NFL Hope For The Future Rankings: XXI-XXVI
Proceeding further into the bottom third of the NFL’s hopeful teams, we find ourselves with known quantities and true unknowns.
It really should not be possible to lose a playoff game where you have a 27-point lead and win the turnover battle 5-0. But the Chargers and Justin Herbert did. By way of comparison and linkage-laying between team 20 and team 21 on this countdown, I transmit the following vignette. You remember. You have to. “At 27-0, it was over. The Chargers had it all. It was all there for them. They’d proven their old coach, Brandon Staley, correct by coming out of the gate on fire after many starters had played deep into a seemingly meaningless Week 18 regular season finale. Their defense had shown that they were not just a 52-strong vehicle for Justin Herbert and Co. by savagely clasping high-voltage manacles on one of the league’s hottest offenses. And their offense had through two quarters proven that they didn’t need the services of banged-up WR Mike Williams to drop an electroshock bomb on enemy defenders, piling up 27 points in less than one half of playoff football. It was enough to cause many viewers to turn off the game at the second-quarter’s two-minute warning, surely. The Chargers held destiny in the palms of their power-blue-gloved hands. That was one way to look at it, but alternately, one could have looked at it through a different lens: at 27-0, it wasn’t over. Yes, the Jaguars had committed almost every possible offensive mistake a team could reasonably commit that didn’t involve lost fumbles. They’d permitted tipped-ball interceptions, bad read interceptions, receiver-and-quarterback-not-on-the-same-page interceptions, and had muffed a punt off a misadventurous punt team gunner’s helmet. BUT. But, but, but. Beyond these self-inflicted changes of possession into enemy hands, they hadn’t been dominated. Not at all. It was a classic case of a team beating itself. But resolve was not lacking in a team that had clawed its way back from the brink of certain death at 3-7 and 4-8. Trevor Lawrence assumed the helm of an offense with less than 110 seconds left in the half and, taking advantage of good starting field position, marched 47 yards in just under a minute and a half, ending with a zippy touchdown dart to Evan Engram to make it 27-7. From here, all bets were off. Trevor Lawrence – the ascendant, the transcendental, the all-surmounting Trevor Lawrence – did in the second half what he and his team had done in the second half of the season: return from the dead. After going down 27-0, the Jaguars embarked on scoring drives of 47, 89, 68, 70, and 79 yards – all consecutively. Frankly, they didn’t have time for any unsuccessful drives. Aided by an intrinsically Chargerian clutch field goal miss by Cameron Dicker, the Jags didn’t need their final swing of the bat to go for 6 – only 3. Doug Pederson was ingenious and ballsy enough to go for 2 down 4 on the second-to-last drive, meaning the final drive’s do-or-die field goal would be to win the game, not send it to overtime. Throw in a T-formation toss on the game’s biggest 4th down to get them into easy field goal territory that would have made Clark Shaughnessy grin with tactician elation, and the game was won. Bad coaches let down-but-not-out opponents back into games; good coaches keep battling even when only an inch of the sunlight of victory is shining through the peephole. But it’s possible to tell the story of that ridiculous, unbelievable, historic, exorbitantly glorious game in even simpler terms. The Jaguars, on both a micro and macrocosmic level, did not allow themselves to be bound by the ghosts of playoffs and peccadillos past; after throwing FOUR interceptions, Trevor Lawrence maintained his unimpeachably even-keeled demeanor, never becoming gun-shy and letting it rip, the consequences be damned. He played how Pederson coached – fearlessly. Meanwhile, the Chargers had the opposite experience – a negative charge, so to speak – by busting open a huge lead through good fortune and sound opportunism early. But a combination of defensive collapse, inexcusably irresponsible offensive playcalling, quarterback flinching and, most of all, an unprecedented loss of composure from a veteran defensive player all acted in disastrous tandem to snuff the Bolts’ crackling playoff energy in a typhoon of teal-tinted vengeance. They didn’t make their own luck. The Jags did. And only one of them is going home without a fond playoff memory.” - Unpublished Personal Vowels epigraph, January 2023.
Oof! The guy who wrote that above departure clearly thought little of the possibility that the Chargers were far, far more responsible for making the Jags look like world-beaters than the Jags themselves were. It took a little bit longer for the decay and inefficacy of the Pederson-Lawrence duo to manifest as unmistakably as it needed to for me to understand that Pederson (and maybe Lawrence, but he gets much more rope) had witnessed the game passing him by and failed to make the requisite changes to his approach and his offense, but that’s exactly what happened. Jacksonville, man. It’s where good coaches and administrators have traditionally gone to breathe their last – Pederson, Coughlin, Meyer, Bradley, to name but a few who held high office – and Pederson was no exception, in the end. The good thing for the Jaguars and for Trevor is that their new head coach seems like one that could at least get the offense going in a positive direction – in a direction more positive than the past coach was able to drive them.
The Chargers, despite reaching the playoffs last year and winning double-digit games, do not have as clear a course towards the gloriousness of hope as the Jaguars do. This speaks straight to the heart of the point of this list, in a way. The Chargers have been farther down the road of the playoffs more recently than the Jaguars – far more recently than that now three-seasons-prior cinematic extravaganza recounted above – but, because they didn’t win the Super Bowl, and because they were summarily trounced by a team who themselves did not acquit themselves too mightily in their Divisional round loss to an even greater opponent, they get dinged in this list. We’ve seen this team fail already, and not even on a mighty stage. They lost to the Texans, who lost to the Chiefs, who lost to the Eagles. And even though the point of this list is by no means to recreate the “transitive wins” parlor game that prevails throughout college football discourse – this isn’t the Colley Matrix – it is important to demonstrate that, as Qui-Gon Jinn eloquently summarized, “There is always a bigger fish.” This list is counting down from Top Fish, but the corollary holds: the fish grow smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller still from number one to number thirty-two, with their “size” being of rough equivalence to how good their fans should feel about them. There’s no multifaceted calculation, no hyper-aware inclusion of ELO or EPA or DVOA ratings, no sprawlingly monumental spreadsheet that attempts a firm purpose of equation for what “hope for the future” actually is in a mathematical sense in use for this list; that is to say, I the author ranked these teams, not an algorithm or algebra problem. And no doubt disagreements will arise and have arisen already in the minds of anyone who’s read the first twenty teams ranked. But I think most people will agree that the high-scoring teams on this list have a great chance of both winning a lot of games this year and in years to come, teams in the middle have the chance to win a few games this year and either increase or decrease this number in coming years, and low-scoring teams would probably be surprising their supporters if they had an amazing year in 2025 and continued this hypothetical success into the latter half of the 2020s without significant changes in leadership. I also think it holds that while years down the road are considered, teams at the top are a lot better in the here and now than teams at the bottom of these rankings are; the Eagles and Commanders, for example, should be expected to beat these Jaguars and these Chargers. Those at the very bottom, moreover, seem fairly certain to give little in the way of satisfying film to their fanatics this year unless multiple things go extremely and improbably well for them, including unexceptional head coach hirings punching above their weight, unsung QBs suddenly getting significantly and mechanically much better, and their rosters making both their HCs and QBs look a lot better with fortuitous performances. That’s the bottom six teams. But today we’re looking at teams 21-26 – the teams just above that bottom-dwelling sextet. Who are these under-the-radar, probably-bad, potentially-interesting, ever-compelling underdogs? Let’s take a look.
We’ve discussed how the Bears, despite having all the requisite corporeal pieces in place, still, imperishably, have an air of “Yeah, but…” that lingers malodorously upon them through no fault of their own (mostly): they are carrying the weight of the shortcomings of Bears teams past. Take that and exponentiate it to the googolth degree and you have something approaching the way I view the Los Angeles Chargers. This team is basically living in a Ghost Of Girlfriends Past-like hell, and has been for about as long as I can remember – no team is more monomaniacally defined by their lack of Lombardis than this team. Others who’ve never won like the Vikings, Browns, and Lions have had extended stretches of glory – the Vikings are one of the winningest teams in the NFL since they joined some 65 years ago and were regular fixtures in the big game in the 1970s – but these Chargers haven’t. They have years that echo like cauterized but still-septic flesh wounds to hang their lightning-bolted helmets on, and few that seem like fond memories more so than foiled meanderings into the viper pit of playoff heartbreak, many with torturous, brevity-laden appellations affixed to them for ease of reference: 1981 (The Freezer Bowl), 1992 (31-0), 1994 (Steve Young’s Monkey on his Back), 2004 (Nate Kaeding), 2006 (Marlon McCree), 2007 (Phillip Rivers ACL), 2009 (Shonn Greene), 2022 (27-0). And just last season, even though the game wasn’t heartbreaking in the same way that the ’06 or ’22 games were, another excruciating excerpt in the horrid history of Chargers playoff games was authored, a 32-12 loss to the mostly disappointing 2024 Texans. Of course it featured a missed extra point. This team needs to win games so convincingly that their big games cannot possibly come down to one or two unlucky plays, because it’s clear someone on high in the Football Gods pantheon has it in for this team. The trouble is, they aren’t nearly that good yet. Someone get this team a deep threat!
Usually it takes a few seasons for the personnel armageddae that seem to trail Jim Harbaugh to manifest in full and malevolent form, but the seams seem to already be coming apart for these Chargers in just their second Harbaugh-helmed training camp. Mike Williams’ signing and immediate PUP designation followed by abrupt retirement saga dealt a blow of worryingly significant magnitude to an already understaffed offensive weapons squadron, and Rashawn Slater’s August 7 injury which required a carting-off from the practice field looked far worse still, from the get-go. It was revealed the same day that the injury was to his patellar tendon, ending his 2025 season before it even began. An unimaginable brutality lessened (for the player) only by the fact that he signed a giant new contract before the injury, providing for him in his recovery. The devastating news elicited a decision by Harbaugh to move 2024 first-round pick Joe Alt to left tackle and Trey Pipkins to Alt’s former RT spot. For a team that looked yet again like one with a surfeit of disadvantages in comparison to their playoff vanquishers – in this case Houston, who were kind enough to the Bolts to spare them the embarrassment of spotting them a 27-point lead before scoring 31+ points and winning – injuries just couldn’t be allowed to become the story of the offseason or the season itself. But that’s what’s happening before our eyes. It’s gotten so bad so soon that this team actually reached back out to Keenan Allen, whose miscreant pilfering of Caleb Williams’ rightful ownership of jersey #13 on the Bears has forever disinclined Personal Vowels from viewing him without side-eye suspicion. I mean, what gives, Football Gods?
The Chargers are another team existing on the ragged fringe between good and meh whose range of 2025 outcomes seems vast and inscrutable at this early date. I could see the Harbaughnauts going somewhere around 9-8 to 11-6 and winning a Wild Card game. I could also see them stumble to a disappointing season and go 8-9 or 7-10. That’s how important a dominant offensive line is to this team, and the reason why the Slater injury is even more catastrophic for the Chargers than it would be for almost anyone else. Alt and Slater’s coexistence on this OL is why they drafted studly rookie back Omarion Hampton in the first round of the 2025 draft. An OL to shame the Hogs is what allowed this team to reach the postseason last year despite almost nothing in the way of established weapons, emergence of one McConkey comma Ladd notwithstanding. And crucially, a great offensive line is what allowed the horrific defense of 2023 to harden into a devastating unit during the 2024 season, with the offense sustaining drives and allowing a too-often-seen defense from last season to evolve into a nasty, high-energy, well-disciplined, ogrish band of marauders that finished the season first in scoring defense (that is a bit misleading, as they were closer to league average in total yards and turnovers). They compared favorably to the Philadelphia Eagles against the pass, giving up the second-lowest yards per attempt to enemy QBs and sacking them at a high clip despite poor pressure numbers overall. The team finished with 46 sacks total, a respectable figure that was 6th among NFL teams, with 15 different players recording at least half a sack but zero players getting into double digits. Whether that’s a sign of depth and teamwork or a dearth of true stars (Joey Bosa, in prior years the clear-cut alpha dog on the DL, only started 9 games) doesn’t really matter – Harbaugh always gets good production out of his defense, which is a curious but not at all unwelcome trait for a nominally offensive head coach to bring to the table. Like his brother, it’s evident when watching Jim’s teams that from backup longsnapper to starting MLB no one has any challenge understanding the level of intensity that the team needs to bring to every practice and every game, regardless of magnitude or count in the standings. That much was evident in their Hall Of Fame Game performance against a fluctuant Lions team, with one team (the Chargers) looking like a team that still wore the invigorating glow of a new-ish head coach with endless energy and enthusiasm and another looking like a team resigned to and acknowledging of the long, long season ahead – the latter has traveled deep into the playoffs the last few years, after all, while the former had to scratch and claw to get there this year.
The playoff game scared me, I’ll admit. The Chargers had a very strong close to the season, which I think is to be expected with a team like them which runs the ball well and can take far greater advantage of late-season fatigue and lengthening injury reports in their opponents’ infirmaries than teams with stronger passing identities. But as often happens, even to great quarterbacks like Justin Herbert, it becomes difficult to downshift into pass-heavy offense when you really need to if you’ve cemented your identity to volume running, and with the Texans impassably deactivating the run game (the Bolts went 18 for 50 on the ground against Houston, their third-fewest attempts on the season), Herbert, who had the worst game of his career on the biggest afternoon of his career, was picked off four times – exceeding his regular season total, an insane stat that could have only possibly happened to a Chargers quarterback. Herbert’s greatness and highlight-prone style of play from years gone by hasn’t disappeared, but it has been depressed a bit in Harbaugh’s offense – he only threw 504 passes in 17 games in 2024. For this team to truly go from static electricity to electrical storm, Harbaugh needs to let Justin cook some more. He’s the tesla coil – give him a positive charge.
Palpably Unfair Facts:
That’s not the first time a Chargers QB has thrown four picks in a playoff loss to Houston. Dan Fouts was picked off five times – four times by one player, Vernon Perry, in one of the greatest individual defensive performances ever – in a 1979 Divisional Playoff loss to Houston’s then-team, the Oilers.
Herbert joined Tom Brady, Nick Foles and Aaron Rodgers as the 4th player to throw 20+ TDs and under 3 picks in one season.
Quentin Johnston wasn’t that bad in 2024 – he finished tied for 13th in total drops (7). Jerry Jeudy led the league with 13 drops.
When you hire a head coach with a defensive pedigree, you expect a few things. You expect a disciplined, intelligent defensive unit who commits few penalties (the Falcons were 27th in the NFL in penalties). You can plausibly anticipate a team that can tamp down an enemy passing game, limiting touchdown passes (the Falcons were 31st in touchdowns allowed, second-worst) and getting after the quarterback by sacking him (also 31st, second-worst). You hope that the team can pick off passes and hold down the opposing quarterback’s passer rating (the Falcons finished 18th in interceptions and 29th in opposing passer rating). Barring a good passing D, you ask that the defense at least hold the opponent running backs in check (The Falcons were 15th in rushing yards allowed, one spot above “exactly average”). At the very, very least, you can bet on a team that gets better defensively as the year goes on and defenders’ chemistry begins to enmesh (in fact, the Falcons gave up almost exactly the same number of points after their late bye, 24.8, as they did before it, 24.9 - including back-to-back overtime losses where they surrendered 30 and 44 points to Jayden Daniels and Bryce Young). In other words, the things that Raheem Morris should have had down pat never materialized. At least the offense was…decent, at times. If Michael Penix takes off, the foregoing could all be forgotten a year from now. But if he doesn’t…
Oh how I have longed to write this one. The Falcons are my team of choice as a fan. I got in not quite on the ground floor of the Michael Vick era but did have a black #7 jersey – that classic, beautifully sleek, almost robotic look that the team rocked in the mid-2000s through to 2020 before they went full Nike-era and ruined their jerseys – sometime around 2003 or 2004. My interest was rekindled away from Peyton Manning and Andrew Luck, the two heroes of all Indianapolis football fans in the early 21st century, when the 2016 Falcons went on their Super Bowl run. Then when 28-3 happened I became a football nihilist whose pitch and depth of cynicism made Friedrich Nietzsche look like Norman Vincent Peale, or the guy who invented pink lawn flamingos, or some other such Pollyannaish pangloss. I was a football-watching Gravemind. As the embers cooled I became able to appreciate the insanity of that game, but only a bit. The larger issue was this: I’d gotten back in on the Falcons at the worst possible time. And I could not back out. I am nothing if not an anti-fairweather fan of the most staggering magnitude. I had to stay here, in Hell. I’ve become acclimatized to the heat and darkness, and though the sufferings have been Tartarean in nature, I feel that I, along with all Falcons fans, are separated in our loyalty through the conferral of a special and demonic gift that permits us to see with unobstructed clarity the mostly changeless flounderings of the Falcons, Our Team, for what they are – mostly purposeless peregrinations around a meager division without hope of playoff glory. At least not since 2017. It’s good that this team’s colors are black and red, a chromatic schema befitting a team that has sought to annually imitate the immortal lines of John Milton’s Paradise Lost in their treatment of adoring fans: “As one great furnace flam’d, yet from those flames/no light, but rather darkness visible.” John Milton had to compose his masterwork while blind, dictating the text to secretaries, which is a fate I fear for myself the more I watch this team.
Why should 2025 be any different than the other years? This team’s hallmark is collapse, and capsize, and corporeal punishment directed against the viewing public. And collapse they did, in somewhat new and exciting ways, in 2024. To begin with, they lost Week 1 despite possessing, on paper, a superior team to the Pittsburgh Steelers, complete with exorbitantly-priced free agent QB Kirk Cousins, high-end offensive skill players in Drake London, Kyle Pitts (laughtrack goes here), Darnell Mooney and Ray-Ray McCloud, 2023 top-10 pick Bijan Robinson toting the rock, Kaleb McGary and Jake Matthews and Chris Lindstrom and Storm Norton and Drew Dalman and so many other OL in a deep unit. They were up 10-9. They lost 18-10, beaten, it seemed, almost exclusively by Justin Fields’ legs and Chris Boswell’s leg, singular. They somehow won against Philadelphia, a game that still doesn’t make sense, lost to Kansas City in a game that made a lot of sense, then went on a wild 3-game winning streak where they should have gone 1-2 (see: Allen, Dennis and Bowles, Todd). A hiccup against Seattle, then two more wins, with the defense fraying fast, against Tampa Bay again and a checked-out Cowboys team on the threshold of indifference. Then they went a month and a half without a win, losing to the bad Saints, the OK Broncos, the OK Chargers, and the good Vikings, who really spanked them. They defeated – barely – their old QB, Desmond Ridder, along with his new team the Raiders before mutilating the corpse of the dead-weight Giants, who were playing out the string and who had been inhabiting the same Cocytus iceberg as the Falcons at the bottom of the NFL for a few years, so that it felt almost fratricidal, or weirdly inhumane, but too distant and removed to matter much to the layperson, like a civil war in a distant country. Then ATL really had to pay back their karmic debt accrued from those two undeserved wins over the Saints and Buccaneers earlier, losing two overtime games that featured less defense than a mid-2010s Big 12 game against rookie phenom Jayden Daniels and second-year, deeply embattled QB Bryce Young. The same Bryce Young who beat them the year before, 9-7, in a 2-15 Panthers season, defeated them this year, 44-38, in a 5-12 Panthers season. Bryce Young, The Falconer.
What will make this season, so fearful to those of us who know to expect less than nothing, different than the others? The reason for hope is Michael Penix, Jr. The former Hoosier and Husky was the most pro-ready quarterback in last year’s draft and proved the better bet than Cousins when the elder passer authored a five-game stretch where he threw 0 touchdowns and 8 interceptions. The latter half of the season’s lone offensive highlight, that grave robbery of the Giants, was all Penix, even though Kyle Pitts just had to act out a lunatic giveaway to give the otherwise triumphant day a soupçon of Falconian feebleness. He put up great numbers against average defenses in Washington and Carolina, despite the losses. Those losses were on their head coach, who simply does not know what a timeout is or what purpose it serves. Raheem Morris is lucky that Matt Eberflus was around to redirect the inquisitive spotlight of “does this guy know what he’s doing?” away from the Falcons, because otherwise, his use of the clock-stopping instrument would be under severe and strictured fire. If you can’t manage a game well and your defense ends the year giving up over 6 touchdowns worth of points to the f***ing Panthers, your leash is a short one. It has to be a short one. Penix needs to do with his offense what I’ve asked the Chargers to do as a team – be so good that the big games you play in, the important ones, don’t come down to coaching decisions. The two first-round picks, Jalon Walker and James Pearce Jr., can help by sacking QBs a bit.
Palpably Unfair Facts:
A reason for hope is the Falcons’ finishing 6th in yards on offense last year despite finishing 24th in turnovers. Sloppy but prolific.
It was time to move on from Grady Jarret, the best and most durable Falcons defender of this century. Farewell, Hammer Jr.
If I sound a little senex iratus here, note that this defense actually got worse in scoring after hiring Raheem Morris (18th to 23rd).
Seattle in its current form cannot hope to live up to the omnipresent relevancy that its Legion Of Boom-era panoply of personalities managed to ignite in the Emerald City. Without names like Marshawn Lynch, Richard Sherman, Russell Wilson or Michael Bennett on the team, this franchise simply isn’t very “loud.” Like their fellow NFC West teams, when their roster isn’t jam-packed full of stars, they seem very “over there” in the Pacific Northwest to the vast majority of the NFL-watching public. This can help explain how this team managed to win 10 games and fail to register with any resonance on the national level, bouncing back in a massive way after a 1-5 stretch following a hot 3-0 start had many wondering if newly-minted HC Mike Macdonald was unable to foster the same ferment of ferocity in Seattle that he had with a star-studded Ravens defense across the continent in Baltimore. The Seahawks’ defense turned into the star of the show later in the season while Geno Smith and the offense began to skid, opening the pathway for a QB change that helped complete a clean break from all vestigial wisps of the Pete Carroll era. The Seahawks, of all NFL teams, may be the biggest unknown going into 2025. Will we see the team that started 4-5, or the post-bye thornbush that suffocated bad offenses, authored some highlights here and there, and finished 6-2? With the NFC West coming off a down year, the Hawks can be masters of their own destiny, but they need their new quarterback to prove that the 2024 Sam Darnold is the real Sam Darnold.
Mike Macdonald deserves some applause. Unlike many other recent “DC turned HC” individuals, he actually got his team to play tough, play together, and win a decent share of contests in Year 1. Robert Saleh, Brandon Staley, Dennis Allen, Brian Flores, you name it – success has been hard to come by for defensive minds thrust into the power chair, but Macdonald enjoyed considerable success that the others did not. One grants that of the five coaches named, none stepped into a situation with quite as much attractive and existing munitions and materiel to help in the fashioning of wins as Macdonald did; his predecessor Pete Carroll, despite being long removed from the hoary days of the dominant Legion Of Boom, had amply restocked a defense that lagged greatly behind league average for long stretches in 2020 and 2021, stacking two great drafts by taking defensive backs Coby Bryant and Tariq Woolen alongside speedy Michigan State running back Kenneth Walker in 2022 and adding to the defense’s back end with Illinois standout CB Devon Witherspoon, good rotational DE Derick Hall, and special teamer/safety Jerick Reed to go along with instant contributors Jaxon Smith-Njigba and Zach Charbonnet, WR and RB, on offense. Pete Carroll’s final team didn’t even have a losing record at year’s end, but a 3-8 tally against teams over 0.500 was the elder coach’s last straw, and Mike Macdonald was asked for and acquired from the Ravens following that team’s bowing-out from the playoffs in the 2023-24 AFC Championship.
Macdonald’s defense had been praised for its soundness and sophistication by many who would know throughout his rise to power in Baltimore and Seattle. The hallmark of his defense is “simulated pressure” – a zone-blitz-heavy, disguise-reliant scheme that tries above all to be indecipherable to enemy quarterbacks. As has become the norm of this era of NFL offense-defense give-and-take, a key philosophical tenet of the defense involves dual safeties playing deep enough to keep all pass-catchers in front of them while also playing shallow enough to provide meaningful coverage and run support that doesn’t give the offense too much to bite off. Through the first nine games of the 2024 Seahawks season, it looked like this scheme might only have worked in Baltimore because of the athleticism of players like Kyle Hamilton and the toughness, discipline and versatility of equally-talent pass-and-run-defending linebackers like Patrick Queen and Roquan Smith. After giving up 20 points to rookie Bo Nix and the low-wattage Patriots offense, the team imprisoned the Tua-less Dolphins offense in keeping them to 3 points, moving the team to 3-0, but the defense dissolved for the remainder of the season’s first half, surrendering 42, 29, 36, 14 (Falcons, of course), 31 and 26 points, moving the team to 4-5 before a much-desired bye allowed Macdonald to assess and repair the struggling D. The procession of punching bags the team got to play in the four games after the bye – San Francisco, Arizona, the New York Jets and Arizona again – no doubt contributed greatly to the defense’s turnaround, as the team went from giving up an average of 30 points per game in the six contests before their Week 10 bye to 15 in the four games after. But having to play good teams – playoff teams – continued to give them fits, with the postseason-ticket-holding Packers and Vikings stacking up 30 and 27 points on them. The Seahawks’ fourth and final NFC North opponent of 2024, the Chicago Bears, did not fair nearly as well as their northern forbears against the birds, losing 6-3 to the Seahawks while the Lions, Packers and Vikings had defeated the same team 42-29, 30-13 and 27-24. This was the spiritual epilogue to the 2024 season, as the last game, a 30-25 formality against the Rams, didn’t include Rams starters and came with the Seahawks mathematically eliminated from the playoffs in one of the more gut-wrenching exclusionary outcomes of recent memory. But while this team had won 10 games, it had lost consistently to better teams – their only win against a winning team was Week 1 against the 7-seed Broncos – and had shown its weakness on offense late in the season, in particular against the Cardinals, Packers, and Bears.
It was clear by the end of the season that this team’s offense was in dire need of fresh faces just as its defense had been a few seasons earlier (the building-up of the defensive unit is by no means over, either): Tyler Lockett was old, Geno Smith’s expiring contract was being propped up by volume-triggered incentives despite a mildly disappointing season (21 touchdowns to 15 picks), and DK Metcalf had begun to fall out of the starting lineup in several of the team’s games. All three departed, with Lockett cut, Geno traded to Las Vegas, and DK shipped off to Pittsburgh. The return for the trades of the team’s two key passing pillars came in the form of the 2025 Draft’s 92nd and 52nd overall picks, which the team spent on project QB Jalen Milroe and South Carolina safety Nick Emmanwori (this came at the 35th pick, as Seattle traded up again with Tennessee for Emmanwori’s draft rights using that 52nd pick from the Steelers). But their biggest offseason move was to replace Geno Smith (at least for now) with Sam Darnold, who was coming off a magical year in Minnesota where the USC product finally seemed to show the skills that got him drafted 3rd overall in 2018 by the Jets. This makes the Seahawks Sam’s fourth team in four years since departing the Jets, and though he looked like a legitimate MVP candidate at points last year, Sam’s last two games were his worst – and now he’s changing scenery again. I don’t want to pile on Sam – he’s had a lot of that, and this isn’t the first time his former team has dumped him for an unproven first-year starter who might end up sucking eggs – but the law of averages tells us that if he’s had one good season (at the lap of a QB guru, no less) to six bad or backup seasons, the eighth season will be, well…And he won’t have Lockett or DK. Proceed with caution.
Palpably Unfair Facts:
The Seahawks became the first team in the 17-game era to win 10 games and miss the playoffs.
Geno’s 249.5 yards per game as Seahawks starter, were it his entire career, would be 19th-best ever, just behind Dan Marino.
The Seahawks lost their leading passer and second-, third- and fourth-most (Noah Fant) productive receivers this offseason.
Bryce Young led a charmed before coming to the NFL. He played high school football at Mater Dei, a perennial national power that routinely competes for championships and which has drawn comparisons to top-flight NCAA football programs for its sophisticated training programs, luxurious treatment of athletes and ultra-high quality of facilities. He played college football at Alabama, a perennial national power that routinely competes for championships and which has drawn comparisons to NFL teams for its sophisticated training programs, luxurious treatment of athletes and ultra-high quality of facilities. Then he was drafted #1 overall by the Panthers, a team that really, really wishes it could draw comparisons to Mater Dei and Alabama for its sophisticated training programs, luxurious treatment of athletes, and ultra-high quality of facilities, to say nothing of the whole “routinely competing for championships” piece. Young’s life got a lot harder when he got to the NFL, and for the most part, it’s stayed hard – his OL has been bad, his weapons nonexistent, his defense the worst any rookie and second-year QB has ever had to deal with. Dave Canales, the man who had helped jumpstart Baker Mayfield’s career renaissance, managed to produce a bit of progress with his Crimson Tide QB, but the pickings were slim indeed. The season highlight for the 2024 Panthers unquestionably came in the form of their Week 18 overtime destruction of the Falcons, where they scored 44 points – the most a Panthers team had scored in 8 years. But is that, an overtime win against ‘Zona, and a 36-22 takedown of the Antonio Pierce Raiders enough to build on, or was it all just catscratch?
Back in 2021 and 2022, as the NCAA’s embrace of NIL was really getting underway, I became deeply and immovably annoyed at the fact that Bryce Young, the blessed one who got to play QB for the most stacked team in Division I football, was being paid enormous amounts of money to appear on a weekly podcast where he offered little more than bland affirmations, superficial platitudes, and nonchalant responses to the host’s talking points. This was the guy who was “getting” to play for Alabama after “getting” to play for Mater Dei, an acknowledge powerhouse in the prep world. How much nicer could this guy’s life get? I never got the answer to that question because poor Bryce Young wound up getting picked by David Tepper’s newest plaything, the NFL’s Carolina Panthers, in the spring of 2023 during that year’s NFL Draft, and ever since, he’s been ceaselessly and violently sabotaged, hampered by endless pressure (24.2% and 26.7% pressure pct - a fourth of his dropbacks so far), hits (6th-most in 2023, a more respectable 23rd-most in 2024) and sacks (62 times in 2023, 29 more in 2024). A great way to amend or ameliorate the beating that this poor guy has taken would be to draft a quality OL or Marvin Harrison, Jr. in 2024 – they went 2-15 in Bryce’s rookie year, after all, which is the worst record a team has ever had in the 17-game era, so they were entitled to the first overall pick. But the comedy of errors that is the day-to-day doings of the David Tepper Panthers would not grant so valuable an asset to this team for its own use; no, the Panthers traded that pick to Chicago, whose awful 2022 season had entitled them to the first overall pick in 2023, in exchange for the Bears’ pick. The Bears, content to lampoon themselves for another season with the dueling banjo QB room of Justin Fields and Tyson Bagent, waited patiently while the Panthers stumbled through the season, eventually reaching that 2-15 mark and giving the Bears back the first round pick at 1.1 that they’d parted with the last offseason, which they eventually used on Caleb Williams. The circuitous path that has as stops on its way Bryce Young on the Panthers and Caleb Williams on the Bears will be an intriguing one to plot the course of some day, but for now all it means is that two promising young QBs ended up on terrible teams. Sad!
Bryce Young’s rookie season was very lackluster. He didn’t crack 3,000 yards passing and rarely threw touchdowns (11 of ‘em in 16 starts – only 1 more than the 10 interceptions he tossed, too. He looked awful small back there behind a hulking if unprotective OL as his passes were batted down and his vision impeded by rampaging pass rushers and defensive backs in coverage that were often bigger than he. And when it was all said and done, the Panthers of 2023 hadn’t held a lead in the 4th quarter, ever – their only two wins came as time expired on game-winning field goals, against fellow rookie C.J. Stroud and his Texans and against the Atlanta Falcons of second-year QB Demond Ridder. Things looked very bad as 2023 came to a close, with the Panthers becoming the first team in fifteen years to be shut out in back to back games, their duo of scoreless contests coming in Week 17 and Week 18 as the worst end to a season you could possibly ask for. Things looked even worse to begin 2024, with the team losing 47-10 and 26-3 in their first two games against the Saints and Chargers – not even among the best offenses last year – before, miracle of miracles, a 36-22 win against the Raiders buoyed the Bryce Young era with its first multi-possession win. Because of the team’s general irrelevance in the post-Jerry Richardson years, this game registered only as a minor, if surprising, upset – but it was much more than that. This was the game that firmly removed the Bryce Young and Dave Canales (Frank Reich’s successor in 2024) Panthers out of the 76 Bucs/08 Lions/17 Browns conversation and moved them into general but not especial badness territory. They proved they could at least beat bad teams, which is good, because their next five games were demoralizing in the extreme: 10-point loss, 26-point loss, 18-point loss, 33-point loss (to Marcus Mariota!), 14-point loss. But after falling to 1-7 – which, granted, meant all the pressure was off, and made their football lives both easier and for the purpose of lasting or memorable achievement essentially meaningless for 2024 – the team rebounded stronger than they ever showed themselves capable of rebounding in 2023, going 4-5 down the stretch and showing significant growth on offense. They even went 2-1 in their final three – a winning record over multiple games! I want to be clear, also, that this team is neither entirely absolved of their 7-27 record over two years (i.e., it’s not all just bad luck, of course) nor entirely responsible for that outrageous loss number. Their 2024 picks on offense, Xavier Legette (WR South Carolina) and Jonathon Brooks (RB Texas) didn’t give the team nearly what they were expecting from them; Legette was OK, finishing with 49 catches, not bad for a rookie, but failing to crack 500 yards, and scoring only 4 touchdowns. Jonathon Brooks was dealing with a torn ACL when he was drafted, and was finally activated in early November, but finished with only 22 rushing yards and 23 receiving yards before a non-contact injury against Philadelphia ended his rookie season. Tragedy has followed Brooks in his early career as this same injury landed him on the PUP list for 2025, meaning he will miss his entire second season, too. Absolutely brutal. Carolina does have the chance to still author a net add from where their offense was in 2024 with their addition of Tetairoa McMillan, a toolsy wide receiver out of Arizona that many teams eyed desirously in this draft. They could use a running back, though – they have 6 on the roster right now, and none look able to handle over 250 carries. If they can just protect Young, and if their receiver can just get open, this team could get up towards .500. But they need to have some highlights. Growth is essential. Building on the moxie they showed late in ’24 is called for, compulsory, and direly coveted.
Palpably Unfair Facts:
The Panthers went 3-1 in overtime games in 2024, and won both of their victories in 2023 as time expired. It’s the first 59 minutes and 59 seconds of NFL games that they need to work on now.
Not much needs to be said about the Panthers defense. They were the worst ever. 534 points is the most ever given up.
Both the Saints and Panthers finished 5-12, but the Panthers gave up 136 more points. That’s because the Saints got to play the Panthers – the Panthers didn’t.
This is the Ship Of Fools of the NFL if ever there was one. The tiresome, played-out archetypes that infest this franchise’s positions of importance and which fans of the 31 other NFL teams wake up each morning and beseech the Football Gods don’t mushroom into being on their own favorite teams are numerous and noisome: muddled, meddling owner who refuses to remove himself from the spotlight and whose chief export is unasked-for bombast; longtime coordinator turned HC who may or may not be passable HC material and whose personality, if it exists at all, has been snuffed out in toto by the spire-like oil derrick inferno that is his owner’s ego; retread DC who proved conclusively that he is not HC material and who can be relied upon to serve as troubling distraction if and when the defense sags; and star player disgruntled with team management who, despite rightly asking to be paid like the top-flight performer he is, is so overexposed in the media landscape that his plight serves mostly as fodder for talking heads and cretinous social media complainers. There are a lot of others on this team that could be mentioned in the above, but this isn’t First Take. Only so much digitized ink needs be spilled recounting the amateurisms of this model train set begging to be mistaken for an actual locomotive. The 2025 Cowboys should be thought of as a passing fancy, a team that may feature in much better teams’ highlight reels, or as the shambling, star-helmeted extras in Game Of The Week B-roll. They are a footnote in the football feast to come, an inessential appetizer which no one, Cowboys fan or otherwise, could misapprehend as the main attraction, despite ceaseless, translucent, and thoroughly purposeless propagandist balderdash trying to identify this team as such. Be kind to your health and your football-watching eyes, and recognize the Dallas Cowboys for what they are: a fattening, preservative-peppered, sodium-saturated clop of deep-fried foodstuff you can purchase for far more than it’s worth on a sultry evening at a Morgan Wallen concert - unwholesome slop in a commercialized hellscape. This outfit’s meretricious gimcrackery will only steal time better spent elsewhere if you choose to consume their rotted, shopworn fare.
All aesthetic. The softest team in the NFL. Top-heavy but rotten to the core. Leaderless and scudding. All of this and more describes the Dallas Cowboys. And these aphoristic skewerings could have been deployed in any year since Jerry Jones decided he - the owner, who doesn’t coach the team - deserved more credit than Jimmy Johnson for the Cowboys’ early 90’s Super Bowl wins. Because that’s all that really matters to Jerry - getting credit. He would rather be heard than be victorious. And that’s the reason this team has not won anything of value in my lifetime - I’m turning 30 next year - and will not win anything as long as this reality-immune, delusion-fueled, publicity-addicted regime of leaders continues to plot its course towards nowhere and waste the lives of young men who’d love to, y’know, WIN. In Trumpian fashion, Jerry commands acknowledgement even from those least willing to provide it - like myself. Am I contributing to the Great Red Spot of attention that swirls imperturbably around the 82-year-old by writing about him instead of the 53-man Cowboys roster or their new coaching staff in this capsule? In a way, yes. I think it’s simply my obligation to do so, since the other 31 teams are getting their own write-ups, too. I hate to punish the players for the misdeeds of management, but in this case I make a special exception. The Cowboys get to be treated like children until the bucolic and wizened PR circus their ownership is so keen on stultifyingly fanning packs up and leaves town. That’s not going to happen any time soon. But with that out of the way, let’s look at why the team itself doesn’t deserve to be taken any more seriously than their cellar dwellers-in-arms that populate the bottommost quadrant of NFL teams alongside them. Spoiler alert: they share a lot of the same characteristics that other bad teams with bad owners exhibit.
To microscope into this season specifically, I want everyone to take a look at this team’s schedule and tell me where exactly the wins are coming from. They will lose the first game of the year against Philadelphia – the Cowboys did once defeat the defending champion Giants, but that team was bad, and this Eagles team is not – and unless they find a way to beat the Giants in Week 2, they seem likely to go into the bye week at 2-7, or even 1-8 if the Cardinals up-end them, as they did early in the season in 2023. The post-bye schedule for this team is uncompromising and unremitting: At Las Vegas, home versus Philly, home versus Kansas City, at Detroit, home versus Minnesota, home versus the Chargers, at Washington, at the Giants. It is entirely possible that the only game they win in that entire stretch is the Week 18 finale versus the Giants; who may be onto Jaxson Dart by that point and either lifeless or invigorated with their new starter. Going o-fer out of the bye is by no means out of the question. It would be delectably succulent for the Cowboys to do even worse than the hurricane of ineptitude I’ve projected above and wind up on 0-17 watch, but the team is probably too talented to approach such an accomplishment. But talent alone won’t give this team a snowball’s chance in the hell that is the NFC East, subjugated under the lordship of Jayden and Jalen, without due and equal schematic advantage brought by the coaching staff. And who is on this coaching staff that gets you excited? Brian Schottenheimer, I regret to say, seems to be personifying two simultaneous and undesirable states of being in the realm of NFL new-head-coach archetypes: Guy Who Comes In After Disaster Season and In-House Coordinator With No Prior HC Experience. Both have high mortality rates after one season in recent years. Frank Reich, Jerod Mayo, Antonio Pierce, David Culley, Lovie Smith (the Texans had two in two years), Dennis Allen, Freddie Kitchens, Nathaniel Hackett (not *really* either one, but he belongs on this list)…doesn’t Brian Schottenheimer seem like he’s in company here? One guy I didn’t put on that list, but could have, is Matt Eberflus, who was mentioned in the Bears segment as the loon who the Colts were prepared to give a pink slip before the Bears decided to give him a raise. He’s the DC of this team. Is that really the best Schotty could do? To look at the Cowboys coaching staff, the answer would appear to be, unequivocally, yes: there is hardly a recognizable name throughout this apparatus. The OC, who in fairness is probably very much subordinate to Schottenheimer in offensive gameplanning, is someone named Klayton Adams. Next to his headshot on the Cowboys official site is “Junior Adams,” wide receivers coach. The two may be father and son, but this is unconfirmed. Ken Dorsey, the fired Bills OC from 2023, has found a new home as Pass Game Specialist on the Boys. The Titans’ GM’s brother, Dave Borgonzi, is LB coach. Not exactly the cradle of coaches, the ‘25 Cowboys. They need Michah back. BAD.
Palpably Unfair Facts:
The 2024 Cowboys tied the record for most home losses by at least 24 points. They joined the winless 2008 Detroit Lions, the 2-14 1981 Baltimore Colts (who had worst defense in history before the 2024 Panthers existed), the expansion year 1966 Atlanta Falcons, and the 1950 Baltimore Colts, who folded after the season.
The Cowboys allowed the most rushing touchdowns on defense and scored the fewest on offense.
The Cowboys committed the second-most defensive penalties and the fourth-most offensive penalties. A season to forget.
K1 is a more enigmatic and compelling figure than a lot of people give him credit for. A bevy of off-field silliness – not issues, just silliness – has helped prevent him from being seen as an unrealized oasis of talent who has shown fulgurations of awesomeness and has indeed inhibited his perception from growing more magnificent than it could have. Add to that a single playoff game in which he was utterly crushed by the Rams and threw one of the most feeble-armed pick sixes in league history and you’ve got a recipe for a forgettable though not immensely disappointing career. Even though he’s only on his second head coach, Kyler’s going into his seventh season as a Cardinal, and in that time the team still doesn’t seem like it’s progressed very far from where they were in summer 2019 when K1 and KK (Kliff Kingsbury, ousted head coach from 2019-22 and currently OC for Team #1 on this countdown) had just gotten off their planes from Texas Tech and Oklahoma. There was positive momentum in the year 2024, however, as Kyler neared a career high in passing yards while trusting his legs more than he has in the past few seasons. Kyler’s 572 yards on the ground along with James Conner’s 1,000-yard season helped the Cardinals finish as a top-10 rushing offense and the #11 total offense. But bad luck, inopportune cold stretches, and a chronic case of “not having the horses” when they had to saddle up against true contenders in the NFC plagued these birds, and at the end of last season they seemed more than anything like a team who doesn’t know what they want to be.
The Cardinals were thought of as a potential suitor for Caleb Williams as the 2023 season got underway – meaning, in the most flattering possible terms, they appeared a team prepared, willing, and bad enough to tank for the USC Trojan. They got off to a great start in that direction that year, dropping two close games to the Commanders and Giants (the latter a contest in which they blew a 28-point lead at home to Daniel Jones, an act of catastrophic meltdown so inexcusable it seemed like it had to be on purpose in service of piling up enough Ls to get Williams at 1.1). Then they beat the Cowboys – the media darlings themselves – in Week 3, pretty handily, and it caused everyone to look a little differently at Jonathan Gannon, a first-year head coach who seemed like he and Kyler might both be on their way out of town if they went 1-16 or thereabouts and had the opportunity to draft Caleb Williams and pair him with a schematically attractive head coach. They only went 4-13, missing out on Caleb by a few games, but showed a decent amount of heart and fight for a team of their lowly prospects, and in their penultimate game of 2023 authored the stunning upset of the season by defeating a nosediving Eagles team as a measure of revenge for their HC, who’d been the Birds’ DC the year before (not really revenge, since he left willingly, but that’s the way of the world in the NFL – beating a former team is always “revenge”). In 2024 they continued to climb from a supposed abysm of futility towards a plateau of competitiveness, hitting a groovy stride in the four games before their bye week that culminated with back-to-back brutalizations of the clearly unprepared Bears and Jets. This moved them to 6-4, a welcome perch that allowed them to assay where they’d come from – specifically a 1-3 and 2-4 early season whose only highlights had been a 6-point loss to contender Buffalo and a 41-10 dismantling of the fraudulent-looking Rams (it’s worth noting that of the two of them, only one of these teams that started the season 2-4 – the Rams – made the playoffs, so they got the last laugh). The Red Sea won both small (17-15 over the Chargers on a barely-viewed ESPN exclusive MNF doubleheader leg, 28-27 over the Dolphins the following week) and big (29-9 over the Bears in Week 9, 31-6 over the Jets in Week 10). They’d even kickstarted this spell of good fortune with a wild, last-minute win over a still-formidable 49ers team, a win electrified by the gloriously zealous go-for-two-to-make-it-a-two-point-game instance (this allowed them to win the game with a last-minute field goal instead of just tying it – love stuff like that). But if you polled these Cardinals, they might report that they would have waived the bye week in favor of just continuing to drive ahead with the season, given what happened in weeks 12-18. They lost – a lot. Including two crucial intradvisional games in a three-week span to the Seattle Seahawks, who, kind of hilariously, actually might have fared better in their tiebreakers with the Rams if they’d lost one of those games and made the Cardinals a winning-record 9-8 team instead of a losing-record 8-9 team. It didn’t end up mattering for the Cardinals, who blew both their first and second games against the Seahawks and their second game against the Rams in Week 17 (an utterly dispiriting 9-13 loss). Despite finishing one game under 0.500, defeating the 49ers twice in one season, besting the Rams convincingly in the early season, playing the Seahawks close and scoring more points than both the Seahawks and the Rams, the Cardinals finished three games out of the playoffs – behind even Atlanta, who’d just gotten blown to smithereens by Washington and Carolina. Late-season NFC West tiebreaking shenanigans – it was ever thus.
At the most charitable interpretation, this team was the epitome of a balanced offense, finishing 12th in points, 11th in total yards, 18th in passing and 7th in rushing. At a less generous blush, this was a team that could not figure out who it wanted to be, identity-wise, and lost out late on a chance to fight their way into a Wild Card or division championship opportunity. At the most unkind measure, this team was a front-running, optically fraudulent team who won a bushel of games against bad teams and good teams having down years. Somewhere between those three readings is the truest triangulation of what the team actually was, but good luck finding it – this team has been, rather sadly, a pretty under-the-radar team for most of its Arizonan localization, and I doubt whether many of those who don’t live in the state or cover the team for a living feel like they’ve ever really, truly known this team, save for digressions toward relevancy in the 2008 and 2009 postseasons and during the midpoint of Bruce Arians’ coachship of the team, principally in 2015 when they reached the NFC Championship and played in one of the great playoff games of the last 30 years against Rodgers and the Pack. The drafting of Kyler Murray was supposed to break this team out of the unremarkable malaise that they seemed mired in during the 2010s, but save for some moments in 2020 and 2021 (the former representing a year that he was legitimately within the MVP discussion for long stretches) this team hasn’t risen above fringe postseason lurker and occasional trap game candidate. To do better than this they need Marvin Harrison, Jr. to make like Marvin Harrison, Sr. and catch a lot more balls. 62 for 885 and 8 scores isn’t bad at all, mind you – but for what his name is and where he was drafted his sophomore season needs to be closer to Ja’Marr and Jettas than Jaylen Waddle and Juju Smith-Schuster. This team is probably “good” on O for a season, and accordingly they spent most of their draft assets on D – DT Walter Nolen, CB Will Johnson, DE Jordan Burch and LB Cody Simon in rounds 1-4. A top ten defense and a top ten offense would probably get this team to the playoffs – if not too far towards a trophy.
Palpably Unfair Facts:
Zona held Detroit to their second-fewest points on the season, 20 – and allowed Carolina to score their second-most, with 36.
He wasn’t incredible, but MHJ deserved at least a few OROY votes. Caleb Williams and Drake Maye positively did not.
If this team can defeat SF for a third-straight time, they could go into their bye at 6-1 or 5-3 and in control of the West to kick off 2025. Unlikely, not undoable.