Preseason Sunday: With Opening Week Here, a Grab Bag of Football Topics, Notions, and Complaints

your humble host and off-ball linebacker

Folks, this coming Thursday, the NFL will inaugurate the regular season of the only sport I still follow with a battle between Saquon Barkley’s Philadelphia Eagles and Micah Parsons’s Kenny Clark’s Dallas Cowboys. This is a time of great joy for me, and it’s also famously one of the signs that fall is near, my favorite season and probably yours. It’s here where I tell you about one of my weirdest idiosyncrasies: I like regular season sports more than postseason. Really tense, high-leverage athletic contests definitely have a ton of drama, but if I’m being honest they often have too much drama. I often find that I can’t enjoy a really intense playoff game because my heart’s too far in my throat. I tend to have much more fun with a laidback early regular season game, where neither team is going to make or break based on the outcome. And so a week from today, opening week Sunday, might be my favorite sporting day of the year. Call me crazy! Crazy or not, I’m ready for the spectacle and the pageantry and all the fun.

Here’s some bits and bobs as we prepare for opening weekend.

• Last year I wrote a piece about how Lamar Jackson, the truly transcendent quarterback of the Baltimore Ravens, seems to end up dodging some of the heat that falls on other quarterbacks who underperform in the playoffs. (Dak Prescott of the Cowboys comes immediately to mind as a QB who certainly doesn’t get treated gently.) I said then, and still believe, that this is all an overcorrection from Jackson’s draft experience: he was doubted by many in a way that was clearly excessive given his obvious ability and, yes, in a way that had unfortunate racial undertones. Many in the football media have responded by being uncharacteristically defensive of Jackson, whose teams have consistently failed to match their regular season success with success in the playoffs. And I think, ultimately, that’s more condescending than anything else. Well, since then Jackson has lost a playoff game where some sportsbooks had them as a home favorite, largely thanks to two horrific turnovers he committed. Mark Andrews ended up taking all the blame thanks to dropping a pass for a two-point conversion, but that pass was actually late and behind him. So, here we go again: is Jackson, truly one of the greatest regular season players of all time, ready to level up and go get a championship? And if he doesn’t, will the media be willing to give him the same criticism it’s given to so many other quarterbacks?

• I am once again begging everyone in the football media to stop misusing regression to the mean. If you can ascribe a specific change in conditions to why a team might get better or worse in the direction of the mean relative to last year, it’s not regression to the mean!

• The Los Angeles Chargers drafting running back Omarion Hampton over wide receiver Matthew Golden makes me actively angry. It’s so senseless. Wide receiver is a position of greater need for the team. Wide receiver has greater positional value and is harder to come by, especially when you consider that they got almost a thousand yards in an injury-shortened season from JK Dobbins, who they signed off the trash heap. And while I’m the furthest thing from a draft guru, I actually like Golden more as a receiver prospect than I like Hampton as a running back. Makes no sense to me.

• The Buffalo Bills are a really strange case. They have an unusual problem: their defense collapses in the playoffs every year. If they just had bad defenses in general - like, say, the Cincinnati Bengals - then that would at least be an uncomplicated and understandable problem. The Bills haven’t had generally bad defenses in the regular season during the Josh Allen era; they’ve ranged from mediocre to pretty good. The trouble is that every year, they fall apart in the playoffs. In their last five postseason losses, they’ve given up 33.2 PPG; for context, the legendarily terrible 2020 Detroit Lions defense gave up 32.4 PPG. There’s lots of theories about this, largely involving the idea that coach Sean McDermott’s “bend don’t break” philosophy doesn’t work in the playoffs. They’ve certainly been hurt by a profound lack of talent on the defensive line and an inability to rush the passer. Well, they’ve made a lot of moves in free agency and the draft, but there’s still no big “wow” addition. If they can’t turn it around, Allen’s career might go down as a brutal lost opportunity for a historically cursed franchise.

• There’s now a truly bizarre culture war going on within NFL social media over Shadeur Sanders, the former University of Colorado quarterback who was projected by many to be a top-five pick in the most recent NFL draft but who ended up going to the Cleveland Browns in the fifth round. The Browns are of course always a mess, and their QB room is particularly messy: accused serial sex offender Deshaun Watson is still on the roster with a massive fully guaranteed contract but is out after tearing the same Achilles tendon multiple times; 41-year-old Joe Flacco still has a big arm and all the savvy in the world and moves like a 61-year-old; rookie Dillon Gabriel is talented but limited athletically and 5’10 tall; and then there’s Sanders, who’s one of the most accurate college quarterbacks of all time but who has profoundly average athleticism and bad instincts under pressure. Coming out of the preseason, Flacco is the starter, Gabriel the backup, and Sanders the number three. And there’s this whole bizarre Twitter narrative that Browns coach Kevin Stefanski is intentionally sabotaging Sanders, who is clearly better than the other two. Sometimes the specific accusation is that this is the product of racism. It’s really hard to know how to react to this; NFL teams are so ruthlessly interested in winning first that they’ll, well, trade for someone like Deshaun Watson. Why on earth would they sit on a superior QB out of spite? How could an NFL coach ever make playing time decisions based on race, given the makeup of the league? Sanders has talent and could eventually be a starter, but he was a fifth round pick and needs a lot of work. It honestly might be better for him than starting immediately on this terrible team.

• The NFL draft is notoriously hard to master; there’s just too much variability at play for drafting to be the science everyone wants it to be. Well, when it comes to new NFL head coaches, we actually have even less predictive information than we do for draft prospects. A draft pick brings college stats, combine results, and years of film against known competition; a coach, by contrast, may have worked under a great system, inherited talented rosters, or benefited from circumstances that are impossible to disentangle from his individual ability. Coordinators and assistants often get credit (or blame) for things that were as much about personnel or luck as scheme, and even “can’t-miss” coaching hires regularly fail once they’re in charge. The truth is we have no reliable metrics for projecting how good a coach will be in the uniquely demanding role of running an NFL franchise, and a lot of what determines success comes down to context no outsider can measure. That uncertainty should push us toward humility: we can speculate, but pretending to know how much a new coach will help his team is little more than guesswork. Why do I bring this up? Because of various storylines that have been a big deal this offseason. We don’t know how good Ben Johnson will be as a head coach, we don’t have any reason to think that Brian Schottenheimer will be a big drag on the Cowboys, we don’t know if the Lions will really struggle to overcome the loss of Johnson and former defensive coordinator Aaron Glenn…. I don’t trust predictions about those dynamics at all; there’s just too little information. We just have to wait and see.

• Isaiah Pacheco was hurt last year, and a lot of people are predicting a big bounce back year. It’s all a matter of expectations; I think Pacheco is solid but frequently treated as more of a difference maker than his actual production would indicate. His 2022 yards per carry of 4.9 was very strong, his 2023 sliding down to merely pretty good, and 2024 out-and-out bad. He’s never topped 1000 yards in a season despite serving as the feature back for three years. He doesn’t add much in the passing game, with a career best year in 2023 that saw him catch 44 balls but for only 244 yards. Perhaps he’ll come back and prove me wrong, but for now Pacheco is a question mark who has a better reputation than his production because he makes a loud noise when he runs directly into a tackler.

• Like many, I have no idea what the Miami Dolphins are doing. I admire the fact that they really went for it in the past several seasons, but now they’re paying the price for swinging and missing. They were already a talent-poor roster and they’ve now lost Jalen Ramsey, leaving them with the worst cornerbacks in the league, tight end Jonnu Smith, their most reliable receiving option last season, and Terron Armstead, their reliable-if-not-spectacular left tackle. Their once formidable pass rush was devastated by injuries to edges Jaelan Phillips and Bradley Chubb. Tyreek Hill is still wildly talented but is coming off of his worst season, is on the wrong side of 30, and remains a headcase. Tua Tagovailoa is the perfect fit for coach Mike McDaniel’s offense, but he can’t stay healthy and lacks mobility or superior arm talent. I still think Minkah Fitzpatrick has something left, Hill and Jaylen Waddle remain a top-five receiver duo in the league, and McDaniel is a wizard. But this team has no direction and at their best they topped out with first-round playoff losses when they were a significantly better team. I feel like ownership is gonna blow the whole thing up after this year, with Tagovailoa, McDaniel, and GM Chris Grier on the way out. And maybe McDaniel’s destiny is to just be an awesome offensive coordinator.

• How well will Kansas City QB Patrick Mahomes play? Mahomes has long been anointed by many as the eventual successor to Tom Brady as the greatest of all time, or even as having already surpassed him. And his team success has continued on a seemingly impossible pace. But in the past two years, the Chiefs offense has been hard to watch, with none of the routine explosive plays that made them so devastatingly effective in the first several years of Mahomes as a starter. Last year they ranked 27th in 40+ yard pass plays, Mahomes ranked 33rd(!) in % of passes that traveled 20 yards or more downfield and 25th out of 26th in average depth of target, which measures how aggressively a quarterback is attacking down the field. It’s hard to imagine this was the same quarterback who threw for six TDs and almost 500 yards in the classic offensive showcase against the Rams in 2018. And while Kansas City fans have had nothing to complain about given the team’s success, the past two years the multiple-time MVP winner Mahomes has played more like the 8th or so best quarterback in the league. So, to my mind the most interesting questions about the NFL this year are these: will Mahomes bounce back and firmly reestablish himself as the league’s best quarterback? Or will he struggle enough, and will the Chiefs lose enough, that people pump the breaks on anointing him the greatest?

And now the predictions.

NFC East Division Winner: Philadelphia Eagles
NFC North Division Winner: Detroit Lions
NFC South Division Winner: Tampa Bay Buccaneers
NFC West Division Winner: Seattle Seahawks
NFC Wildcard 1: San Francisco 49ers
NFC Wildcard 2: Green Bay Packers
NFC Wildcard 3: Atlanta Falcons

AFC East Division Winner: Buffalo Bills
AFC North Division Winner: Baltimore Ravens
AFC South Division Winner: Houston Texans
AFC West Division Winner: Denver Broncos
AFC Wildcard 1: Cincinnati Bengals
AFC Wildcard 2: Kansas City Chiefs
AFC Wildcard 3: Oakland Raiders

NFC #1 Seed: Detroit Lions
AFC #1 Seed: Buffalo Bills

NFC Champion: Tampa Bay Buccaneers
AFC Champion: Buffalo Bills
Super Bowl LX: Bills 35, Buccaneers 17
Super Bowl MVP: Josh Allen

MVP: Joe Burrow, Cincinnati Bengals
Offensive Player of the Year: Bijan Robinson, RB, Atlanta Falcons
Defensive Player of the Year: Will Anderson, EDGE, Houston Texans
Offensive Rookie of the Year: Tetairoa McMillan, WR, Carolina Panthers
Defensive Rookie of the Year: Abdul Carter, EDGE, New York Giants
Comeback Player of the Year: Aaron Rodgers, QB, Pittsburgh Steelers
Coach of the Year: Dan Campbell, Detroit Lions