We have pretty much reached the midseason point and it’s time to look at the prime candidates for all the major NFL awards. I didn’t crown an Offensive Player of the Year since I’m not a big fan of that award and since an offensive player takes home the MVP trophy every year anyway I only have players from that side of the ball up there.
Tag Archives: NFL
Post-week Six NFL Power Rankings:
Now six weeks into the season we have a pretty good picture of all 32 NFL teams. Sure, you never know what will happen over the rest of the year, but I tried to rank them by the way they’ve played so far and factor in how they’ve improved since the season started or what they can still get better at. As of right now the list looks like this:
Top 10 defenses in the NFL right now:
Defenses run the table right now. Other than Pittsburgh’s and Atlanta’s high-powered offenses it’s the defensive units that have carried the premier teams over the first five weeks. Sure those team’s offenses make the critical plays and Tom Brady will be the main figure in New England from now on, but the top defenses have made the winningest teams go. The criteria for what makes those units elite has changed over the past decade or two, since the focus has shifted more to being able to lock down receivers and mix coverages well, but I feel like being able to make offenses one-dimensional by shutting down the run has a lot of value.
Biggest surprises in the NFL so far:
Every NFL season brings new surprising underdog-stories and disappointments. After three weeks the standings look a lot different to how analysts predicted them to be and there have been a bunch of things going on around the league that not a lot of people saw coming. Here are some of them:
Predicting the entire 2016 NFL season:
The first game of the 2016 season is only two days away and so I tried to predict everything coming up, starting with the top three candidates for each NFL award, the seedings for both the AFC and NFC, the Super Bowl matchup and a couple of other predictions.
Who to look out for during the regular season:
Every year some players at the bottom of team’s rosters around the league emerge and that’s what this list is about. The idea is not to talk about Pro Bowlers who may take the next step, but rather about guys and position groups who many people don’t even know of. All of them take on different roles – some might crack the starting lineups while others make their impact as a rotational players while some units will be much better than they were just a year ago. With the preseason in full swing we got a first look at all of them.
NFL Top 100 Players of 2016:
To make this clear right away – I love the NFL Top 100 list. I watch it every single year and they have some great audio clips, commentary and game scenes. But I also often disagree with the rankings, especially because I feel like the players vote for the top performers from the previous season instead of trying to project who the best players during the upcoming season will be. Because of that I listed the most under- and overrated players on the countdown and who I think got snubbed a couple of weeks ago.
Additionally I make my own list every year. To not have to argue about the criteria I didn’t include guys who didn’t play a single snap during the season like Jordy Nelson and Joe Haden, while also excluding someone like Justin Houston, who I’m not sure about if he’ll be cleared to hit the field in 2016. And since Tom Brady will ‘more likely than not’ be suspended for the first four games of the season he also dropped out of my top ten. Other players who struggled with staying on the field in previous years might have also not made the cut.
So here’s my version of the Top 100:
Most under- and overrated players in the NFL Top 100 of 2016 and who got snubbed:
Every year over hundreds of players select their top 20 players in the league and the NFL Network compiles those lists to build the NFL Top 100. The first problem is that each player only lists his best 20, in which some of the guys at the bottom should never come up if everybody gave an objective opinion. The second one is that each player sees some on their fellow athletes twice during the season and some not at all and therefore they don’t get to see everybody on tape. So some mistakes are made and players get listed too high, too low or not at all. Here are my corrections:
Biggest roster holes in the NFL:
No roster in the NFL is perfect. Good players move on if they don’t get paid as much as they would like, draft picks don’t always meet expectations and there’s a cap limit because of which teams don’t have the money to invest equally in every position. So it’s not only the teams who select early in the draft who would like to upgrade some position groups. All of them would benefit from that. So here are the biggest holes on some of the NFL’s rosters.
Biggest winners and losers, steals and reaches from the 2016 NFL Draft
It was a very eventful and surprising three days in Chicago and all teams improved their roster. So now it’s time to look at who benefited most from the draft and who had to come out of it with some form of disappointment. The lists include both teams and players and at the end I put up the biggest steals on this year’s board and which players I thought didn’t present a good enough value at the spot they were taken. None of them are ranked in any particular order.
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