropbacks. Not great but not terrible. That number skyrocketed to 28%, the highest in the NFL, in 2024. He was also pressured the most times, period, in the season, which in turn led to him scrambling more (Stroud is athletic, as all QBs are these days, but he’s not Lamar Jackson) and taking more sacks (52 times in 2024, an increase of 14 from the previous year). All this deterioration around him ultimately resulted in almost 400 fewer passing yards despite his starting all 17 games, three fewer touchdown passes, and seven more interceptions. The issuance of inefficacy from the Texans’ passing game had a lot to do with the receiver injuries and misguided additions that the team had to deal with on the fly, with on-again-off-again WR1 Tank Dell losing numerous starts to free agent acquisition Stefon Diggs, which didn’t exactly go to plan – Diggs, shipped off to the Pats in 2025, finished with less than 500 yards and 3 touchdowns – and clear-cut WR1 Nico Collins losing 5 games to injury in the crucial midsection of the season, during which the team went 2-3 and lost to both the Jets and Packers in frustratingly close one-score games. His return, while not necessarily premature, did not immediately result in his galvanizing the offense to new heights, as he had a minor impact in the team’s win over Dallas and only caught half of his targets in a 5-point loss to the awful Titans. Outside of their three receivers, who all told had mildly disappointing years in Year 2 of the Stroud era, only tight end Dalton Schultz caught more than one touchdown. 2022 second-round pick John Metchie, whose career has been majorly derailed by a July 2022 leukemia diagnosis, has had a tough time working himself into the regular rotation of receivers, and the team’s former RB1, Dameon Pierce, fully lost his job to free agent Joe Mixon in 2024. This team’s pass rush is the one part of the team that is incontrovertibly not in question – Danielle Hunter and Will Anderson combined for 23 sacks in 2024, 47% of the team total (49). That seems like it should equate to something better than the 14th-ranked scoring defense. Maybe in 2025, that kind of production will.

Palpably Unfair Facts:

• Stroud’s 2024 season bears resemblance to Matt Ryan’s post-MVP 2017 season – same number of TDs and INTs, just as deflating.

• Another 12-sack season from Danielle Hunter in 2025 would move him to 28th-most all time – ahead of Aaron Donald.

• Houston’s 10 Personnel package (4 WR 1 RB) in 2025 could be lethal after drafting Iowa State’s Jayden Higgins and Jaylin Noel.

Sports media spent a lot of gust, bluster, and gratuitous gushing over the Raiders’ perceived grown-up moves in the offseason. They have Thomas Edward Patrick Brady, Jr., as minority owner, after all, and if there’s one thing we’ve learned from the twilight of Brady’s NFL career and his early post-retirement chapter of life, it’s that he’s just as good at doing everything else in public life as he was at being an NFL quarterback. That was a joke, just in case you were wondering. Few teams will look as different in 2024 from where they were in 2023 as the Raiders will, but though Geno Smith and Pete Carroll are theoretically upgrades over Aidan O’Connell and Antonio Pierce (ok, Pete Carroll is definitely an upgrade over Antonio Pierce), I don’t buy that the full cranial cavity brain-trust transplant that Just Win, Baby effected this offseason will bear any more fruit of the enchanted stem than a replacement-level QB/HC change. Don’t get me wrong – Las Vegas needed sweeping changes this year, both because Antonio Pierce was clearly not the guy under the headset or between the ears, and because he represented an unwelcome vestige of the disastrous Josh McDaniels era. “You can’t repeat the past,” Nick Carraway tells the titular character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. I would say the same to the Raiders, who didn’t atone for the sin of not hiring Rich Bisaccia in 2022 by elevating Antonio Pierce in 2024. One of the abiding lessons woven by Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age novel regards the difficulty, indeed the impossibility, of fundamentally altering one’s identity, heritage, and quintessence – “born back ceaselessly into the past” – and as regards these Raiders…they’re still the Raiders. 1983 was a long time ago, and it’s only going to keep disappearing in the rearview, no matter who is below ownership.

There were a lot of different moments last year that showed the American viewing public that something was off with Antonio Pierce’s game management nous. In Week 1 against the Chargers, late in the game with a chance to pick up a new set of downs and facing a 4th and 1 in Chargers territory, down 16-10…they punted. The Raiders lost 10-22. In Week 7 against the Rams, facing a 4th and goal from the Rams’ 4, a false start (also a reflection of poor coaching) turned 4th and 4 into 4th and 9, and even though the team had only 2:58 seconds left in the game…they kicked a field goal. It was freakishly similar to a decision his predecessor, Josh McDaniels, had made against the Steelers the year before, down 8 needing to tie the game and settling for a field goal to cut the lead to 5 – in both cases, the Raiders still needed a touchdown, so the field goal was essentially worthless. The Raiders lost 15-20. The following week, they lost another one-score game against the Chiefs, with critical failures on 4th down, including a catastrophe on 4th and goal (at least they went for it this time), proving the main story. The Raiders lost 20-27. When they faced the Chiefs again on Black Friday, the Raiders’ league-worst rushing offense managed to put up 116 yards on the ground before the team curiously pivoted away from the run with 6 minutes left in the 4th quarter. After their second-to-last drive stalled with 2:21 left, Pierce sent on his punting team, but then panicked and took a time out – with the game clock stopped – and recalled his punting unit in favor of his field goal team. The Daniel Carlson attempt missed badly. The Raiders used the rest of their timeouts and a Chiefs timeout to get the ball back but the last play of the game was the most staggering disaster yet, as a playcall mixup and resulting communication chaos caused the Raiders’ center to fire the ball backwards before the rest of the team, which had gotten into makeable field goal range again with a chance to win the game, had gotten set, an errant snap that QB Aidan O’Connell couldn’t corral and lost to the Chiefs. It was a tsunami of unpreparedness which the Raiders lost 17-19. Their final one-score loss of the season came against the spiraling Falcons with Desmond Ridder, the former Falcon QB that team had gotten rid of to make room for Kirk Cousins and, not unsurprisingly, Michael Penix Jr., getting the start. Falcons fans could have told Antonio Pierce that asking Ridder to throw the ball 39 times was not a recipe for success, yet that’s the route that Pierce elected to take. The Raiders lost 9-15.

I bring all these up not to pile-on Pierce, though his wanting approach to both gameplanning and in-game-management warrants consideration, but to show that these are 5 games in a 17-game season. This team lost 13 of those 17, and their average margin of defeat in the other 8 games they lost was a prodigious 15 points. Better coaching and better preparation were not going to turn this ragged pirate ship into a treasure-laden seafaring vessel ready to sally forth and ravage a flotilla of contenders in the playoffs. I like the adds of Ashton Jeanty and Raheem Mostert in the running back room – they needed a cash infusion at that position worse than maybe any team in the NFL needed a cash infusion at any position – and I do appreciate the notion of bringing both Geno Smith and his former coach Pete Carroll into the fray to attempt a recreation of the success they enjoyed in Seattle rather than only adding Geno and some other guy at HC. But Carroll isn’t an offensive head coach – he’s been a head coach so long that you can be forgiven for not knowing that once upon a time he was a defensive coordinator – and anything he “brings” to Geno’s game is going to be in the form of routine, regimentation, and familiarity of weekly ritual. That said, the part of the Raiders’ offseason that I like the most is the re-introduction of Chip Kelly to the National Football League. I place great faith in a former head coach who actually proved in his brief stint with the Eagles that he could both lead a team to wins (not always non-toxically or without an unhealthy proportion of personnel meddling, to be sure) and design a sophisticated, innovative offense at the same time. His success with Ohio State may not seem all that laudatory given the unparalleled levels of offensive talent he was working with, but he did win a national championship with the Buckeyes last year despite working with the lowest-drafted Ohio State quarterback since J.T. Barrett. Dwayne Haskins, Joe Burrow, Justin Fields and C.J. Stroud all failed to do what Will Howard and Chip Kelly did. That has to count for something, right? Marginalia like additions of Alex Cappa on the OL and blocking tight end Ian Thomas should help the lagging run game too.

One should be far more forebearing in joining in the chorus of pundit-driven praise for the higher-level, behind-the-scenes moves that the team has pulled off between the dreary 2024 season and now. I don’t know to what extent former Chargers and one-year Raiders GM Tom Telesco was responsible for this team’s deficiencies on both sides of the ball, but I don’t buy that he needed to be shown the door one year in, especially when his replacement, John Spytek, has no GM  experience and is replacing a guy who has 12 years of track record in that department and has been pretty damn good. Look no further than the ongoing and escalatingly bizarre Christian Wilkins breakup to see that, for now, this is the same Raiders team with the same old sideshow drama as always.

Palpably Unfair Facts:

• Another year, another spate of Aidan O’Connell seeing the team bring in a replacemet QB. Garoppolo, Minshew, now Geno.

• Brock Bowers had the greatest rookie TE season ever. Only Travis Kelce and Zach Ertz have caught more passes in one season.

• This defense has absolutely no hope if Maxx Crosby isn’t healthy and/or doesn’t return to 2022/2023 production in 2025.

The mind reels to think about the terrible twists of fate that have befallen this team since the night of January 14, 2023. One of the most fun and compelling playoff games of the last 30 years saw Trevor Lawrence and new-lease-on-life Doug Pederson, who seemed like he’d really bloomed where he was scooped up and replanted in Jacksonville, saw the Jags erase a 27-0 late-second-quarter deficit and win 31-30 by utterly out-willing and out-coaching the Brandon Staley Chargers, somehow defeating the powder blue upstarts despite losing the turnover battle 0-5. That really shouldn’t be possible, but it was. It felt very much like the January 2014 comeback that Andrew Luck and the Colts brought into being against Doug Pederson’s 2013 Kansas City Chiefs – a two-part showcase of the lowest of lows for a young first-overall pick in his second season, needing to just show us something, followed up by a blazing processional that was nothing but highs. Trevor Lawrence and the Jaguars felt like they had arrived, period. But 2023 and 2024 weren’t kind to this team, and now Pederson is gone, the game seeming to have passed him by. Who better to jumpstart the faltering wunderkind’s career than Liam Coen, a man who just did much the same with Baker Mayfield, yet another once-embattled R1P1?

When I wrote about the Kansas City Chiefs, the #3 team on this rundown, I mentioned how perception had usurped reality in many fans’ estimations of that squad’s capabilities. Reality has failed to usurp perception for just quite all of the Trevor Lawrence apologists, expectation-bearers, and remembrancers of his collegiate doings. Or people like me, who see in the guy a lot of the same traits that made us fall in love with Andrew Luck and who do not want to see another prospect with oodles of prowess squandered on a team that can’t get out of its own way and whose ownership, while not capital b BAD in the same way the Dan Snyders or Hugh Culverhouses of the world are, won’t be topping any lists of Closest Thing To Jeffrey Lurie. Trevor had an unreal, space elevator-esque rise to nigh-preeminence of the QBs of the AFC in 2022, capped off with a two-for-one playoff deal that consisted of him TKO’ing Justin Herbert and company and then losing, in no way humiliatingly or hope-destroyingly, to a superior Chiefs team led by MVP Patrick Mahomes. It didn’t seem like the gravy train was running out of track any time soon. But after an 8-3 start in 2023 decomposed into a 9-8 no-playoffs coffin, aided by a Trevor Lawrence injury that clearly downgraded the passer’s abilities while the defense fell apart throughout December and January, Lawrence seemed to lose the magic that Pederson had begun to gin up, going 2-8 in 2024 and going over 300 yards just twice. Mac Jones was not good in relief and the Jaguars finished 4-13. A yucky, sticky, protracted hospice-stay for the Pederson regime that lasted longer than it felt like it needed to resulted in the former Super Bowl-winner receiving the ouster after the season, leading to a very, very weird courtship of now-HC Liam Coen which felt by turns Josh McDaniels-ian and reminiscient of NFL-turned-college coaches like Nick Saban and Bobby Petrino who repeatedly demeaned the idea that they would turn tail and run to a reputedly cushier college job despite time left on their contracts for bad NFL teams they’d failed to turn around sufficiently. However distasteful and undiplomatic the ending of Coen’s coordinatorship in  Tampa Bay, Jags fans have to be happy with his addition here. He’s not the CEO, squadron-agnostic head coach that someone like Dan Campbell or John Harbaugh is, but he doesn’t seem to carry the same potentially unfair perception of being a wonky egghead that someone like Ben Johnson or Mike McDaniel does. He seems like an affable, balanced guy who has the stat sheet to back up his offensive maestro rep.

Giving the man Coen and his prodigy Lawrence, who needs a lot of PR rehab after the last couple seasons for those who’ve been sqayed to doubt him, a bounty of pass-catching and ball-carrying weapons falls to the new GM, a baby-faced chap by the name of James Gladstone. Despite sounding like a 19th-century Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Gladstone was a mainstay in the front office of the Los Angeles Rams from the flaming end of the Jeff Fisher era through the most recent season, receiving four promotions between 2018 and 2024. Now he’s been promoted yet again, albeit to a team without so much as a shred of sustained success over the last 25 years, but he’s already thrown some old Rams hits on the record player, throwing a 2026 first round pick-sized cold cut to the Browns’ Dawg Pound in return for the draft rights to Travis Hunter, a potentially generational two-way player who can inhabit a single roster spot while providing starter-to-near-starter production at both WR and CB. Of course, “proceed with caution” is the aphoristic injunction that will rule the day until Hunter proves he can do both on a regular basis, and a legitimate fear with Hunter that has rarely been bandied about goes something to the tune of “if he CAN’T consistently start or rotate-in at both receiver and corner, is he good enough at either to warrant a high first-round pick?” We won’t know for a while, and even though grandiose ideas of Hunter being a solidified two-way starter to begin his career seem far-fetched and unlikely, we can trust that to maximize Hunter’s ROI we will at least see a decent amount of his stylings on both offense and defense in Year 1 – barring injury, of course, and we should wonder whether if this Shohei Ohtani two-way-player thing starts to go off the rails with Hunter whether some injury report shenanigans might not begin to manifest to throw the scent off disappointing play or conditioning issues from the rookie – with him featuring plentifully in the offensive passing game. On that side of the ball, at least, he won’t be expected to show up and immediately be the Top Dog. For that he has existing Jaguars to lean on like Brian Thomas, Jr. and…well…Parker Washington? Almost every other Jags wideout is a new addition or an undrafted free agent. Thomas Jr. is already a premier wide receiver in the NFL despite the limited, exhaustible resource of spotlight hype being concentrated mostly elsewhere, and can do a lot to draw coverage away from Travis Hunter as he begins his pro wide receiver career. There’s little else in the way of true playmakers on this offense, though, with failed FA experiements Christian Kirk and Evan Engram now gone, little more than the contents of the Jags history dustbin. Travis Etienne is still here at least, now onto his second GM and fourth head coach, and like Trevor Lawrence very much in want of a fresh, statistically-spectacular season to re-validate his pedigree as necessary Jaguars machine cog following a 2024 campaign with halved production across the board. A bevy of other backs, including Tank Bigsby, seem poised to siphon touches. But bare shelves in Publix (lack of talent in the Jags’ offensive skill position groups) is nothing compared to what this team is facing on defense. This is a team that, outside of the brief and liminal “Sacksonville” era defense in 2017 and 2018 which few would point to as a period of Jags glory these days, has not fielded a defense both top ten in yards and points since 2006. Needless to say this defense never took off in 2024 either, with the pass defense in particular suffering last year – the Jags finished last, dead last, in passing yards surrendered, third-last in interceptions, second-worst in interception percentage, second-worst in opponent passer rating, fifth-worst in sacks, fourth-worst in hits, and third-worst in sack percentage. Pass rusher Josh Hines-Allen, who signed a large contract extension in 2024, accounted for 31% of Jag sacks. No one intercepted more than one pass. Travis Hunter should be busy.

Palpably Unfair Facts:

• The Jaguars had three Pro Bowlers in 2024 – rookie WR Brian Thomas Jr, long snapper Ross Matiscik, and punter Logan Cooke.

• The Jaguars ran the fewest plays on offense in the NFL in 2024 and allowed the second-most to be run against them on defense.

• The 2024 Jags had a yardage differential of -1423. Their 2020 franchise record was one 43-yard play away from being broken.