NFL Hope For The Future Rankings: XXVII - XXXII
Twenty-six teams down. Six to go. There’s not much light at the end of these teams’ tunnels - if an end to said tunnels are even in our field of view - and fans of these six may want to take some choice Fountains of Wayne lyrics to heart: “I wanna sink to the bottom with you.”
Unlike the top of this list, which is populated almost uninterruptedly by Win-Now teams with great rosters and proven or promising QBs with smart head coaches, the bottom of this list has a number of different inhabitants – none of which provision their supporters with more than a meager ration of liminal confidence in their teams. If you haven’t been keeping track of the 26 teams we’ve already named, then you’ll be in for a surprise or two. If you have been keeping track, you’ll find that the six teams remaining are exactly who you’d think – but perhaps not for the reasons you think.
Take a certain team in South Florida, for example. Here we find a team that, on paper, has its QB1, has a desirable head coach, lives in a division that does have a “bully,” yes, but not one as monstrously tyrannical as the Evil Empire Patriots or current Chiefs, and seems to have decent pieces peppered throughout its offensive and defensive lines, skill positions, linebackers and secondary. Yet herein lies a fundamental crux of how this list becomes constructed. The Dolphins have all of these things, and have had all of these things for multiple seasons, and have nothing, zero, zilch to show for it. Playoff wins? None. MVPs or COTY awards? Not one. Big-time wins down the stretch in the regular season that gives their fans at least a substantiation of belief in their team’s aspirings towards glory? No. They have not done anything that you want a contender to do when it really matters. They’ve had two terrible playoff losses in the cold and the wind, away from their paradisiacal quasi-Caribbean idyll of a homefield at Hard Rock Stadium, where they either had basically no chance (Skylar Thompson versus Josh Allen) or absolutely no chance (Tua Tagovailoa versus Patrick Mahomes). In short the team seemed to possess a deleterious, intrinsic weakness that no amount of Tyreek Hill or Jalen Ramsey trades could stitch up – a lack of toughness. A dearth of grit. An insufficiency of ruggedness. Whatever you want to call it, no one in their right mind could have possibly liked the Dolphins’ odds going into Buffalo or Kansas City in mid-January with how their team was constituted. Small and fast wins in autumn – big and beefy wins in winter. As Bill Belichick, quoted by Chris Simms, apparently said: “Fast guys get slower. Big guys don’t get smaller.” That’s what clinches victory in the swill of hibernal crunch time.
But the Dolphins are merely one example of how a team might sow hopelessness into the Sadd Color’d fabric of their wanting fans. They are a truly bad example of how a team can be rich in worldly materials and impoverished in the intangible sinews that strengthen and anoint champions. There are worse teams that have neither – no clear-cut QB1, no desirable coach, and no obvious prospects of putting themselves in situations whereby they can convince the NFL and their legions of fanatics that they aren’t just cannon fodder for the offenses of marauding oppositions and bloodthirsty defenses ready to rend in twain whatever newest rookie QB their maladroit managements trot out for slaughter this season. Take the team in Cleveland for this example. The old adage holds: When you have two quarterbacks, you have no quarterbacks. How does that math work out if you six? If you complete the pattern, I suppose it means you have negative four quarterbacks. But even if they cut all but one of these lackluster camp arms they’d still be in deep trouble, regardless of whether that poor young or old man had to constantly look over his shoulder to ensure his backups weren’t gaining on him while also sensing pressure from enemy pass rushers in front of him. Absolutely no one in that QB room inspires a modicum of confidence right now. Sure, one might have been able to bastardize their faculties so profanely as to view Shedeur Sanders as an unfairly denounced starting-caliber NFL QB a few weeks ago, but after the disastrous afternoon he suffered at the hands of the Rams backups, there’s no luster left on this new Bugatti, and with Dillon Gabriel already appointed as an obvious project, a rough mound of clay in need of artisan hands to mold him (good luck finding someone with mitts like those on this Browns staff), Joe Flacco, the forty-year-old passing statue whose NFL epitaph is being incised into the marble frontispiece of his career’s mausoleum as we speak, has been declared the Week 1 starter. And who do the Browns play in Week 1? The Cincinnati Bengals. A team whose offensive firepower is considered by much of the NFL’s fashionable intelligence to be the supremest in the land. Good luck making an opening day statement against that team, who has the league’s reigning passing leader and Triple Crown receiver, with Flacco, who has never made a Pro Bowl despite 17 at-bats. What a circus!
There are two other types of teams you’ll find in this sextet of subordinated squads. One is the “team with once highly-regarded head coach who is trying to navigate a quarterback minefield” category. In here we find teams located in New York and Indianapolis. It’s utterly unfair to say that the head coaches of these two teams brought their current undesirable situations upon themselves, but they doubtless had a hand in it; losing Saquon Barkley, which if last season’s Hard Knocks Offseason is to be believed was essentially the sole and benighted idea of Joe Schoen, doesn’t excuse the nothingness we saw week in and week out from Brian Daboll’s Giants, who looked like they lost their entire offense as they bungled to a 2-13 record through 15 games and scored single-digit points 5 times. That puts them in the unenviable company of teams like the pre-Cam Newton Panthers in 2010, the pre-Sean McVay Rams in 2016, and of course, themselves, since the 2023 Giants also scored 9 points or fewer 5 times. The only reason they didn’t stay at 2 wins is because they got to play the other “team with once highly-regarded head coach” team last year, the Colts, who allowed the Giants to dog-walk them for 45 points – a figure equal to the total amount of points the Giants scored in all other games from December 1 on. Those Colts, somehow, some way, went 8-9 despite starting a shimmering desert mirage of imagistic photons at QB for most of the season (see: Richardson, Anthony and Flacco, Joe), but never seriously challenged Houston for control of that division. Those Colts were so impressed by the aerial acrobatics visited with relish and relentlessness on them by the Giants that they signed their former QB, Daniel Jones, to “compete” with Richardson (imagine calling such a farcical camp battle a QB competition) for the starting role. The only issue is that Big Blue had actually cut Jones by the time the Giants faced off against Indy, and it was Drew Lock, not Daniel Jones, who bombed the horses for 4 touchdowns and a 155.3 rating. An easy-enough mistake to make. Maybe if the Colts kept the receipt they can get their money back.
Finally there’s the last bit of badness to deal with: the Saints and Jets. These teams have been mired in muck and mishigas for almost the entirety of the 2020s, though both have tried to feign competitiveness throughout the decade (in fairness to New Orleans, they skillfully and artfully concealed a deteriorating Drew Brees for one season in 2020 before his arm all but fell off in that year’s playoffs, going 12-4 and losing to a team they’d handily swept in the regular season during their Divisional defeat). New Orleans has attracted wonder, scrutiny and bemusement from much of the financially-savvy NFL world for their succession of salary prestidigitations and cap contrivances since the retirement of Drew Brees (and before), with few believing either that their annual renewal of future-mortgaging wasn’t, one, supremely ill-advised, and, two, even worth it in the short term; now staring down the barrel of an ~$89M dead cap haymaker for this season, the bill, as it always does, has begun to come due. A stop-loss would have been a wise choice for this team roundabout 2022 or so when it became clear as day to everyone not in possession of a Louisiana cell phone number that there was nothing doing for this team in the way of playoff success, but they’ve finally come round. Their new head coach and ownership don’t inspire confidence, either. And then…the Jets. What needs be said? It’s another defensive coordinator. But this time it might work! Read on.
The Giants’ game of musical chairs at QB that began in 2023 – and has reared its entertainingly wrongheaded horns throughout the 2025 offseason – seems doomed to loop unremittingly for much of this season. I think it’s safe to say that we’d all love to see as much of Jaxson Dart as possible, but head coach Brian Daboll and general manager Joe Schoen are playing a dangerous game if they start him too soon and he’s not clearly the best passer on the team. For one, they need to actually win games and prove that the swamp of waterlogged offensive performances their team has offered up for the last two seasons isn’t all their fault (which it may be), but they also need to do the right thing and not toss Jaxson Dart out there if he’s not ready so that they can bank on ownership not firing them because they need more than one season to fully develop their Ole Miss product. This season is a seriously high-stakes one for Big Blue. Another failure and they might be onto Year Zero of another Daniel Jones-ish whirligig: fired head coach with lame duck QB, lame duck QB with new HC, and on and on and on. It took three head coaches to get out of that mess (2019: Pat Shurmur, 2020-2021: Joe Judge, 2022-2024: Brian Daboll). The generational cycle of violence which has been twirling about at varying levels of intensity since 2012 needs to be stopped somewhere. One hopes for Giants fans’ sake that the 2025 draft yielded a true “The Guy” for this franchise at QB – and not, as some have postulated, just the second-best option in a weak class.
One of my favorite ever crowd shots from an NFL game – and one of my favorite sports pictures of all time – is from January 9, 2022, during the final game of the Joe Judge/Dave Gettleman era in New York. It features a fan wearing a simple outfit: a Tiki Barber #21 jersey, which had a piece of scotch tape plastered shambolically across the nameplate upon which “Peppers” had been written in an inky scrawl (for Jabrill Peppers, since-departed safety), and upon the fan’s head a large brown paper bag with a cutout of Dave Gettleman’s face, complete with a comically-oversized clown nose, affixed to the back. This is what the fan looked like from behind, the details of which we know due to some incisive and intrepid fan-conducted journalism conducted by a MetLife attendee who sat behind this gentleman. The front of the fan, immortalized in the famous picture to which I referred, shows the brown paper bag hat to have two large, slit-like eye-holes cut out, and an unmistakable message written in all caps across the top and bottom of the bag: “FIRE EVERYONE.” Front picture linked here, back picture linked here. This guy was #mad. And I think it’s entirely possible we see more of these neo-Aints-bag-wearing people at Giants games in 2025.
Why do I view this team so pessimistically? For one, the NFC East seems to finally have more than one definitively good team. And they’re really good – they met in the NFC Championship last year. They also have the Cowboys, who though not a contender by any means and riddled with silly infighting of their own which makes them seem more like a clown car than even the Giants, do have a lot of talent on their roster, and all other things being equal can probably overpower the Giants through sheer superiority of players. The Giants don’t seem like they can match up with the Eagles or Commanders on either offense or defense unless those teams have a dismal day on offense and a serious underperformance on defense – not things we should expect from two seemingly well-coached teams. And they’d need to split with the Cowboys to get a win against them – I cannot see the Cowboys, moody and prone to inconsistency though they are, losing to this team in Jerryworld. The rest of the Giants schedule is the Battle of Verdun. They start out against those Commanders (in Washington) then go to Jerryworld for that likely thrashing at the hands of the Boys, then have to play the Chiefs and Chargers, both playoff teams from last season, at home. 0-4 seems the most likely start to this season. They then travel to New Orleans, which is a “must-win” game in the saddest possible way, because if they don’t win that one they’ve got the Eagles, Broncos, and Eagles again in the following three weeks. Through two months, it would be a serious accomplishment if this team was able to do 2-6 or better. 1-7 through Halloween is the most probably outcome. Their November is consumed with NFC North hardship, as they start with the 49ers (who, partially because they get to play the Giants, have the easiest schedule in the league and ought to be very good) then play the Bears at Soldier Field, the Packers at home, and the Lions at Detroit the week before Thanksgiving, when, I have a hunch, the Lions will be in a serious groove. They will probably be sitting at 1-11 come December. The rest of their schedule is the teensiest bit easier, as they get to play a rebuilding New England before their bye then get the Commanders and Vikings (both 12+ win teams last year) at home before finishing out the year with a trip to Vegas to play a Raiders team that many are bullish on and a Week 18 home stand against those Cowboys; it’s tough to predict this sort of thing, but if both New York and Dallas have been having down years it’s likely that some banged-up starters may be sitting this one out. Anything beyond 3-14 would be exceeding my expectations for their win total this year. Yikes!
As has been said many times to this, some of the teams that will act as contributors to that bloated L total I have the Giants at will be disappointing this season compared to last season, and as such it’s unlikely that NYG will finish with exactly that record. It’s far likelier that any team will finish closer to 8-9 or 9-8 than 3-14 or 14-3. Extremity carries with it improbability. But man it’s hard to find wins for this team going off the information we have right here and right now. I’m reminded of the 2013 Texans, looking at this Giants team, if I had to draw a comparison to a recent team. They have some stars on the roster: Kayvon Thibodeaux and Brian Burns are their J.J. Watt and Brooks Reed, Micah McFadden is their Brian Cushing, Dexter Lawrence is their Antonio Smith, Malik Nabers is their Andre Johnson and Andrew Thomas is their Duane Brown. The big issue is that Russell Wilson is their Matt Schaub, Jameis Winston is their Case Keenum, and until we see otherwise, Jaxson Dart is their T.J. Yates. Jaxson Dart could transform into their Deshaun Watson C.J. Stroud if and when he takes the reins from the other two guys and proves he can pilot the offense to piles of points, but again, if he cannot do that, and if his being inserted into the starting lineup would constitute more of a trial by fire than a 90-day-free trial, then Daboll and Schoen need to take the high road and maintain the young gun on the bench so as to not ruin him. Confidence, swagger, and early success are utterly imperative components to a young quarterback’s development, and if these are lacking the poor soul may not make a full recovery. If this team is 1-7, what’s the point of throwing the kid out there? Let Jameis do another 30-30 TD:INT year if that’s what we’re working with. Hell, put Tommy DeVito back out there before asking Dart to rescue them from a 2-win season.
Palpably Unfair Facts:
Speaking of Mr. Cutlets, DeVito is the longest-tenured quarterback on this roster. We’ll see if he gets to stick around post-cuts.
RB Cam Skattebo is the most intriguing skill position pick of the draft. I just have no idea what he’ll look like in an NFL offense.
Only once has the WR1 on a team that Jameis Winston started at least 7 games for not reached 1,000 receiving yards.
The five teams that remain form something of a silly synthesis: they all have questions or concerns at the ownership level. The Haslams (Browns owners, Team #29) are known for meddling and poor QB/HC/GM hires (Stefanski notwithstanding), the Johnsons (Jets, #30) cannot do anything right – especially with the front office and their subsequent HC hires, the Irsays (Colts, #31) have kept the Colts mostly a punchline outside of their horrible teams’ stumbling into Peyton Manning and Andrew Luck after disaster seasons, and the Bensons (Saints, #32) have been buffeted by rumors of team sale, disputations of Tom Benson’s (the late owner) will, and failure to properly oversee their team’s headhunting practices (as well as their ability to very, very well oversee other affairs). And then there’s the Dolphins. Stephen Ross is not known as a great owner, but his shortcomings have a subtlety to them that at once place the Dolphins just the slightest bit “up” from the invective-demanding missteps that the teams below them commit but also condemn Fins fans to a kind of invisible irrelevance that other teams don’t understand and cannot empathize with. In the many years since perfection occurred, and as fewer and fewer folks stick around who actually remember it, 1972 seems less like a coronation and more like a curse.
If you don’t know about the mind-bendingly overlong drought of offensive consistency that the Dolphins have suffered from since the retirement of Don Shula – a coach who last helmed this team in 1996 – then you really should, but in short, this team has never been able to be good on offense without the winningest coach in NFL history under the headset. It really looked like that may change with the advent of Mike McDaniel’s tenure with the team, but injuries to their quarterback, cold spells, and the perception that they might be under a spell that prevents them from playing well in the cold have hamstrung this team’s chances again and again since 2022. The lone season they played up to their potential, 2023, ended in the worst possible conditions and in the worst possible way: negative-number wind chill in Kansas City in a game they scored 7 points and lost by 19. The year before, even with their third-string quarterback at the controls, they managed to take the Bills into the fourth quarter of a tightly-contested and thrillingly sloppy playoff game, even taking the lead in Highmark Stadium at one point off a horrible – and not unusual – Josh Allen fumble. But 2024 was neither a season of playing up to potential nor of thrilling sloppiness – it was just boring and bad. Tua Tagovailoa, the Alabama QB who has now been on the team for 5 full seasons (and has yet to play a second fully-healthy one) was lost in the second game of the season, kicking off an underwhelming sequence from Weeks 2 to 7 where the team’s lone win came courtesy of a 15-10 stinker against the very bad Patriots in Foxborough. Tua returned against the Cardinals in Week 8, but lost both this and his following game against the Bills, dropping the team to 2-6 and effectively ending their season. A three-game win streak against the tough but still-struggling Rams, the horrible Raiders, and the mostly horrible Patriots ensued, bringing the team to within one game of .500, but the team then alternated between wins and losses for the rest of the season – a two-game win streak in Weeks 16 and 17, to get the team to 8-8, was followed by a loss to the Jets, putting the 2024 Fins in the disappointing sub-surface cell of 8-9.
It has been a rough go of things for this team. If you recall, in the ten years between 2009 (the season after their only division title since Tom Brady became a thing) and 2018, the team went 6-10 three times, 7-9 four times, 8-8 twice, and by a superhuman effort and a lot of bad play from opponents managed to eke out a 10-6 record in 2016, getting bounced from the playoffs easily and quickly by the Pittsburgh Steelers. By the time 2019 dawned, management had had enough – radical change, and toxic medicine, was needed. They stripmined the roster that year, bringing in Patriots assistant Brian Flores to oversee the deconstruction and ensure at least a substratum of cultural toughness was imbued as the team struggled to a record sufficiently sickening to ensure them a chance to draft a franchise quarterback. Through four weeks in 2019 things were going according to plan: the team was losing, at a worse proportion than just about any team in NFL history, and players were being sold off for decent returns. But quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick was not playing poorly enough to guarantee a #1 overall pick. After dropping to 0-7, the team finished the year 5-4, beating playoff-bound teams like Philadelphia and New England – as well as fellow cellar denizen Cincinnati, ensuring that team the next year’s first pick – to wind up 5-11 and in the fifth draft slot. That’s not the sort of tanking that gets you Joe Burrow. It does, however, get you Tua Tagovailoa, which the preceding #TankForTua campaign had nominally been in pursuit of, and the Dolphins drafted the somewhat-undersized, somewhat-injury-concern-laden Alabama passer with the fifth pick in the 2020 draft.
The years with Tua have, at this moderate remove from that fateful draft, not really been that much better than the Ryan Tannehill/Chad Henne/Chad Pennington ones. 10-6, 9-8, 9-8, 11-6, 8-9. And the aforementioned swift departure from the playoffs at the hands of the Kansas City Chiefs. What, exactly, was the tank year for? It certainly wasn’t to go from 7-9 and no playoff wins to 9-8 and no playoff wins, with a couple bad Wild Card losses, half of them without your starting quarterback, mixed in. Is it ridiculous to say that the team’s 2020s incarnation, with nary a postseason triumph on the wall, has been more disappointing than the 2010s, with the same macrocosmic result? By a reasonable person’s estimation, who counts all wins and losses the same, the answer is no. But when you apply the irrational calculus of the Dolphins, who nakedly and willingly surrendered themselves to acquiescent losing for the 2019 season in the most undisguisedly blatant tanking thrust of recent history, which we know occurred due to financial inducements offered to Flores, the answer has to be no. 2019 had to be paid off with postseason glory. And it wasn’t. At least not yet. But who thinks that Mike McDaniel, Tua Tagovailoa, Tyreek Hill and Jaylen Waddle have the best yet to come as we sit here in 2025? Not I. And I doubt many Fins fans feel different either. There have already been numerous surfacings of discontent within the McDaniel locker room, to say nothing of the abortive and thoroughly illegal dalliance attempted by Stephen Ross with Sean Payton and Tom Brady after he had just drafted Tua; speedy malcontent Tyreek Hill used no uncertain terms in expressing his desire to leave Miami early this offseason before meekly and insipidly walking those comments back, to the bemusement of the NFL world and the vapid acknowledgement of his quarterback who at least did himself the service of noting that Hill needs to do a lot more to regain trust than just vocalize an apologetic statement in a public forum. “Win Now” piece Jalen Ramsey, added in the playoff year 2023, has departed for Pittsburgh, as has Jonnu Smith, sneakily their most reliable receiver down the stretch last year. And to top it all off, Minkah Fitzpatrick, a piece traded away in the 2019 fire sale for a first round pick, has been brought back. There’s no better headstone to engrave on the 2019-24 Dolphins than that. Something needs to give here. I doubt we won’t have answers come 2026.
Palpably Unfair Facts:
Tua is second in Y/A since 2020, but only 15th in touchdown passes and total passing yards, and negligible in QB rushing yards.
The Dolphins have finished as a top-10 scoring offense twice (2001, 2023) since Don Shula retired.
The ’25 Fins only play three “true” cold weather games: at Jets, Steelers, and Pats. Win these, and change your reputation, boys?
Joe Flacco, starter. That in and of itself should terrify the canine cadre of supporters that flock to FirstEnergy Stadium loyally and promptly each fall Sunday. Behind him there is little from a macroscopic perspective that should have anyone less optimistic than the most militantly cheery Lake Eerie stalwarts all that excited: two rookies, one a third-round pick, one a fifth-rounder, a Steelers and Eagles castoff, a Ravens and Dolphins castoff, and Deshaun Watson – the worst traded-for player in NFL history. What, Browns fans might ask themselves, is the point of this season? What, exactly, is this season’s goal? There can be only one objective: finding out if Dillon Gabriel or Shedeur Sanders can play, or at least develop.
The Kowloon Walled City is a former slum that sprawled throughout British Hong Kong and was infamous for its hellish population density and general misery. The Cleveland Browns had the “misery” part down – now they’ve got that other indispensable ingredient, overcrowding, to recreate in filamental form that theater of extreme dismay in their own quarterback meeting room. The misfortune of Shedeur Sanders and Dillon Gabriel, two highly-promising if not necessarily “NFL starter”-grade QB prospects from a physical skillset perspective, is that they exist on the same roster; why Cleveland felt it needed to draft Shedeur Sanders after Dillon Gabriel, or at all, is not a question to which I have an answer, nor is it a question I feel 100% confident that Kevin Stefanski, Andrew Berry or even Jimmy Haslam has a salient response to. The fact that they are vying against each other, and against apposite starter Joe Flacco, and against reclamation project trade return Kenny Pickett, AND against knockabout journeyman Tyler Huntley, probably constitutes far more vicious competition-fostering adversity than they really need to impel them towards improvement and skill-honing, but what the hell do I know? Well, I do know that I neglected to even mention Deshaun Watson, the nominal and financially-anointed QB1 of a few years ago, but he’s basically dead cap weight – dustbin of history contents – at this point. What the future holds for him is murkier than any of the preceding passers, but he forms the final piece of this Black Hole Of Calcutta-esque detention center that is the Browns’ QB room. This can’t be good for the other players on offense, right? A planet, like a wide receiver, can only orbit one star at a time. Well, not really, but you don’t want multiple stars. Elliptical, not circumbinary, orbits rule the day in the NFL.
If the torture of that analogy wasn’t enough for Browns fans, the torture of this roster’s glaring gaps provide enhancements for the excruciation. The departure of Nick Chubb, who has an argument for being the second- or third-best Brown since their 1999 return to the league, has left the running back room consisting of Jerome Ford, Ahmani Marshall, Dylan Sampson, Pierre Strong Jr., Toa Taua and Trayveon Williams. Of those names, two recorded rushing attempts for the Browns last year, and they (Jerome and Pierre) combined for 673 yards and 3 rushing touchdowns. The passing leaders, Jameis Winston and Deshaun Watson, are either gone (as in on a different team) or finished (Deshaun Watson will never play another down for this team, regardless how much more time he has to spend burning a quarter-billion-dollar-sized smoking crater in the Browns’ bookkeeping). The one part of the otherwise mostly phantasmal offense that put up some decent numbers, the receivers, kept up the two most important pass-catchers: Jerry Jeudy, who seemed to finally come into his own in 2024, and David Njoku, who when it’s all said and done will probably be joining Chubb in the Top 10 Browns since their ’99 redux. But the circular suffering of this team is like a big half-pipe in the X Games: all things eventually come to rest at the bottom of the gravitational well, which is where the QB resides. And it’s right well unclear who the principal passer is going to be for this season. Joe Flacco has been named the starter, yes, but at 40 years old, immobile, and without the Eagles’ offensive line in front of him there’s no sure bet that he can deliver the ball consistently downfield, can evade pressure, or can hope to have pressure stymied in front of him. Barring Flacco rediscovering his 2012 postseason self and staying healthy, the likelihood seems high that we’ll see at least one other quarterback this year – and let’s not mislead ourselves, it would be a bad thing if that second QB was not Gabriel or Sanders. One of them will need to separate, and this season, if they’re going to be successful on this team. When’s the last time a team carried two rookie quarterbacks on the same roster with neither as starter for a full season? Shedeur looked like he may jump ahead of Gabriel on the depth chart with a dazzling outing versus the Panthers in his first preseason game, but Gabriel looked sound – not magisterial, but sound – in his playing time against Philadelphia, a rookie-mistake pick 6 notwithstanding, and Shedeur looked awful in his second go, taking five sacks and completing three passes against the Rams of Los Angeles. Tyler Huntley spelled the rookie in the two-minute drill, leading to a game-winning field goal as time expired. You hate to see two teammates competing against each other, but that’s basically the situation that the Browns concocted by pulling Sanders for Huntley, and with Huntley leading the team to victory after incessant inefficacy from Sanders throughout the afternoon, they arrived at a distasteful result for roster-cutting purposes. They could carry four quarterbacks into the season, which seems insane for a team that needs a lot of help at a lot of different positions considering two of those QBs could be untested and potentially non-starter-material rookies, but this is the cloud-cuckoo-land of Cleveland, not the callipolis of careful and calculated roster diligence that has been strongly erected in places like Baltimore, Kansas City and Philadelphia, and nothing should surprise us at this point. Kenny Pickett or Tyler Huntley probably needs to go. Why keep them, anyway? The football-watching world knows who they are at this point, and if either of them are going to be successful, they’re not going to do it on this team. Better to go with Flacco, who has something of a defined floor and ceiling, and your two rookies and one more veteran than try to guess correctly between Gabriel and Sanders. One of them still could be good – we just don’t know yet. And even though using a dearth of game-tape-backed evidence in someone’s favor may seem unwise on its face, such a fact, which works to the advantage of Gabriel and Sanders, acts as a useful tiebreaker in the minutiae- and esoterica-dependent world of roster fringe decisions. This is the Sheol of suck that Andrew Berry has allowed to amalgamize and etiolate in the radioactive, elongated shadow of his Deshaun Watson trade; he, Stefanski and Haslam need to be the machete-wielding brush-clearers that slash away the unwanted shrubbery that has shot up amongst the non-clarity on the QB1 question in order to reveal the towering, glorious tree-trunk that is the QB of the Future. If they can’t, two of them will be gone, and the hatchet will be handed to new hewers of Browns history, and the names of the nixed won’t be Jimmy Haslam.
Palpably Unfair Facts:
The 2023 Browns tied the 1987 Patriots record for most different quarterbacks to receive at least one start for one team in a single season. As of August 19, this Browns team has a chance to break that record. Let’s hope for their rookies’ sake they don’t.
For all the uncertainty, the Browns do know one QB-related thing – they can’t start Watson, whose 23.4 QBR was worst among QBs who started multiple games in 2024.
While the present and future are cloudy and grim, we can look to the past for some gems. Only two of the top 10 leaders in career yard-per-rush average are in the Pro Football Hall Of Fame. Both are Browns: Marion Motley and Jim Brown.
It may seem overtly cruel, even sadistic, to put a team that has weathered as many tempests in swift succession as the 2020s New York Jets so low, not least after they made concerted efforts to build a professional coaching staff and front office that won’t make the same all-too-familiar, predictably silly mistakes that prior recent regimes have in Florham Park. But take an objectivity-informed look at this team. How exactly is it all that different from previous iterations of the Jets? In one way it is markedly different - there’s no young, highly-drafted QB on this roster upon which the hopes and dreams of Gang Green Nation, if there is such a thing, have been foisted. But the other played-out hallmarks of bad Jets seasons are there. Coach coming in with a lot of fieriness as a celebrated coordinator with little or no HC experience. Clear-cut new QB1 whose acumen is suspect. Disquiet amongst leaders at the skill positions. And, everlastingly, question marks, if not fully-fledged worries, along the OL. The need for a culture change was dire in 2021, when they hired Robert Saleh to replace Adam Gase; it seems like a new reset is needed again, but was Saleh the biggest problem? And is Aaron Glenn the best possible answer?
The New York Jets are proof positive of the conclusive truth of Murphy’s Law. That which can malfunction will malfunction. Expectations that might not be met shall never be met. And players that could be good will turn out to be bad. The Jets actually exist in a perpetual state of self-sabotage that is above – or, perhaps, below – Murphy’s axiom of disaster, whereby not only will everything go wrong that could, but things that seem unassailably and irreducibly certain of staying good and pure become shriveled and attenuated, or may simply dissolve in a gangrenous miasma of evanishment. Aaron Rodgers: gone after one set of downs in 2023, nowhere close to his best in 2024 (though in a heartless plunge of pitilessness from the Football Gods his stats when added up equal one of the best Jets seasons ever, Vinny Testaverde’s 1998 and Ryan Fitzpatrick’s 2015 notwithstanding). Davante Adams: here one day, gone the next, himself enjoying a decent season by his standards but saddled with a contract of such laughable magnitude that the Jets had to simply release the future Hall Of Famer, who was swiftly scooped up by a retooling and far more amply-managed franchise in Los Angeles. Less notable but equally unhelpful recent signings from other teams who saw their stardom sapped by the black hole of Jets-y-ness include Dalvin Cook, who was useless in 2023, C.J. Uzomah, who was worse than useless in 2023 (he wound up on IR) and was mostly useless in 2022, Randall Cobb, who was not only useless but largely nonexistent despite being signed specifically for Aaron Rodgers in 2023, and Allen Lazard, who was not so useless as to be an afterthought on an offense that was mostly bad in 2024 but who does serve the distinguished purpose of being another Rodgers Guy that the team kowtowed to simply to appease their mercurial QB1. What’s the through-line, the thread of Ariadne, the overlapping gravamen between all these guys? They left better situations to come to the Jets, and were either bad or didn’t help the Jets while they were on the team and have since their time as teammates moved on to better things than the Jets or fallen off the face of the NFL earth. It is not hyperbole, nor is it uncouth, to say that right now the Jets are where good players go to die. Massive years from Rodgers on the Steelers and Adams on the Rams would provide contrapuntal arguments to this assertion, but who really thinks that will happen?
What’s worse is that the Jets didn’t even replace these fellows with equals or near-approximations – they’ve mostly just gotten worse. This is a universally-acknowledged rebuild, after all, so no one expects them to sign the newest versions of Joe Montana, Jerry Rice and, uh, Kellen Winslow. But the pieces they restocked the carpentry-needy cupboard with don’t seem to rise very far, if at all, above “manifestly substandard” levels of competitive quality. Justin Fields has been a bad quarterback for several seasons, and while beloved in fantasy circles for his rushing value (at times he’s been more or less a very good version of Wildcat Ronnie Brown), he hasn’t proven that his style of play can do anything more than win one out of about every three or four games. He hasn’t breached the 3,000 yards passing mark once in his career, and excepting the unlikelihood that he suddenly changes into a pocket-operating precision passer, he is not the guy who is going to maximize Garrett Wilson, a fourth-year receiver whose Ohio State pedigree and hot start as a rookie in 2022 have begun to lag behind the development of fellow Buckeye wideouts over the last two years. The most notable addition they’ve made in that wide receiver room to try and gauze the gaping hole left by Davante Adams’ 854 yards and 7 touchdowns in 2024 is the addition of Tyler Johnson, a now-veteran journeyman who has spent time on the Buccaneers, Texans, and Rams gameday rosters. He has 76 catches and 828 yards – in five seasons as a pro. Breece Hall, who looked on pace for an OPOY award in 2022 before tearing his ACL and meniscus in Week 7 and ceding the catbird seat for that award to teammate Wilson, was joined in the backfield last season by Braelon Allen, who looked like a tough-mudding change-up option at times but only averaged 3.6 yards per carry. Adding former Texans fullback Andrew Beck might help, a bit, but this RB room really needs Breece Hall to be The Man again for the other pieces to not look shabby and, again, substandard. Now, to be sure, the pallid cast of the QB, WR and RB units – the TE group doesn’t seem special, but few do these days – could look significantly better if, IF, the offensive line plays up to its potential. A dicey gambit with the Jets, no doubt, but they do have pieces. Alijah Vera-Tucker, who few would debate is not a truly great guard, stayed healthy last season after a season-ender in ’23, and he was joined in 2024 by Penn State tackle Olu Fashanu, who worked his way into cemented starter status by the end of the season. They were then joined by another young tackle, this time Armand Membou from Mizzou. He wasn’t the first tackle off the board, but he’s right there with Will Campbell, Josh Simmons and Josh Conerly Jr. as a consensus first-round protector. Add center Joe Lippmann and other guard John Simpson and the starting OL, if they’re all healthy, looks fairly good. But see the first paragraph – this is New York, and no plan survives contact with the enemy (in the Jets’ case, Week 1 of every regular season). This defense was actually halfway decent last year, conceding very little through the air and not getting gouged week in and week out on the ground. But this was Robert Saleh’s doing, mostly, and now he and interim coach Jeff Ulbrich are gone. Aaron Glenn is a defensive mind, and hopefully a motivational one, too – but it shouldn’t be expected that growing pains and learning curves won’t pop up early and often throughout this team. Just win more than five games.
Palpably Unfair Facts:
Breece Hall and Garrett Wilson, RB1 and WR1, combined for a mammoth 16 drops from Rodgers passes, third-most of any two teammates in 2024.
Left unsaid in the “halfway decent” defense remark was how many first downs they gave up via penalty – 47, tops in the league.
Tyrod Taylor, the backup quarterback, has more rushing yards and touchdowns than all the current Jets running backs combined.
I had this headline cooked up and ready to fire off even before the Colts released their first quote-unquote official depth chart on August 4, a drearily evasive document which buffoonishly neglected to name either Daniel Jones or Anthony Richardson as QB1, instead supplying the disgraceful equivocation “Daniel Jones OR Anthony Richardson,” in clear and flagrant, if not unlawful, breach of the accepted social contract between franchise and fans that ought to govern the summer months. Chris Ballard managed, miraculously by his standards, to find a QB who could at least serve as opening day starter for two Week 1s in a row when the artist formerly known as AR-15 suited up against the Texans on September 8 2024, but that might be the last time we see a Colts quarterback accomplish that meager feat for some time if, as was announced on August 19, Daniel Jones gets the nod over the former Florida Gator come September. This team has little in the way of playmakers on offense outside once-umbrageous running back Jonathan Taylor, whose prime might have well been squandered in the hellish carousel years of Rivers → Wentz → Ryan → Richardson, and a once-opportunistic defense has been a shell of itself and patently incapable of slowing good teams down for going on three years now. It is a virtual certainty that the true QB of the future - a future which, Tantalus-like, seems to irrepressibly recede whenever reached for by these Colts - is nowhere to be found on the roster as currently constituted. A more urgent question, if a question can be more urgent, is if the coach of the future is here, and whether there’s any future at all for Chris Ballard if this team doesn’t win big and stop living in the mournful, 2010s-spattered shadow of Andrew Luck immediately.
Things looked grim for this team in the sullen interval between the 2017 and 2018 seasons. Josh McDaniels, the offensive coordinator for the 2017 NFL MVP QB who had just reached and lost the Super Bowl, had reneged on his agreement to become the next HC of the Indianapolis Colts. But Chris Ballard, the then still-new GM of the Colts, acted fast to do one better, inking Frank Reich, the offensive coordinator for the 2017 Super Bowl MVP who had just reached and won the Super Bowl, to a contract making him the next HC of the Indianapolis Colts. The 2018 season was a fun one for the Colts, with early struggles (they were 1-5 by mid-October), a big time surge down the stretch (they finished the season 9-1), a Wild Card win over divisional rival Houston, and a disappointing but not heartbreaking end to the season in Kansas City, where second-year QB Patrick Mahomes gave Chiefs and Colts fans the impression that he looked a whole lot like a young Andrew Luck. Then, calamity struck. Andrew Luck retired, seemingly out of nowhere but with more than a couple understandable breadcrumbs foreshadowing the hanging-up of his cleats, on August 24, 2019. The Colts and all their fans were absolutely rattled by the upheaval, with the shock leading to the facially abhorrent phenomenon of Luck being booed as he walked off the field of his final preseason game. Frank Reich did more than expected in 2019, answering the surprise retirement of one of the most important players in sports by going 7-9 and demonstrating a mastery for getting more out of his roster than the component parts seemed to equal. The team finished with winning records in 2020 and 2021 despite fielding two different and admittedly limited QBs, but were stricken with a rocky start to the 2022 season that included an embarrassing tie to the undisguisedly tanking Texans and alarming losses to perceivedly inferior divisional opponents Jacksonville and Tennessee. Trade acquisition Matt Ryan was not playing well, but he was good enough to keep his job, or so it seemed; Ryan was benched in favor of rookie Sam Ehlinger after the team’s second loss to the Titans, with the accompanying pronouncement that Ehlinger would be the starting QB for the rest of the season (a card, funny enough, that this team would play again a few years later, with Frank Reich, ostensibly the decision-maker for a choice like this, no longer on the team; coincidence?). Ehlinger struggled against a not-great Washington team and was terrible against the Patriots, and at 3-5-1, Reich lost his job. In favor, ridiculously, of Jeff Saturday – a guy with no head coaching experience, no NFL coaching experience, and no college coaching experience. It was a minor league baseball team-caliber stunt totally unbecoming of an NFL franchise, and the announcement, which caused mayhem throughout social and traditional media for the sheer lunacy of it, came packaged with one of the most astonishingly nonsensical press conferences anyone had ever seen, with the temporal triumvirs of the team – Saturday, Ballard, and owner Jim Irsay – appearing in front of reporters to offer a bland and ineffective defense of both Reich’s firing and Saturday’s hiring. As you’d expect, the team collapsed, winning one game the rest of the season and being blown out in most of their other remaining games. The fact that this team kept Chris Ballard while letting Frank Reich leave, after saddling the former Super Bowl champion OC with what can only be called a succession of short-term tourniquets on a gaping Andrew Luck-sized exit wound where their QB used to be, is a crying scandal that Colts Nation hasn’t forgotten. Now, Colts Nation is being told that Daniel Jones, the second-worst qualifying passer in the NFL in 2024 according to passer rating (one spot above the turbulent Richardson), is the answer for this team; Shane Steichen, the current HC, is trying out that old canard signifying Jones not only as the Week 1 starter, but as the starter for the entire season. Can we at least see if he can play before making such a preposterous pronouncement? It just never ends with this team. The corybantic shenanigans that this team subjects its fans to through its incapability of finding anything close to a long-term answer at QB cannot be good for the human psyche. Nor is it good business: just take a look at the calderas burned into the books by the dead money owed to yesteryear throwers Matt Ryan and Carson Wentz – to say nothing of the $25M they threw at Phillip Rivers for a middling final season and Wild Card loss.
The luxuriance of the contracts doled carelessly out to the succession of replacement attempts for the retired Andrew Luck may have led us to this point: pennywise, parsimonious, prosaic passers like Jones, Flacco, Ehlinger, etc. There is really not a lot of reason for hope for these fans, at least not in 2025. The passage of principal ownership of the franchise from Jim Irsay, who passed away on May 21, to his daughters Carlie, Casey and Kalen may lead, eventually, to better days – it seems unlikely that Chris Ballard will simply continue to keep his job without challenge if this most recent QB room experiment, the cheapest and least inspiring yet of his tenure, doesn’t alchemically convert this roster’s rubbish into roster gold – but for the time being, for 2025 in particular, there’s nothing to convince Colts fans that this won’t be a dark and doleful season full of bad passing and one-sided defeats to hungry opponents. It would be naïve to think we won’t see at least two, and three, of these QBs before the season’s welcome end.
Palpably Unfair Facts:
Anthony Richardson averaged 12.2 intended air yards per pass attempt, easily the best in the league. The difference between this and second place (Trevor Lawrence) is greater than the difference between second and thirty-second place.
One piece of hardware that Colts fans can hope ardently and realistically for is an OPOY award – TE Tyler Warren looks like the real McCoy. A Wildcat QB in college, maybe he can take some reps at signal-caller down the stretch.
The 2024 Colts’ first five losses were all by one score; their last four were by more than one score. An issue of morale, perhaps.
It’s somewhat rare to have a team whose inhabitancy of the bottom spot in the league, preseason-poll wise, is essentially one of unanimity. But that’s what we have in the 2025 New Orleans Saints. For several years now the Saints’ salary cap situation has grown more and more monstrous, with the day of reckoning and piper-paying being forestalled again and again as the team tried fruitlessly to wring a few more Win Now seasons out of an aging and not-up-to-snuff roster still more or less built to maximize Drew Brees. He is long gone – so far in the rearview that he now might be on to his second broadcasting stint since retiring – and now so is his one-time long-term replacement, Derek Carr, who “retired.” We’ll see if that lasts. What probably won’t last is any kind of honeymoon that Kellen Moore is currently enjoying in NOLA, as he has little chance, even if he designs the greatest and most schematically magnificent offense known to man, to win much of anything this year. If the long-term QB for this team is on the roster, we don’t know who it is. OUR TRUE QB1 HAS YET TO REVEAL HIMSELF.
Filling a page with details, information, insights, and predictive matter about this Saints team will be hard. What all is there to say? This team has a quarterback room that can contend with some of the worst this century. Rookie Tyler Shough seems to have the most impressive pedigree of any of the forlorn folks in this unit, he being the Saints’ 2nd-round pick in 2025 with a long and kind of storied college career that culminated as a Louisville Cardinal. They also have Spencer Rattler, who was Kyler Murray’s replacement at Oklahoma and later a South Carolina Gamecock, who was a 5th-round pick last year. And finally, there’s Jake Haener, another guy on the shorter end of the quarterback bestiary who the team took a flyer on in the 4th round of the 2023 draft out of Fresno State (he’d transferred from Washington four years earlier). Add all those up and average it out, and the composite Saints quarterback for 2025 is 6’2, 210lbs, was drafted 106th overall, spent 6 years in college and played their college home games roughly in the vicinity of Pueblo, CO, the midpoint of the seven universities at which the Saints’ three QBs played. Pueblo also happens to be the city in which Woodrow Wilson, the president who oversaw the United States’ entry into and participation in World War One, collapsed after a massive stroke while on a whistlestop tour campaigning for the United States to enter the League Of Nations. No need to discuss how that association fared with the hard truths of the world, and we wish this group – the Saints QBs, if I’ve fully lost you at this point – better. Even though they look like they could join the notorious ranks of the 2011 Indianapolis Colts (Collins, Painter, Orlovsky), the 2004 San Francisco 49ers (Rattay, Dorsey, Pickett, Doman) and the 2004 Chicago Bears (George, Hutchinson, Quinn).
If our theoretical 6’2 210 106th overall Saints QB had to play at a specific DI college, the nearest one to Pueblo is the Air Force Academy, and with this QB room, a service academy offense where they throw the ball 2-4 times a game such as that practiced at Air Force might not be the worst idea in the world. They still have Alvin Kamara, but Alvin Kamara hasn’t really been Alvin Kamara for some time – he last made the Pro Bowl in 2021, which is longer ago than will make you happy, and he hasn’t averaged over 5 yards per rush since even earlier, in 2020. A slow descent from relevance that seems unnoticeable at first, then becomes suddenly striking, is not a totally unfamiliar fate for Saints players – the same happened to Michael Thomas over the course of a few seasons in the earlier 2020s, and he no longer has a team. Kamara is too valuable to this team to just be cut (at least not this year), but it would do well for him to remind the Saints and the league at large that he’s still That Guy. In all seriousness, his QBs’ loss might be his own gain this season; like a 2019 Christian McCaffrey, or James White at the end of Tom Brady’s career, being a reliable receiving threat at RB when your downfield game is morbidly suspect can lead to many happy returns in the realm of fantasy points, especially when your nominal backfield mates are Kendre Miller, who has struggled to carve out the barest semblance of a role in this already limited offense, and this-year adds Cam Akers and Clyde Edwards-Helaire. The receivers truly aren’t half bad – Chris Olave is a respectable #1, all things considered, and Brandin Cooks, even now in his NFL dotage, has never been a bust on any of the teams that have gotten him on their Week 1 roster. Perimeter/slot hybrid Rashid Shaheed, their resident downfield stretch guy, and auxiliaries Dante Pettis and Cedrick Wilson could probably hold their own if their QBs could deliver them the ball, but this of course remains to be seen. The OL has had its issues, though, and while they seem to have quickly found an answer to the LT hole left by Terron Armstead’s departure in last year’s selection of Taliese Fuaga, their interior has been topsy-turvy due to a combination of inconsistency (Trevor Penning, Cesar Ruiz) and age-related wear/injury (Erik McCoy, who granted is very good when healthy). The turnover on the OL throughout last season is shown in the statistic of snap percentage: no other team surpassed the Saints in number of linemen who played 25% or more of the season’s snaps, with 8. Their pick of Kelvin Banks to anchor the other tackle position in this year’s draft helps shore up the outside of the line, but running between the tackles looks like it will be rough going yet again.
And then we have the defense. This defense is, by any measure, elderly. The continuing presence of Cameron Jordan as a starter on this line is both a testament to the veteran’s motor and durability and also an acknowledgement that none of the Saints’ recent first-round picks to supplement the on-in-years pass rusher (Payton Turner, Marcus Davenport – both already on other teams) have panned out sufficiently to supplant him. At MLB, Demario Davis is still getting it done (the absolute gladiator hasn’t missed a game due to injury in his entire career, which stretches back to 2012) but he too is really gettin’ up there, as they say. The other LBs are mostly lowkey guys, with Pete Werner a relatively recognizable name but the others largely unfamiliar. The secondary looks a bit better, with the addition of Justin Reid from Kansas City a welcome replacement for the retired and underrated Tyrann Mathieu. But they lost starting CB Paulson Adebo to the Giants and S Will Harris to the Commanders, along with Willie Gay, yet another former Chief, to the Dolphins, who seem to have featured quite a lot in this list’s hither-and-thither of FA and trade transactions. They did do at least something to supplement their DL, which has lost a lot of stars over recent years (Trey Hendrickson, Shy Tuttle and Sheldon Rankins to name a few), by signing now-well-travelled pass rusher Chase Young to a three-year contract, but without a lot of other weapons-grade pocket pillagers to help him out, it’s a serious question as to whether this too won’t be a revisitation of the failures of Payton Turner and Marcus Davenport. This team could surprise, but I’m not holding my breath. Arch Manning pre-orders, anyone?
Palpably Unfair Facts:
The Saints’ D had a huge discrepancy in passing (second-stingiest TD %) and rushing (second-most yards surrendered) in 2024.
The current player with the most passing yards on the Saints is Taysom Hill. He’s been a tight end since 2022.
The Saints’ two actual quarterbacks with existing NFL experience both have a lower career passer rating than their head coach.