NFL Playoffs, Storylines around the NFL

New year’s resolutions for NFL playoff teams (2025):

We’ve reached the final week of the NFL season and the calendar year 2025. So, with the playoff participants at least largely established, while I’m generally not a big believer in them personally, I took the opportunity to come up with resolutions for each of the six teams who have already clinched a spot on either side of the bracket.

Since the Denver Broncos, Miami Dolphins and Cincinnati Bengals are still fighting for the final Wildcard berth in the AFC and the Atlanta Falcons could still take away the NFC South crown from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the task for them is to just take care of business (and hope for some help). Therefore, I didn’t give them their own paragraph.

For this exercise, I largely focused on personnel usage, schematic details and attitude in how teams should approach future matchups. Let’s dig in:



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NFL Power Rankings, Power Rankings

Power rankings heading into the final month of the 2024 NFL season:

At this point, 14 weeks of NFL action are in the books and we’re entering the home stretch. With 17 games, there’s no perfect solution mathematically, but all teams have now had their bye weeks and have four more contests remaining before the playoff picture is finalized.

Seven teams have already been eliminated while four have clinched playoff berths – and even division titles on the AFC side of things. That means five more sports are still up for grabs on either half of the bracket, although realistically, there is a pretty wide gap between the franchises who simply have to take care of business on their end compared to ten times “in the hunt” officially but sat below .500.

As always, these are power *rankings* rather than standings, meaning teams with worse records may be listed above others with slightly better results so far or who they’ve lost to directly. The purpose of this exercise is to project how many of the other 31 franchises each side would beat head-to-head right now and not weigh likelihood of securing a certain seed in the postseason or compare to results from months ago.

Let’s dig in:

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Uncategorized

Under-the-radar NFL studs (2024):

I forgot to post this here last week already – so please bear in mind that the numbers are now slightly different!

Even though the NFL is headlined by superstar players, often times it’s the guys who don’t get talked about a whole lot that make a big difference for their team. So I decided to highlight three names on offense and defense each, to give them they attention they deserve!

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NFL Film Breakdowns, What makes him so good

Who’s the NFL’s apex predator on the edge?

The Myles Garrett vs. T.J. Watt debate has long ongoing with passionate supporters on either side of it. Both have consistently been front-runners for Defensive Player of the Year honors and terrorized opposing quarterbacks. But who’s EDGE1 right now?

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NFL Quarterbacks, NFL Rookies, Player Rankings

Checking in with the rookie and sophomore NFL quarterbacks:

Over the last two drafts, ten quarterbacks were selected within the first 33 picks respectively and now that all but one of them have logged double-digit starts, I thought it was time to review what they’ve shown. I will provide my general thoughts, aided by some advanced metrics, and express my level of confidence in their long-time viability at the pro level.

Just to be clear, I won’t be discussing this year’s eighth and eighth overall selections Michael Penix Jr. (Falcons) and J.J. McCarthy (Vikings), who only saw very limited action in mop-up duty and unfortunately got hurt after a promising preseason showing respectively. Therefore, we’ll be looking at four guys from each of those draft classes.

Let’s dive in, going by chronological order of when they got selected:


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NFL Film Breakdowns

How the Cardinals have become NFL bullies

Following two 4-13 seasons and another slow start this year, the Arizona Cardinals have now won four straight games and sit atop the NFC West by half a game, with a manageable schedule the rest of the way. I’ll break down what they do schematically on offense and defense, along with how a bunch of their young players have stepped up!

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NFL award winners

Mid-season NFL awards (2024):

We’ve arrived at the mid-way point of the 2024 NFL season. Unlike most people, who still use week eight as the timestamp for that description, I think it should be pretty clear now that this is actually the exact moment to reflect with half of the 18 weeks down. Of course, only about half the league has had their bye weeks so far, so I will use per-game statistics rather than bring up total numbers for the most part, in order to be able to compare players more practically.

Just like I did in my full-season predictions, I’ll lay out the case for the top three candidates for each major AP NFL award. Then I also added my first- and second-team All-Pro teams if the year ended today, without further comment, since I will have discussed a large portion of the players listed and it would exceed the breadth of the exercise. Unfortunately, I had to exclude names like Aidan Hutchinson and Chris Godwin due to injuries.

Let’s get into it:


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Storylines around the NFL

Misery index seven weeks into the 2024 NFL season:

Unlike most weeks where one topic jumps out to me for a video or article I want to write or even there’s a point in the season where it makes sense to do power rankings or mid-season awards, there were several ways I considered going here. However, as I looked a broader view at the NFL landscape, my one grand thought I came away with is the state of affairs for the teams at the bottom of the standings and their gap to the rest of the league. In large part because I currently don’t see a path where those franchise massively turn things around and I don’t want to ignore them until draft season rolls around.

With some teams having already had a bye week, I didn’t want the cut-off to be two wins, but rather I chose to go with the nine squads at least three games below .500 – meaning 2-5 or worse. That also made sense considering the two teams that criteria excludes are the 2-4 Rams and Dolphins, whose campaigns have been heavily affected by injuries and still have some hope to turn things around.

To illustrate that rift between the franchises in question and those in legitimate position to compete for playoff spots ultimately, here’s a number to consider – and I understand of course that it has to exist for this make sense mathematically – but the nine teams I’m about to discuss have an average point differential of -53.1 for the year, meaning the median outcome for them every week is pretty much losing by just over a touchdown. I did not go back to recent years to really dive into how this stacks up, but it feels like quite an extreme line of demarcation – and that calculation includes the Saints’ clearly unsustainable start, where they led the league with a +62 point differential through the first two weeks.

So this isn’t meant to be a way for me to trash the bottom-third of the league, but rather trying take a step back and reflect on how we got here, by going through these teams. And maybe give an outlook for the near future, as we think about how things could be course-corrected.

We’ll go by record first and then alphabetical order:


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NFL Film Breakdowns

Pick 6: Best defensive plays of NFL week 6 (2024)

After focusing on the top quarterback plays last week, I decided to flip things around and highlight some of my favorite defensive moments from this past week!

We’ll go through the play-calls on both sides, discussing the rules/assignments for the individual pieces and how they ended up working in concert to win those downs as a unit!

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