With Super Wildcard Weekend upon us, it was time for me to give you my full predictions, leading all the way up to Super Bowl LVII. I analyze all 14 teams, break down each matchups schematically and give my reasoning for who I think advances.
Of course the very first thing I saw once I finished recording were the news on Dolphins QB Tua Tagovailoa already being ruled out for this weekend. So a couple of my thoughts on him are irrelevant for now, but it doesn’t really change anything.
We’re just three weeks away from the regular season being wrapped up and as I went through the remaining schedule, there’s literally just one game left with zero playoff implications and two others that by all likelihood will have no impact at all. Therefore, I decided to break down a bunch of these different scenarios, by formulating five questions that are most prevalent as it pertains to the ultimate playoff picture, and handing out my predictions for how I believe things will play out.
Once again, I want to thank playoffpredictors.com, for helping me not go completely insane as I went through this exercise, working through all the different possibilities and having to go down the steps of tie-breaking procedures, depending on two or three teams having the same record, etc.
I decided to not make a separate point for “who will earn the final Wildcard berth in the AFC”, since the Chargers have a playoff probability of about 80+ percent and the Ravens sit above 98% right now. So really it should be a three-headed race between the AFC East teams not named Buffalo, and since I don’t have much belief in the Patriots, this will most likely come down the season finale between the Dolphins and Jets, as the atter would hold the head-to-head tiebreaker with a win and same record ultimately. A paragraph was enough to cover this and maybe I’ll do a full preview of that contest anyway, if things break the right way.
Now let’s get to my five actual questions:
After the first quarter of the season, we put together a power ranking of all 32 NFL teams. So once again, it felt appropriate to revisit my predictions for all the major awards and give you my top three names for each of them, as we’ve finished up the first half of the year now. Some of those I still look in very much the same way, while the rookies and coaches particularly are quite different than I expected
With the NFL adding a 17th game last season and therefore an 18th week, now the mid-way point has moved to past week nine. That means some of the players listed here have already played in each of those weeks, while others have only had the chance to participate in eight contests. Due to that, I will use per-game stats more frequently than totals, in order to allow us to make easier comparisons between names.
Here’s who I’d give each award if the season ended today:
Similar to what I did last week, with the top five college players at each position a month into the season, I wanted to take a look at the landscape of the NFL, only from a team perspective, ranking them from number one all the way to 32. Due to the addition of a 17th game last year, the quarter-pole isn’t quite exact, but I think this a great time to give a resumé on what we’ve seen so far.
These are not “power ratings”, but rather rankings based on my film study, putting performances into context and using (advanced) statistics to support my case. Therefore you will see teams with worse records or even those who have lost to others in their direct matchups, be higher up than those other squads.
This is what I came up with:
Week one of the 2022 season is in the books and there’s a lot to talk about. Once again, I wanted to come up with three statements/discussion points for all 16 games. However, I didn’t just write about the stuff I picked up whilst seeing some plays pop up, but rather due my excitement for the NFL being back, I committed myself to really digging into the tape and statistics of every contests. That’s why this is only coming out on the day week two is already about to start again, even if I wanted it to be published earlier.
Now, week one can be a giant liar and we have to take everything with a grain of salt in the grand scheme of things, but I feel pretty strongly about some of these takeaways and believe they can paint a good picture on the league’s current landscape. I’ll talk about individual players, position groups and teams as a whole, trying to understand what we saw in this first slate of games and what it means going forward.
Let’s dive into these games:
Less than a week away from the 2022 NFL season kickoff game between the Bills and Rams, it’s time for me to once again predict the entire year, going through every single award, presenting my playoff picture and projecting forward who will square off in Super Bowl LVII.
As far as the awards are concerned, I will go through my top three candidates for each honor, explaining why I believe they will receive votes, along with just listing a couple of honorable mentions at the end of each paragraph.
To determine playoff seeding, I actually had to go a step further and yet again predict all 272 games, work through tiebreakers to figure out how exactly these teams stack up and then put them in order, so I could ultimately pick my winners for each matchup, leading up the eventual NFC and AFC representatives in the big game at the end of the season in Arizona.
(I added the Excel sheet with ever single game picked at the very bottom, if you’re interested.)
Here’s how I believe things will shake out:
It’s that time of the year! Fantasy football drafts are fast approaching and everybody’s putting together their personal lists. So I wanted to give you some players at each position that I’ll be targeting based on their current average draft positions (ADPs).
Timestamps are in the video description for quarterbacks, running backs, wide receivers, tight-ends and defenses!
With the majority of NFL training camps starting in about a week and depth charts starting to be formed, I wanted to highlight some of the more intriguing battles for (mostly) starting positions and certain roles around the league. I tried to address every position at least once and cover a bunch of teams, discussing their options at those positions.
After spending months on evaluating college prospects, talking about what each team did in the draft and their overall roster building process, it’s time to discuss some of the tangible effects we may witness this upcoming season. So I wanted to look at all eight teams, who finished last inside their division in 2021, and rank them based on likelihood of ascending to the top of those groups.
I had a lot of fun with this exercise, because while I enjoy creating excitement for one franchise – and I was able to still do so for the teams in question – it’s also good to do think contrarily, try to poke holes in rosters/coaching staffs and lay out a path for why groups may underachieve. Therefore, I ultimately put together a short intro on the baseline situation, gave the other three teams a paragraph each to break down certain concerns they may have, and then finally got to the franchises in question here.
We spend so much time hyping up the established squads and neglect those closer to the bottom of the league – at least in terms of positives they may have going on for themselves – that this was supposed to be a change-up to a lot of the content out there.
(I have no idea how it happened, since the Jaguars obviously selected first overall in the draft, but somehow I ended up listing the Texans for the AFC South. Since they have a lower projected win total this season, that actually makes it a slightly bigger challenge anyway though.)
So let’s get into the breakdown:
In the second half of this series, we’re breaking down the one area for each AFC team, where they could still improve their roster upon, now that the main period of free agency and the draft are in the books, along with some of the crazy trades that ruled the early stages of the NFL offseason.
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