Tag Archives: New England Patriots

Storylines around the NFL

Ten statistics that have defined the initial third of the 2025 NFL season:

Six weeks into the NFL season, you’ll hear a bunch of numbers thrown out there by different mainstream media shows but also niche podcasts, from basic yardage totals to hyper-specific metrics about efficiency by a certain unit, depending game situation, personnel grouping, and so much more.

So what I did once all games from this past slate were concluded, was to dive into a variety of outlets, play around with filters and compare statistics I found with the tape, to come up with what I believe are the ten most meaningful numbers, as I try to describe what this year has been about.

Just a quick disclaimer – these all concern teams that have earned equity to be deemed significant so far this year or at least came into the season as a franchise of note in regards to competing for the Super Bowl. So you’re not going to read about the Raiders’ atrocious run-blocking or the horrible splits for the winless Jets through the first three quarters compared to garbage time.

Let’s get into these:

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NFL Film Breakdowns, NFL Quarterbacks

Top five quarterback performances of NFL week five (2025)

Despite multiple highly talented quarterbacks either being on bye or currently injured, we got to witness excellent play at the position in several games. I went back to watch all of them and now want to highlight my personal top five, by breaking down their top plays!

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NFL Film Breakdowns

NFL Preseason 2025 standouts:

Two weeks of the preseason (plus the Hall of Fame game) are in the books and it’s time to shine some light on players who have popped so far! We’ll go through some clips for three players on offense and defense each!

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Fantasy Football

Fantasy diamonds for 2025:

Fantasy football season is upon us, and while I don’t label myself an expert in the field, this has become an annual tradition to lay out some of my favorite picks for where they’re going in drafts. And they’ve worked out pretty damn well for me over the years!

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NFL Offseason, NFL Predictions

NFL teams most likely to go from worst to first in 2025:

With how intent the NFL is on keeping an even playing field, we see a couple of teams turn things around every year. I ranked the eight teams who just finished last inside their division by how most likely to improve to number one!

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NFL Offseason

What does success look like for your favorite NFL team in 2025?

The following conversation goes against what the NFL’s shield is trying to sell the public at the start of every single season – the idea of all 32 teams having a chance to hoist the Lombardi Trophy at the end of it. As much as I love how they strive for parity, conceiving anything but achieving the ultimate goal as a failure would always leave all but one fan base dissatisfied. Generally, I sway away from asking questions like the one in the title, but due to several factors, I thought laying out which factors we should pay attention to and what constitutes a “successful campaign” was particularly interesting this year.

I’m fully aware that this by no means is an innovative concept, but looking back at this past season, I thought the gap between “the rich and the poor” was as large as ever once we got to around Thanksgiving. So I do believe it’s important to offer a frame of context for how we should probably view what these franchises are about to put onto the field once we kick things off. For some teams, simply measuring it by where the journey ends for them in 2025 is fair, yet for others, showing growth in certain areas may be even more crucial for their future outlook.

We’ll go through them all by division here!

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NFL Offseason

Most improved position groups across the 2025 NFL offseason:

We officially put a close to our coverage of the talent acquisition period of the calendar, as we’ve extensively discussed everything heading into and coming out of the NFL Draft, before weaving it into the rest of the roster construction in our month-long video series, where I broke down every single move and its meaning one division at a time.

Now, it’s time to draw conclusions one more time through a league-wide lens and identify the position groups that were most improved through free agency, trades and the draft. This is based on what each roster looked in week 18, not taking injuries into account, whether they affected who was actually able to be on the field at that time or those who may linger into the season.

And one more disclaimer – I always look at this exercise in more of a holistic sense. One singular player may give an entire unit a very different feel, but I try to point out those groups that at least made multiple meaningful acquisitions.

Here’s what I came up with:

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NFL Draft, NFL Offseason

AFC East Draft & Roster Review 2025

Closing out the first half of our divisional draft and roster review series with the Bills, Dolphins, Patriots and Jets. We’ll once again break down every single player they selected in the draft, their projected role on their new team and the overall construction of those rosters throughout this offseason!

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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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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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