I have no idea whether or not Trent Reznor enjoys the sport of American football. I did some half-assed research in an attempt to suss out an informed answer; the closest I came was this repost of a 2005 interview with Metal Hammer in which Reznor said of his high school experience, “I wasn’t praised for throwing a football or whatever.” I should not be surprised to see him regard the sport with dismissive contempt. In the popular conception, the jingoistic theatrics of football and Reznor’s cathartic blasts of distorted DX7 are considered strange bedfellows at best, mutually exclusive ends of the continuum of teenage interest at worst.
But, regardless of whether Reznor appreciates football at all, in understanding the entertainment appeal of his own music, he also understands the entertainment appeal of the National Football League. Every September, the NFL asks us if we’re ready to have a good time, just like and when all of us football fans cheer in affirmation – whether at a stadium at home – the league gets our heads right with the quickness. Ready to party? Have fun? Well that was the last guys. Wrong fucking league. We’re here to have a bad time.
I’m not pointing this out to shit on the league’s prized product. All I’m saying is that we don’t watch NFL football because it’s fun, pleasant, life-affirming, or otherwise conducive to generating or reflecting positive emotions. Sure, we all thrill to see a deep completion down the sideline or a 70-yard touchdown run or quarterback make a daring escape from multiple oncoming pass rushers while pointing his receiver open before slinging the rock to the newly open guy for a big play microseconds before getting shoved to the ground.
But these plays are all highlights. Outside of these highlights, football is often an anticlimactic slog, chock full of incompletions, stuffed runs, special teams blunders, and injuries. This is to say nothing of the league’s rules and officiating, who are a constant threat to ruin even the most spirited contest. Any game is liable to be buried under a mountain of holding calls, sideline deliberations, and interminable replay reviews. Not one of these is any fun whatsoever, and most games contain all of them to some degree or another. And, unless you’re lucky enough to be a fan of one specific team out of 32 possibilities, your season is going to end in disappointment.
We don’t watch the NFL because it’s fun, we watch the NFL because it’s compelling. Every cliché deployed in describing the experience of the sport is a finely calibrated, precision-engineered component in the league’s FOMO superconductor. If every game is important, every fan is pressured to see as many games as possible, especially since bad teams can and do beat even the best teams from time to time. Since so many games remain undecided until the final seconds, it’s hard to give up on all but the most hideous blowouts. And every year, certain teams and players transcend all of this with their play, letting the view experience a multitude of unforeseen and unforeseeable triumphs. All of this makes it hard to look away from pro football, but none of this is fun in the conventional sense.
This is true even of the triumphs. As every fan of a team knows, the moments before victory is secured are spent in unrelenting emotional agony, with spectators both at home and at the stadium left with no recourse except screaming and/or stewing in their own rising blood pressure and brewing bubble guts. Why are we like this? Because we’ve all seen enough football to know that victory is the exception, not the rule. We celebrate victory because it is the rarer thing, and it makes all the suffering worth it (unless you’re an Eagles fan, in which case suffering is the reward and victory leaves you unsure of what to do with hands/used D-cell batteries).
There’s no rational basis for being excited about any of this shit. Sure, at least one team or another will rocket straight out of the sewer to the top of the standings, but even more teams will fall short of expectation; note that last season’s Cinderella stories are particularly vulnerable to this. The same is true at the level of individual players. Your favorite superstar will either play slightly worse than previous season or fall off a cliff entirely. The highly touted rookie who left all college opposition an irradiated wreck just last autumn is, in all likelihood, gonna play like a fucking rookie, and draw enervating concern trolling from the football punditry industrial complex.
In short, the optimistic case for any given football team’s success is plainly irrational for all but the most entrenched of the league’s superpowers, and even for that very short list of teams (I count four heading into this year, but I could be talked out of at least two of them) optimism remains a non-actionable disposition from the perspective of process-based decision making. In my short but oddly successful NFL soothsaying career, I’ve found that a bet that is disrespectful to the hard work put in by a team’s players, coaching staff, and front office is all too often a wise one. Part of me hates being such a hater, but most of me is happy to have found a way to be consistently correct about something for once, psychological consequences be damned.
This preview of the coming NFL season is written for the fans that have internalized reflexive pessimism. If you want your NFL previews to deploy mountains and mountains of statistical and game film-based evidence in service of blowing sunshine up your ass, look elsewhere. If you need your NFL previews to talk you down from the ledge of toxic positivity so that your head’s right when your team inevitably shits the bed, you came to the right place.
Before I begin, I would like to note two things. First off, the structure of this season preview is the same as it ever was. I will provide my predicted final standings for each division, in descending order. Division champions will be listed on top, in bold, and my predicted Wild Card teams will be marked with an asterisk(*). My hot takes for each division will accompany these predictions; just like last year, I will only talk about teams if I have a real opinion I want to share with everyone. I didn’t have time to learn about every team in detail or even form a cogent opinion on all of them, and I have no reason to pretend otherwise.
Second, while individual pieces of news are sourced with hyperlinks, I must credit the research sources that have informed all of the following takes. Once again, an unquantifiable surfeit of kudos goes to Aaron Schatz and everyone else who worked on this year’s FTN Almanac, which is an ever-indispensable resource for anyone who wants to know anything about football. I cannot recommend you purchase and peruse this essential document for yourself. I also recommend you all subscribe to Too Deep Zone, the Substack of the great writer (and longtime Schatz lieutenant) Mike Tanier, whose hardened football cynicism I aspire to and openly envy.
I would also like to credit my favorite football podcasts, particularly The Domonique Foxworth Show, The Athletic Football Show, and The Mina Kimes Show. All of the above books, Substacks, and shows are well worth your time, and it’s quite possible that I stole opinions from them without even realizing it. (If you are cool enough to be one of the purveyors of these sources, found your way over here somehow, and feel that I have appropriated your work without sufficient credit, please contact me at robsblogcomments@gmail.com and let me know how I can set it right.)
All images are my own screen captures, taken from Tecmo Super Bowl ’25 Hardtype. Please ignore the counting stats for each player; I’ve got the Vikings at 7-2 and couldn’t bear to reset the entire season. Thank you for your understanding [ducks from oncoming bottle].
Now sit down for some football; it’s gonna suck. Can’t wait.
*****
Jump to a Division: AFC East / AFC South / AFC West / AFC North / NFC East / NFC South / NFC West / NFC North
*****
AFC East
Buffalo Bills
New England Patriots
Miami Dolphins
New York Jets
For over twenty years, the AFC East’s occasional flirtations with competitive intrigue have been just that: infinitesimally brief and ephemeral gestures towards romantic possibility that take form only to be crushed under the weight of the reigning hegemon’s concrete colossus heels. In the seasons just after the transfer of power from the Patriots to the Bills, it did seem as though the Dolphins were ready to challenge both the Bills and our prevailing notions of how this division does business. Now, the vibes in South Beach are in the toilet. Mike McDaniel clearly understands he is tumbling into the open mass grave that is the final resting place of countless failed young schemelords before him, without a single playoff win or division title to show for it, and his team is following his lead. The lessons here are twofold and eternal. The first is that early success in football cannot be trusted until it demonstrates its staying power. The second is that a team that is built to win nine games each year cannot transcend those expectations; it can only meet them briefly before inevitably falling short of them.
The Patriots’ listing in second place should not be taken as an endorsement of their strategy, nor of their medium-to-long term prospects. It’s just that they are the only other team in this lot capable of appearing serious and put together, even if we all know better. Even if you don’t consider Mike Vrabel a disciple of Belichick-ism, his management style is clearly that of the classic Defensive Tyrant. Give him a talented roster and he may go so far as to snag (and then squander) home field advantage, even amidst massive injuries. Give him an untalented roster and he’ll squeeze six hideous wins out of them come hell or high water, but to no long-term benefit. This is not a talented roster. Take it from a Vikings fan when I say a commitment to Garrett Bradbury is a commitment to starting over at quarterback in a couple of years. Whether the doddering old handjob enthusiast in the owner’s box will ever summon the industry and imagination to start over everywhere else too remains a question we all know the answer to.
AFC South
Jacksonville Jaguars
Houston Texans
Tennessee Titans
Indianapolis Colts
Listen, I don’t want to write about this sorry division, and you don’t want to read about it. So instead, the oncoming rush of unmarketable, contemptuous anarchy that is the future of Gross Football Lunch brings you:
Five Great Ozzy Osbourne Performances
- Black Sabbath (from Black Sabbath, 1970): If you want to be a great singer but you don’t have a great singing voice in the conventional sense, you need to have two things. First, you need to be able to use your voice in service of some kind of character; if you can’t be an opera diva on the stage, the next best thing is to be an actor on the, uh…stage. Second, your vocal timbre needs to be unique. Everyone who has ever heard you sing must be able to tell it’s you singing immediately upon hearing you sing again. Ozzy was, of course, incredibly gifted in both respects, and on this, the first track of the first Sabbath album, he demonstrates total command of these talents. Listen to him sell the fear and terror!
- Looking For Today (from Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, 1973): The best way to listen to Sabbath Bloody Sabbath is alone, in the dark, with headphones on and the volume cranked to the absolute maximum, while in the midst of a particularly crippling depressive episode. Get to the second to last track under these conditions and you’ll be stabbed in the heart by this gem of a mental health jam. Ozzy’s plaintive but mournful urging towards trying to put yourself together and make something, anything of your life will get you right in the sad, antisocial feels.
- Megalomania (from Sabotage, 1975): I could put the entirety of Sabotage on this list if I wanted to, but I’ve chosen to highlight the album’s centerpiece, a nine-minute doom trudge into the emotional heart of a band at war with their own management while also on entirely too many drugs to function, and having about as much fun as you’d think doing so. Here, Ozzy channels squishy vulnerability, inchoate anger, and imperial Satanic menace seemingly all at once.
- Flying High Again (from Diary of a Madman, 1981): Ozzy’s public persona was a high wire act, as he had to incite lucrative moral panic while also opening himself up as a goofball who just wants to have a good time. This track leans into this latter component with impish, childlike glee while still nodding to the former; remember, back then possession of any quantity could land you in federal, which is unthinkable these days. I don’t even live in a legal state but I can still pick up a 6-pack of delta 9s on my way home from getting groceries.
- Secret Loser (from The Ultimate Sin, 1986): Vulnerability is the connective tissue of this list, so let’s bring it home with a deep cut of a bubblegum bop that marries uptempo party metal to its bummed out lyrical content with Ramones-level skill. As a song, it’s underappreciated, with an undeniably propulsive chorus hook. As the second song of an otherwise stadium-sized collection released at the height of if you ain’t first, you’re last shitbaggery, it’s delightful subversion.
Okay fine, real quick for accountability’s sake: I should really take the Texans here, but their god-awful, self sabotaging offensive line from last year only got worse(!) in the offseason, to a degree that can and will sink their whole campaign. The Jags are the only other team that could conceivably crack seven or eight wins, so they’re stuck with the bag.
AFC West
Kansas City Chiefs
Denver Broncos*
Los Angeles Chargers*
Las Vegas Raiders
To present football takes publicly is to doom oneself to being wrong publicly, in ways both foreseeable and not. This time last year, I was too busy spit-chuckling about drafting Bo Nix in the first round to see the Broncos coming. After all, there’s not much even an offensive mastermind like Sean Payton can do with an accurate but relatively weak-armed quarterback. See, when it’s written down like that, getting dismissive sounds pretty ridiculous, doesn’t it? The potential success of Nix’s quest for professional viability, when combined with our shared universal love for free agent acquisition Dre Greenlaw, The People’s Linebacker, has everyone who is bored to death of the Chiefs (so, everyone) keeping a close eye on the Broncos in anticipation of a theoretically possible division title upset.
That’s balderdash, of course. The Broncos are good enough to be an obvious Wild Card, but the king stay the king and all that. I have not done any research on the Chiefs for this piece; when you need to crank out eight division’s worth of blurbs while still making time for ignoring the 4-year-old putting the 2-year-old in the cobra clutch in favor of sneaking in a few cheeky deaths in Dark Souls II, you need to make a some business decisions. Any discussion of wide receivers or offensive line upgrades is rendered folly, at least as far as the regular season is concerned. The Chiefs will win the division and advance to the AFC Championship at minimum until proven otherwise.
And it’s a good thing, too, otherwise I would find this division a nightmare to handicap. If you want to make NFL predictions but have too much dignity to pay attention to each team’s offseason transactions, all you need to do is yourself the following two questions: Is the coach good? Is the quarterback good? Answer Yes, No, or Maybe to both questions for all 32 teams, and you’re as ready as you need to be to pencil in regular season results. All four coaches in the AFC West are good and boast proven track records, and all of the quarterbacks are at least serviceable. If the Chiefs weren’t so busy making the league so damn boring and pointless for the rest of us, I would be in a real bind.
I have too much lingering respect for Pete Carroll to dismiss the Raiders out of hand, but I can find no rational basis for believing they will be anything more than a mediocre tough out. I am also skeptical of the Culture Change coaching hire; if changing the culture could fix the Raiders, they would have been fixed decades ago. The Chargers have a more obvious shot at relevance, however, I am only giving them a Wild Card because I have to give out three of them. The AFC has three elite teams, one reasonably comfortable Wild Card contender, and 12 jobbers, including the entire AFC South. The Chargers have a good but not great quarterback in Justin Herbert, a good right tackle, a really good slot receiver, an aging, middling deep threat receiver who retired at the start of camp, an awesome left tackle who is already lost for the season, and a defense chock full of old guys and no-names. In a just world with a sensible amount of playoff slots, that would not be enough. No points awarded for identifying the load bearing phrase in the previous sentence.\
AFC North
Baltimore Ravens
Cincinnati Bengals*
Pittsburgh Steelers
Cleveland Browns
While we’re on the subject of damning with faint praise, last season gave us all a glimpse at the present and near future of Cincinnati Bengals football, as not even Joe Burrow at his white-hot best could overcome a slow start and a defense that couldn’t stop a toddler learning to ride a tricycle. When was the last time a truly great quarterback was held back (as in, out of the playoffs entirely) by a truly putrid defense? Now that the league has nurtured pass-first play to maturity, the very idea seems all but impossible. Lou Anarumo, once hailed as a genius for crafting an adequate defense out of balsa wood and painter’s tape, has been dismissed for not doing the same once the talent got even worse. Trey Hendrickson’s return to the team is hardly a bad thing, but it’s not an improvement over last year. Any hopes for an immediate turnaround are just that.
Which is a real shame, since the Ravens are the most historically vulnerable of the AFC’s Big Three. Lamar Jackson has stayed healthy the past couple of seasons, but last year they dropped games to both the Browns (forgivable, since no division rivalry game is ever a given) and the Raiders (neither explicable nor forgivable) and also lost to the eventual champion Eagles at home, in a game that wasn’t a fraction as close as its final score suggests. If the Bengals got their act together on defense (and didn’t take September off for a change), they could make a real push. But alas, that was the case last year too, and the Bengals did neither. Not enough has changed to justify any belief things will turn out differently. I would spare a minute for the Steelers and their awful vibes, but let’s face it, we’re all gonna hear about them a lot, and entirely against our individual and collective wills. Therefore, I will spare you this indignity.
NFC East
Philadelphia Eagles
Washington Commanders*
Dallas Cowboys
New York Giants
Going chalk is boring and it sucks, but what else can I do? The Cowboys and Giants are both deeply unserious football operations, but the Cowboys at least have some big name roster talent. The Giants, by contrast, have one good receiver and a theoretically decent pass rush, but you can’t win if you can’t score. And don’t come at me with Jaxson Dart optimism; just two years ago, fucking Kenny Pickett was generating the same kind of hype for putting together nice tape in meaningless games. My point is the bottom of this division in completely locked in before the season even starts.
That leaves the division up for grabs between the Eagles and the Commies. While I’m willing to listen to arguments in favor of Washington (and wouldn’t be too surprised to see them take the title), it is an ironbound law of pessimistic football prediction that a true football pessimist must see a team do it more than once before crowning said team. They also have many more questions to answer than the Eagles, who bring most of their championship team back for another go, minus a quality defensive piece or overrated offensive coordinator here and there.
But I’m getting sidetracked, as it’s worth digging a bit into those questions the Commanders’ roster provokes. For starters, Jayden Daniels may be entering his second season, but this is not a young roster full of up-and-comers. On the contrary, it is old as hell, ranking 6th in snap-weighted age in 2024, per the FTN Almanac. I can’t imagine bringing in Laremy Tunsil (31) and Deebo Samuel (29) is going to help with that, nor do I see much cause for excitement with Deebo’s arrival; he was available for a 5th round pick for a reason. And did you know that Terry McLaurin turns 30 in September? Where does the time even go?
The defense is also a concern, with a middling to maybe slightly above average pass rush and a leaky back end, headlined by Marshon Lattimore (who was horrendous after arriving via trade last season) and Bobby Wagner, who no doubt spent his veteran rest days handing out Werther’s Originals to anyone who will let him complain about how the game he loved died after the 1978 rule changes. And, while Jayden Daniels is as advertised, let us not forget that quarterback progress is hardly linear. If you don’t believe me, hop in a time machine and see what people were saying about C.J. Stroud this time last year. This is by no means a perfect comparison, but I don’t intend it as one. It’s merely a reminder that lots of things can go wrong with a second year quarterback, regardless of what Disco Stu would have you believe.
NFC South
Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Carolina Panthers
Atlanta Falcons
New Orleans Saints
Oh Christ, not this again. It’s been a couple of decades since the last realignment, but what could the league have been thinking in creating two South divisions? Hindsight is 20/20 and all, but surely someone in the league office could have figured that someday Peyton Manning would retire and the Falcons and Saints would both suck again, and future generations would be stuck with not one but two designated pro football backwaters. Again, I freely admit that I don’t want to write about this division, but alas, there aren’t any further Black Sabbath album tracks I care to blurb about. I’m going to have to instead blurb about crushingly sad football, and, in exchange for your tolerance of this, I promise to keep my pseudo-informed opinions as pithy as possible. Deal?
The Buccaneers seem content just doing their thing at this point, and you can join the rest of us in penciling them in for a fifth consecutive division title as long as you don’t even think of calling them contenders. I have the Panthers in second mostly because gassing up the Panthers despite knowing what a disaster David Tepper’s stewardship has been remains my dumbest and most reviled bit, and where would I be as a writer if I weren’t willing to show total contempt for my audience?
It is also an admonishment that you are not take the Falcons seriously. Every year, assorted football enthusiasts whose brains have been reduced to demiglace by the Dunning-Kruger superconductor that is fantasy football see that the Falcons have a great running back and a pretty good wide receiver and, having decided that if the Bucs were actually good, they would have either emerged as actual contenders or gone on a miracle playoff run with all of their opportunities, pencil Atlanta in for 10 wins and a home playoff game. Note that this ignores Tampa’s superior roster at every position except at running back; since the discourse can only regard teams as contenders, frauds, or bottom feeders, it regards a perennial mid-tier playoff team as a Lovecraftian aberration that the human mind cannot comprehend.
NFC West
San Francisco 49ers
Los Angeles Rams
Seattle Seahawks
Arizona Cardinals
Football prognosticators of all temperaments are in a constant bind. Anyone who has followed the league for any length of time knows that every season is full of surprises. Therefore, relying solely on the previous season’s results to determine the upcoming season’s results is an obvious mistake. But rational decisions making still requires evidence, and offseason football coverage is not evidence. Rather, it is the sludgy, radioactive byproduct of the football punditry industrial complex. Therefore, last season’s results are the best evidence available, despite its inherent limitations.
I say this because, while it is justifiably easy to predict that the AFC South as the league’s worst division once again, a responsible soothsayer must attempt to buck last year’s trends, and the NFC West might be a complete trainwreck. None of the teams inspire a lick of confidence. I would have loved to go chalk and declare victory for the Rams, but the phrase “rejuvenation chamber” does not engender trust in the spinal health of a 37-year-old quarterback. Perhaps the Rams are loaded enough in their defensive front to survive a swooning Stafford. Perhaps I will wake up in the morning on a private jet to Tenerife. Who can say, really?
The Seahawks are hoping Sam Darnold can keep his magic from last fall going but seem to be betting that a terrible interior offensive line was so instrumental to his success that he won’t even need a functional receiving corps, let alone a good one. I’m sick to death of fooling myself into picking the Cardinals to win anything; if the Cardinals were capable of winning, they wouldn’t be the Cardinals, would they? This leaves me stuck with the 49ers, a proposition that I can only justify under the flimsiest pretexts. Speaking of which, did you know the 49ers were in the Super Bowl as recently as two seasons ago? Surely no team could fall off for good so quickly, catastrophic injury report be damned.
NFC North
Minnesota Vikings
Detroit Lions*
Green Bay Packers*
Chicago Bears
Listen, I know this is a shameless homer pick, but if the NFC North can buck decades of tradition and become impossible to predict, why can’t I dream a little? And, to be fair, the Vikings appear to have their most loaded roster since 2009. In addition to the team’s enviable collection of backs and receivers (hold this thought), the offensive line might actually be good for the first time in well over a decade. The defense may have questions in the secondary, but the Brian Flores has done more than enough to earn my trust. Flores will get the most he can out of his DBs; the pass rush will make coverage easy with chilling frequency. The Vikings’ on-paper defensive talent has been a question as long as Flores has been DC, and he keeps answering it.
That said, no one knows what to expect from J.J. McCarthy and, even if one were to assume a baseline of competence under center (which is not guaranteed!), that vaunted skill position group is entering the season in shambles. Jordan Addison is suspended for the first three games, third receiver Jalen Nailor is nursing a hand injury of unclear severity, and Justin Jefferson is coming off of a hamstring injury that absolutely is not going to linger into the season, and how dare you suggest otherwise. But Adam Thielen is back to give the vibes a boost (if not the production), so the franchise is just one Diggs away from getting the band back together, give or take a Kyle Rudolph. And really, Kwesi Adofo-Mensah should be on the phone with the Pats day and night to bring Diggs home. If you’re also a Vikings fan and find the very idea wasteful and distasteful, ask yourself this: Do you wanna see the team manage its resources responsibly on the way to falling just short of a Super Bowl yet again, or do you wanna see some fucking DINGERS?
But until I successfully will Four Deep into reality, I fully expect the Vikings to run the ball at the highest rate of Kevin O’Connell’s tenure. The revamped interior line is cause for optimism on the ground, but the team has not been able to run the ball consistently since Dalvin Cook’s heyday, so I’ll be a good pessimist and remain skeptical that KOC can design an effective run game until he shows me otherwise. Again, you can’t win if you can’t score, and any prolonged offensive struggle will leave the Vikings struggling to stay afloat in the division. And ultimately, it is irresponsible to assume McCarthy will be above replacement level – let alone a respectable to above average starter – without evidence. Put all of this together, and it becomes impossible to make a rational, evidence-based, positive case for the Vikings.
So instead, I’m going to build an emotional, vibes-based, negative case against the rest of the division, and point out why all three are destined to fail. Right off the bat, let’s all take a moment to write off the Bears, shall we? Just like the rest of the league’s bottom quartile, the Bears have been so bad for so long that I can’t predict any success for them until they’ve won a few division titles and/or playoff games. Ben Johnson’s arrival at head coach does not and cannot move me from this position. If being a good offensive playcaller were the only prerequisite for being a good head coach, the open mass grave of failed young schemelords wouldn’t be so overstuffed that it putrefies every source of fresh water within a 50-mile radius.
Johnson has his work cut out for him, as Ryan Poles’ and George McCaskey’s collective incompetence and general nincompoopery have stuck Johnson with a quarterback who has one season to show two seasons’ worth of development and a deeply impatient fan base nestled in a huge media market. Johnson doesn’t have to take the Bears to the playoffs this year per se, but he has to remove all doubt that Caleb Williams is The Guy. If Williams falls short, he will enter next season with nothing to do but polish his resume for a career as a backup somewhere else, just like Justin Fields in 2023. And two years after that, Johnson’s replacement is going to a year behind in developing Williams’ replacement, who was drafted by Poles’ replacement, as is the Bears way.
Speaking of Ben Johnson, both he and his former defensive counterpart Aaron Glenn have left the Detroit Lions to give the club its first case of brain drain in who knows how long. Despite the fact that the Lions have never even had two coordinators worth poaching at the same time, this is not why I’m down on the Lions. If this were any other franchise, I would give Campbell and Holmes the benefit of the doubt. Good teams suffer from brain drain all the time, but most of them navigate it adequately enough. The most recent and prominent exception is the 2023 Eagles, but that just tells me that in order to find good replacement coordinators, all you gotta do is be slightly more savvy than Nick Sirianni, and how hard can that be?
No, I’m down on the Lions because of center Frank Ragnow’s retirement ($) and guard Kevin Zeitler’s departure, full stop. The Lions’ superb offensive line has been the engine of their new-found fortune, and while it’s not reasonable to expect that line to collapse entirely because of two departures, it’s more than fair to expect a drop-off. And if the line drops off, the run game will be less efficient and Jared Goff’s erratic play under pressure will be on more prominent display. In a less competitive division, this wouldn’t be enough to doubt a repeat title, but all four of these teams are built to draw each other’s blood. Even a small fall off – a missed stunt here, a defensive stonewalling on fourth and inches there – could end up making a huge difference in the final standings.
Fortunately, the Green Bay Packers are not in position to capitalize on a Lions swoon of any size, because the organization refuses to understand how the balance of power has shifted around them. For almost 30 years, the Packers have ruled the NFC North (and Central!) with an iron fist. Yes, the Bears and Vikings (and Bucs!) each grabbed a few division titles here and there in that stretch, but in the fullness of time those seasons were mere blips. The Packers knew they had Brett Favre and/or Aaron Rodgers and their rivals didn’t, which meant they knew they were likely to get a playoff berth just about every year, which meant that they didn’t need to take many roster-building risks. And, to be fair, this was justifiable for most of this time period. Why take big swings in free agency or trade away picks for veterans when you can punch a playoff ticket for your All-World quarterback without them? Are you trying to tell me the mid-2010s version of Aaron Rodgers can’t get a four-game hot streak going?
This approach was easy to mock, but hard to truly write off. Pencil in the Favre/Rodgers Packers for however many extra Lombardis you want, but the fact of the matter remains that no amount of trade market aggression and free agency spending can guarantee a ring, and the salary cap has always done a masterful job of smiting teams that spend against it frivolously. I’m not saying this is a good team building strategy, mind you, but when you’re building a roster around the only elite quarterback in the entire Upper Midwest, it’s a logical one.
But if this low risk, draft and develop philosophy limited the Packers’ potential even with a great quarterback and weak opposition, how far can it take them when their quarterback is merely above average and the entire division is a World Cup-style Group of Death? The Packers have spent most of the last three decades building 10 to 11-win teams and hoping that luck and the Divine Right of Kings will provide them with 12 to 13-win records, and stuck to that process because 10 to 11 wins almost guaranteed them a home playoff game. Now they’ve once again built a 10 to 11-win team, but 10 or 11 wins is no longer good enough. They need luck and plenty of it to make a serious play for the division – let alone Super Bowl contention – because Jordan Love is a Win With quarterback and not a Win Because Of quarterback, and there’s not enough firepower elsewhere to compensate.
Still, this is a good football team and should have no trouble snagging a Wild Card. Improve this team’s pass rush and get Love a real receiving threat on the outside, and this team is an actual contender. The Packers did neither, instead betting that the same developmental leap they missed out on last year will work out this year. They’re sticking to their same process, but expecting different results. Top wideouts don’t grow on trees, but a team in the Packers’ position should be ready and willing to push their chips in and trade for an immediate difference maker. Instead, they’re behaving like every other overcautious sucker at every poker table in history and hanging on to as many chips as they can while the blinds slowly whittle their pile away. It’s a good thing I hate the Packers guts, otherwise this would all make me quite upset! Welcome back to competition, Packers! It sucks here, you’re gonna hate it.
Well, alright then! It’s the evening of Thursday, August 28th, I’ve just finished my final edits, and absolutely no blockbuster trades for A-List superstars can invalidate all the mean things I said about my most hated team, the Green Bay Packers.
Oh hey, the group chat is lighting up, let me just check on that real quick. What’s that you say?
…
…
…
GOD FUCKING DAMNIT, ARE YOU FUCKING JOKING!?!? FUCK!
Very well then.
NFC North (Revised)
Green Bay Packers
Minnesota Vikings*
Detroit Lions*
Chicago Bears
*****
This concludes the Pessimist’s Guide to the 2025-26 NFL Season! Thank you for joining me journey through this wilderness of hot takes. I deeply appreciate each and every one of you who sent me a click, regardless of whether you read every word, scrolled to your team’s division and nothing else, or fled immediately in shame, terror, and disgust.
Gross Football Lunch is returning for the season starting on Thursday, September 4th with the Week 1 Confidence Pool. This season, I’m going to be making changes to the format meant to preserve my sanity, and I will go over all of it in the Week 1 column. Until then, have a great Labor Day weekend!
Rob Writes About Whatever 
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