We’re back with the weekly preview series, looking at this sixth slate of the season! While one of the stand-alone games won’t anybody away, there’s a bunch of good ones throughout Sunday!
NFL Power Rankings after the first quarter of the ’21 season:
As I always do after the first four games of a season, I wanted to rank all 32 teams once again. Unfortunately, with the 17th game added, it’s not exactly a quarter of the season anymore and we’ll have to see how that impacts teams down the road, who may otherwise have already pre-determined their outcome for the full year, but I think at this point we have a pretty good indication of where almost everybody stands.
The thing I want to make very clear here is that these are my personal rankings and I judge what I’ve seen on the field, rather than what the records say. So there may a couple of 2-2 teams over others at 3-1 for example, as I don’t want to be a prisoner of the moment.
So looking at this whole list, I wanted to quickly share my general thought on the individual teams, aided by a couple of key statistics, but I’m more than willing to discuss certain rankings, maybe in comparison to others, in the comments or on my social media outlets (links in the top bar).
Now let’s go through this list:
NFL week 4 preview (2021-22):
We’re back with another weekly preview video, breaking down this week four slate with key stats, personnel and schematic matchups, before putting out my prediction for every single game. We have a bunch of divisional games and storylines to discuss!
NFL week 3 preview (2021/22):
After recapping every week of the NFL season in detail last year, I thought about switching things up and previewing the upcoming slate from now. Let me know what you think of the format and which of my picks agree/disagree with!
Three biggest takeaways from every NFL week one game:
The first of 18 NFL weeks is now in the rear-view mirror and while we don’t want to overreact to what we saw, there are some things that we were able to learn. Therefore – just like I did last year – I put together a list of three takeaways that I have coming out of all 16 games. Some of these may concern an individual player, a coach, a position group or a team as a whole. Obviously, there would more things to point out here, but for the purpose of this exercise, I chose the ones that were most apparent to me.
This is what I took away:
Predicting the entire 2021 NFL season:
We are exactly a week away from the NFL kickoff game between the Cowboys and Buccaneers. So as I do every year, I predicted the three top candidates for every major award, like MVP, Defensive Player of the Year and so on. To go along with that (since I’m a football psycho), I went through the whole schedule and decided on the winner of every single game, considering bye weeks, travel schedule and of course how the teams match up against each other. The result is a list of the seven playoff teams in each conference, a prediction of every postseason round and ultimately who I have winning the Super Bowl.
My Excel sheet, where I filled out the entire schedule is at the very end, if you want to check it out or see where I have your team finishing at, if they’re not listed among the playoff squads.
Here’s how I have the season shaking out:
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Fantasy diamonds for 2021:
We’re back once again with my fantasy diamonds piece, where I try to give you some names I think are undervalued based on current ADPs (average draft positions) across the three major platforms – NFL.com, ESPN & Yahoo.
I realized this wasn’t posted here until now, so R.I.P. J.K. Dobbins …
Power Rankings ahead of the 2021 NFL season:
Just three weeks away from the season-opener between the Cowboys and Buccaneers, I once again ranked all 32 NFL teams and split them into six different tiers, from Super Bowl contenders to – how I liked to call it – tanking teams. Putting this list together, I considered talent on the roster, how all the pieces fit together, the level of coaching and I project these teams to develop until the new year.
Of course, these will change over the course of the season, as injuries become a bigger factor, players improve/regress and teams get into a certain rhythm. Therefore I’ll come back to it, at the latest, mid-way through the 2021 season and move these groups up or down the board accordingly.
Here’s my list:
My NFL Top 100 players of 2021:
As I have done the last seven years and as the actual reason I started with my page, I have put together my personal list of the NFL’s Top 100. This was originally designed to be a ranking of the top 100 players in the league, regardless of position, for the upcoming season. And while this has more and more become a comparison of resumes and altered its criteria, in the spirit of what this was intended to be, I listed what I thought were the very best players, in relation to how good they are at their position coming into 2021. What I changed this year was actually putting ratings on these players – sort of Madden style – and one by one incorporating them into the list, while debating back and forth when multiple guys shared the same number.
There are six names to start off with, who didn’t qualify for my list. I believe they all deserve to be on it, but I just didn’t know where to put them, because of how long it’s been since we’ve seen them on the field, how often they’ve gotten hurt recently or because we just don’t know if/when we will see them play again.
I also added the 30 names that just missed the cut. So it’s almost a top 130, because I always have a tough time leaving those names off, but I feel pretty good about the ultimate rankings that I put together here.
For analysis, just click on the video, where I work my way from the bottom to the top!
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The official countdown premieres five days from now, but I’m filming this here on August 4th – just in case any players were to suffer an injury or some other news coming out, that would change the availability of certain players.
Key position battles at 2021 NFL training camps:
With training camps for all 32 NFL teams under way now, I thought it was time to go through every single roster once again and identify what I believe are some of the more key position battles, which I would classify as an actual competition, which could take all of preseason to play out potentially.
I tried to include one example for each position, without repeating teams, and at the end I will mention a few other competitions that I will have my eyes on.
