On Monday, I was an optimist, picking five NFL teams I expect to improve in 2026. Today, unfortunately, we hit the opposite side of the ledger. I know not to check my mentions on social media for a few days after this annual column, and I take a little longer to answer those texts from people inside the league. "Did you really have to pick us?" ... there's never a good response.
Don't blame me. I don't have any vested interest or desire to see any team do poorly or struggle. In a zero-sum league, though, five teams improving means that five teams have to decline. And using data that has helped point toward future downswings, I will identify five teams that are likely to win fewer games in 2026.
Since 2017, the decline column has gone 34-9 at picking teams that will fall short of their win total from the previous season, including an adjustment for the shift from 16 games to 17 per season. The improve/decline columns overall are 69-17 (.802) during that span, with a 50-36 mark (.581) against the preseason over-unders archived on Pro-Football-Reference.com. The average decline amounts to about 3.4 wins per 17 games.
Last year, the column correctly predicted four of the five teams. The one miss was the Colts, who went 8-9 in 2024 before getting off to a white-hot start in 2025, hitting their bye at 8-2. An offense that looked perfect started to show cracks, lost Daniel Jones to a torn Achilles and went into free fall. Without Jones or DeForest Buckner for much of the second half, the Colts lost seven straight to finish 8-9 for the second consecutive season.
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But the other four teams suffered substantial steps backward. The Vikings went from 14-3 to 9-8, as J.J. McCarthy couldn't deliver on expectations under center, and Kevin O'Connell's mastery of one-score games slipped in 2025. I'm not sure that one was too surprising.
The remaining three squads, all favorites to compete for the Super Bowl, each stunningly missed the playoffs.
Following a 12-5 mark, the Commanders fell to 5-12 last season with one of the league's oldest rosters, a lack of young talent and Jayden Daniels suffering through an injury-riddled season. The Lions were 15-2 in 2024, but issues with the offensive line and offensive infrastructure, injuries on defense and a tougher schedule knocked them back to 9-8.
And then there were the Chiefs, who did the unthinkable. Expecting the Chiefs to go 15-2 again probably wasn't realistic even without knowing that Patrick Mahomes would finish the season with a torn ACL. Andy Reid's team somehow fell from 10-0 in one-score games to 1-9, and a 6-11 Chiefs team missed the playoffs for the first time since 2014.
If you read Monday's improvement column, you know that the Chiefs and Lions are two of the teams I'm (perhaps unsurprisingly) expecting to improve in 2026. I'm going to start this year's decline column with a team that was in last year's improve column.
Note: Schedule strength is via ESPN's Football Power Index (FPI).
See more:
Five teams set to improve
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CAR | CHI | DEN | JAX | NE
Chicago Bears
Record in 2025: 11-6 (7-4 in games decided by seven points or fewer)
Point differential in 2025: plus-26
Projected strength of schedule: 10th toughest
I don't typically put these teams in any real order. When Bears head coach Ben Johnson said his team was the No. 1 regression candidate heading into 2026, though, how else could I start the decline column?
Johnson, who has talked about the importance of generating passing EPA, isn't naive about what advanced metrics expect to happen to the Bears. And he's not being naive or unrealistic in suggesting that the Bears have a shot at defying those odds. The 2025 Bears are the classic example of a team that should project to decline the following year. And the 2026 Bears have the sort of roster to prevail nonetheless. Let's take a closer look at both sides.
If you were drawing a blueprint for a team that was likely to appear in this column, you would essentially be describing last season's Bears. An unlucky team in 2023 and 2024, the Bears got far more than their fair share of breaks for most of the 2025 season.
Johnson helped drive a massive offensive improvement in terms of creating explosive plays, but the Bears were also spectacular at holding on to the football. They turned the ball over a league-low 11 times last season. They forced 33 turnovers, which helped keep afloat a defense that otherwise struggled. The Bears were 27th in points allowed per drive on possessions that didn't end with a fumble recovery or an interception. The Kevin Byard-led secondary picked off 4.3% of opposing passes, the highest rate in the NFL.
Some of that luck will not occur again. The Bears recovered 66.7% of the fumbles in their games last season, again the highest rate in the league. Twenty-three teams have posted a fumble recovery rate of 65% or more in any given season since 1990. Those teams went 0-for-23 at replicating that the following season, collectively recovering 49.3% of fumbles.
Forcing fumbles is a skill, to which Charles Tillman-era Bears fans can attest, but what happens once the ball hits the ground is almost entirely random. The defense forced only 17 fumbles last season, which was right around the league average of 16.8. The offense fumbled 16 times but fell on 12 of those balls for a 75% recovery clip. (In the postseason, the Bears forced six fumbles in two games on defense and failed to recover one.)
Forcing more takeaways than anybody else in football and turning the ball over less often than anybody else is a great way to lead the league in turnover margin. The Bears did, posting a plus-22 mark. The Texans, at plus-17, were the only team within an eight-turnover margin of Chicago.
And though Johnson is right to put explosive play generation alongside or even ahead of turnover margin in affecting the outcome of games, teams will win a lot when the turnover margin is weighted so heavily in their favor. Turnover margins have shrunk toward zero as offenses have gotten better at protecting the football and shrunken their passing depth in recent years, but 22 teams have posted turnover margins of plus-20 or more since 1990. Their average record was just short of 13-4 after adjusting for the 17-game schedule.
You know what's coming next. Excluding the 2025 Bears, the other 21 teams posted an average turnover margin of plus-3 the following season, with their margin declining by more than 19 takeaways on average. And 20 of those 21 teams won fewer games the following year, with the 2013 Patriots, who sustained their 12-4 record from the previous season, as the exception.
The Bears' season started with a frustrating loss to the Vikings, with Chicago leading most of the way before melting down in the fourth quarter. It proved to be an anomaly, as an offense that ranked 18th in EPA per play during the first three quarters of games was also the best in the NFL from the beginning of the fourth quarter onward. That -- and some luck -- led to some dramatic, narrow victories; after a 3-7 record in one-score games in 2024, Chicago went 7-4 in games decided by seven points or fewer in 2025.
In Week 4 against the Raiders, the Bears drove down the field for a touchdown to take a 25-24 lead with 1:39 to go. Their 2-point attempt fell incomplete, giving the Raiders a chance to win the game. Geno Smith drove Las Vegas into position for a 54-yard kick, but veteran kicker Daniel Carlson had his potential winning attempt blocked.
After a bye the following week, the Bears were trailing the Commanders by two points and faced a third-and-1 on their 40-yard line with 3:10 left. A first down would have allowed the Commanders to start chewing up the clock and cost the Bears their timeouts. Instead, Jayden Daniels fumbled an exchange with Jacory Croskey-Merritt, giving the Bears the football and a short field. They hit a 38-yard field goal to win the game.
Though the offense put the Bears up 41-27 with 4:53 to go in the fourth quarter against the Bengals, the defense quickly blew that lead, as the Bengals scored two touchdowns. A 2-pointer on the first score gave the Bengals a 42-41 lead with 54 seconds left, but Caleb Williams scrambled for a first down on third-and-10, then hit Colston Loveland for a 58-yard touchdown to win the game.
In Week 10, the Bears trailed the Giants 20-10 with six minutes left, but Chicago drove the length of the field for a touchdown, got the ball back with a short field after a 26-yard punt, then quickly drove downfield for another Williams scramble for a touchdown to win again.
The following week against Minnesota, the defense allowed the Vikings and McCarthy to drive the length of the field for a touchdown to take a 17-16 lead with 50 seconds left. Special teams won the game here, as Devin Duvernay returned the ensuing kickoff 56 yards to set up a winning field goal by Cairo Santos.
While trailing the Packers 16-6 in the fourth quarter -- despite knocking Jordan Love out of the game earlier -- a long Bears drive ended in a 43-yard field goal. With 1:59 to go and two timeouts, Chicago successfully recovered an onside kick to retain possession. On fourth-and-4, Williams hit Jahdae Walker for one of his six catches last season to tie the score with 24 seconds left. The Packers then fumbled a snap on fourth-and-1 in field goal range on the first drive of overtime. Williams then threw one of his best passes of the season to DJ Moore for a 46-yard score.
But in so many of those games, even the league's best offense wasn't the whole story. Either the defense blew the lead, the team forced a takeaway at the most opportune time or special teams worked magic in Chicago's favor. The Bears were 18th in special teams DVOA over the full season, so it wasn't as though they were dominating for entire games with that facet.
Do the offensive exploits from Williams in those situations matter? Of course. Great players show up in key moments, and Williams did, including on his miraculous touchdown pass in the divisional round that sent the game to overtime. But when we think about great clutch players, it's usually stars who excel throughout games and then sustain (or even slightly elevate) their play when things matter most. Williams was 20th in Total QBR through the first three quarters of games but third best from the fourth quarter on. You can tell yourself that Williams needed time to play his way into games, or that the game slowed down for him in key moments, but it's difficult to find many QBs who have that sort of split for any sort of extended multiyear stretch.
Here's what I can say confidently: The Bears cannot expect to win 11 games again in 2026 with the same formula. The good news for fans is that they don't appear to be expecting to do so. General manager Ryan Poles made aggressive moves to try to improve the defense, with seven of Chicago's 13 most-used players on that side of the ball in 2025 no longer on the roster, including the four most-used defenders in Byard, Jaquan Brisker, Nahshon Wright and Tremaine Edmunds.
The Bears were also banged up on defense, ranking 26th in adjusted games lost while losing players such as Dayo Odeyingbo and Kyler Gordon for significant stretches. Johnson says he hopes that his defense is healthier this season, but free agent addition Coby Bryant, who starred at free safety for the Seahawks a year ago, has already been sidelined for most of the upcoming season after undergoing left knee surgery earlier this month. Gordon is on the physically unable to perform (PUP) list because of a calf issue.
There are also real concerns about the pass rush, which ranked 29th in pressure rate despite blitzing at the 12th-highest rate in the NFL. Poles didn't make a significant addition up front, where he has signed three starting linemen to big contracts. The Bears were able to approach adequacy only because of Montez Sweat, who made it to 10 sacks for only the second time in his seven-year career. Though Sweat is a good player, and Gervon Dexter Sr. could break out, the Bears don't project to have a significantly better pass rush this year, barring a significant in-season trade. And if Sweat isn't as productive as he was last season, the front four could be seriously lacking.
The more plausible way that the Bears break away from that 2025 formula, of course, is by the offense going nuclear. The teams that defy these sorts of obvious regressions tend to do so by massively upgrading the most important spots on their rosters, leading with head coach and quarterback. The Bears didn't change either of those, but they're naturally hoping that Johnson can unlock that sort of potential in Williams.
Johnson says his goal is to set the single-season scoring record, and that might be too optimistic, but the numbers I've mentioned earlier make it clear that the Bears have some room to grow on offense in 2026. The Bears were ninth in EPA per play and 11th in points scored per drive last season.
Could they be the best offense in football in 2026? Given their young talent at quarterback and in the playmaker spots, as well as the presence of Johnson as one of the league's foremost offensive minds, it would hardly be shocking. Williams improved as the season went along, jumping from 19th in Total QBR during the first half of the season to 10th from Week 10 on. Loveland looked like one of the best tight ends in the league during his second-half breakout. Luther Burden III emerged as a difference-maker and one of the league's most efficient wideouts on a route-by-route basis while Rome Odunze was sidelined late in the campaign, and the trade of Moore opened a spot for both wideouts to be in the lineup.
Of course, to be the best offense in football, virtually everything has to go right. It rarely does. Burden is already dealing with a groin issue. Running back Kyle Monangai is week-to-week because of a knee injury. Left tackle is a serious question, with as many as four potential candidates competing to fill in for the injured Ozzy Trapilo, who just came off the PUP list. And Garrett Bradbury should be a downgrade for Drew Dalman at center. Chicago's line was remarkably healthy a year ago before the Trapilo injury struck in the playoffs, with the offense ranking among the healthiest in the NFL.
As a pro, Burden has as many games with negative receiving yardage (three) as ones in which he has topped 70 receiving yards. And Odunze has caught 51% of his targets as a pro. The Bears' young players all have significant promise, and it would hardly be a surprise to see some of them break out, but it's probably too optimistic to expect every one of them to have the sort of season you might project from what they did in a small sample of the 2025 campaign.
All of this adds up to a universe in which Bears fans get some of what they want in 2026 without having everything go right. I wouldn't be shocked if Williams takes another step forward and the offense follows in kind. With real concerns about the defense and a guarantee that the Bears won't be quite as lucky with turnovers and special teams work late in games, though, I'm not sure even an improved offense can get Chicago to 11 wins this season.
Denver Broncos
Record in 2025: 14-3 (9-2 in games decided by seven points or fewer)
Point differential in 2025: plus-90
Projected strength of schedule: 15th easiest
Broncos fans understandably believe 2025 could have been a season for the ages. Blessed with a dominant defense and an offense that came alive late in games, Denver came within a special teams penalty and a missed completion of potentially going 16-1 in the regular season. And after beating the Bills in a classic game during the divisional round, the Broncos didn't have an injured Bo Nix for the AFC Championship Game, and they still nearly beat Drake Maye and the Patriots with Jarrett Stidham under center.
Sean Payton & Co. added Jaylen Waddle in the offseason and will return 31 of the 33 players who played at least 300 offensive or defensive snaps for them in 2025, so it's fair to wonder whether the Broncos might simply run the same record back with a virtually identical roster. Similar to the Bears, though, I'm not sure the Broncos can realistically get the same results from the process that led to that 14-win season in 2025.
For one, they can't count on all of those players being available quite as often in 2026. Though the offense was injured at about a league-average rate, the defense was the third healthiest in the NFL, per FTN's adjusted games lost. The only starter who sat out more than three games was oft-injured linebacker Dre Greenlaw, who was one of the two players not returning to the roster. (The other is defensive lineman John Franklin-Myers.) This was the league's fifth-oldest team on a snap-weighted age basis a year ago, and I'd be a little concerned about some of those veterans getting worn down and staying healthy through a full 2026 season.
Vance Joseph's defense had been excellent since the start of 2024, defying concerns about defenses maintaining their consistency from year to year. Though the Broncos were among the league's elite units for most of the season, I'd just point out that things began to get iffy down the stretch.
Denver was second in the NFL in points allowed per possession through its Week 11 bye. But over the next four games -- facing the Commanders, Raiders, Packers and Jaguars -- that fell to 21st. The defense was propped up by facing backup quarterbacks Chris Oladokun and Trey Lance over the final two weeks of the regular season, then it gave up 30 points to the Bills in that divisional round thriller. The defense was excellent in the conference championship game, but that was also played in awful weather on a day when neither offense did much because of the conditions, at least for most of the second half.
The Broncos' defense should still be good, of course. Denver has the best cornerback in football in Pat Surtain II, arguably the most underrated edge rusher in the league in Nik Bonitto and a true interior disrupter in Zach Allen. I'm just not quite as confident that the Broncos will be a top-five unit in 2026, in part because of injuries and they weren't necessarily playing that way against starters down the stretch.
Though there were signs of growth from Nix in his second season as a passer, the Broncos roughly stayed put in offensive efficiency, actually dropping from 15th in points scored per drive in 2024 to 18th in 2025. Waddle should provide a needed upgrade over Troy Franklin and Pat Bryant, playing across from Courtland Sutton, with the hope that the former Dolphins receiver can serve as a valuable contributor on the sort of in-breakers Nix hasn't targeted consistently over his first two years.
If the Broncos don't improve on offense to make up for a possible defensive decline, I'm not sure their formula will lead to 14 wins. The Broncos went 9-2 in one-score games, and though they could have won both of those narrow defeats, they also had some very generous breaks late in games.
In Week 5, the Broncos came back from a 17-3 deficit in the fourth quarter to take an 18-17 lead against Philadelphia. On the ensuing Eagles drive, a fourth-and-4 conversion for 30 yards was wiped off because of an illegal shift penalty, instead producing a 23-yard punt. Nix appeared to commit intentional grounding on the next drive, but it was waved off after a lengthy delay. A personal foul on Zack Baun then extended the drive again, allowing the Broncos to run down the clock and kick a field goal to put the game out of reach.
One week later in a dismal game against the Jets in Tottenham Stadium, the Broncos kicked a field goal to go up 13-11 with just over five minutes left. Marvin Mims Jr. then recovered a fumble to avoid handing the Jets a short field that would have set up an easy field goal. Though the Jets got the ball back and drove to the edge of field goal range for Nick Folk, the Broncos sacked Justin Fields twice to seal an ugly victory.
The following week, the Broncos trailed the Giants 26-8 in the fourth quarter and scored three consecutive touchdowns to take a 30-26 lead. Jaxson Dart quickly drove the Giants for a touchdown to go up 32-30 with 37 seconds left, but backup kicker Jude McAtamney missed the extra point attempt that would have given New York a three-point lead. Nix hit two completions for 51 yards to get the Broncos back into field goal range, where Wil Lutz's kick won it instead of tying the score.
In another ugly game, the Broncos took a 10-7 lead over the Raiders into the fourth quarter, but Nix threw an interception on his own side of the field. Daniel Carlson missed a 48-yard field goal attempt that would have tied the score at 10-10 with 4:30 to go, and the Broncos ate up the remaining time.
Facing the Chiefs the following week, Harrison Butker missed an extra point attempt that would have given Kansas City a 20-16 lead with 9:57 left. Instead of needing to go for a touchdown, the Broncos could instead settle for field goals, and Lutz hit two of them on Denver's final two drives of the game to win 22-19.
After their bye, the Broncos went to overtime with a Jayden Daniels-less Commanders team. Denver scored a touchdown on the opening possession, but the Commanders answered. Washington went for two to win the game, but Marcus Mariota's pass was tipped away for a Broncos victory.
Finally, the Broncos needed a late touchdown to break a 13-13 tie with an Oladokun-led Chiefs team, then allowed the third-string quarterback to drive to within a yard of the red zone on the ensuing drive, but the drive stalled out.
Similar to the Bears, the Broncos had a remarkable habit of getting their offense going at the right time; they were 16th in EPA per play on offense through the first three quarters of games and fifth during the fourth quarter and overtime. The Broncos also got some very well-timed special teams luck with missed kicks when it really helped transform late-game scenarios.
FPI is optimistic about Denver's schedule, and getting that trip to Arrowhead out of the way against a potentially limited Patrick Mahomes in Week 1 is probably a plus for the Broncos. Ten games against the AFC West and NFC West, though, makes me think the schedule might be a little tougher than the algorithm believes. The Broncos could challenge for a division title again in 2026, but that's probably going to come in closer to the 10- or 11-win range this time.
Jacksonville Jaguars
Record in 2025: 13-4 (6-2 in games decided by seven points or fewer)
Point differential in 2025: plus-138
Projected strength of schedule: 12th easiest
To compare another team to the Bears, the Jaguars were also on our list of improvers a year ago, rising from the doldrums to claim an unlikely and unexpected division title. While the existence of the Titans prevented the Jags from going worst to first, jumping from 4-13 to 13-4 was a massive leap forward for coach Liam Coen's team in his first year at the helm.
The most obvious indicator for the Jags as improvement candidates heading into 2025 was their sheer lack of takeaways on defense. Jacksonville picked off only six passes and forced nine takeaways all season in 2024, with the latter figure ranking last in the NFL.
In 2025, Anthony Campanile's unit matched that mark by the end of Week 3, creating three takeaways in each of Jacksonville's first three games. The Jags forced 14 turnovers through Week 5 and finished with 31 by the end of the campaign, second most in the league. Jacksonville ranked in the top five in both turnover margin (plus-13, third) and fumble recovery rate (63%, fourth). As I covered in the Bears section, both of those are difficult to sustain on a year-after-year basis. Devin Lloyd, who surprisingly tied for the team lead with five picks, also left in free agency after a career year.
There was another factor, though, that subtly helped the Jaguars as they went 9-1 after their midseason bye: They stopped playing starting quarterbacks. Over their first eight games of the season, the Jaguars faced the opposing team's primary and preferred signal-caller seven times. The only exception was Week 2, when Jake Browning played most of the game after Joe Burrow suffered a toe injury. But over the final nine games, the Jaguars faced the opposing starter for a complete game only twice, with the Titans getting a full start from Cam Ward and the Broncos getting one from Bo Nix. Six of the other seven games were almost entirely against second-, third- or even fourth-string options, and Justin Herbert was pulled in the fourth quarter of a blowout loss for his own safety in the seventh.
The Jags started against backups in Davis Mills, Jacoby Brissett, Brady Cook and Philip Rivers, then saw Daniel Jones and Ward suffer early-game injuries that forced them from those respective contests (often an even more difficult switch for a team to navigate). More than 66% of the passes thrown against the Jaguars during this eight-game stretch were by backups. And though players such as Justin Fields and Ward weren't necessarily playing all that well, they were still a cut above replacement-level quarterbacks such as Cook and Brandon Allen.
Over the full season, nearly 41% of dropbacks against the Jaguars came from quarterbacks who weren't their team's primary signal-caller. Only the Rams and Buccaneers faced backup QBs more often. Unless the 2026 Jaguars turn into the 1985 Bears and start knocking quarterbacks out of games on a regular basis, it's tough to imagine Jacksonville will face backups quite as often this season.
The old Bill James plexiglass principle also applies here. Teams that make massive single-season improvements almost always give some of that success back the following year. The Jaguars jumped by nine wins from 2024 to 2025. Even if we expand the sample and adjust for the move to a 17th game, there were only 32 other teams from 1990 to 2024 to improve by seven or more wins in a given season. Those teams declined by an average of 3.8 wins per 17 games the following year, a list that includes the 2018 Jaguars, who failed to deliver on the promise the 2017 squad showed during a deep playoff run.
Naturally, I'll point at the Jags going 6-2 in one-score games in 2025, including a pair of overtime victories over the Cardinals and Raiders, with the latter decided by a failed 2-point conversion attempt. Things weren't quite as dramatic or desperate as they were late in contests for the Bears and Broncos, and the Jaguars did manage big wins over playoff teams such as the Broncos, Chargers and Panthers, which helped Jacksonville's point differential grow more in line with that of a 12-win team.
For the third team in a row, the natural question is whether the offense can pick up some of the slack. Trevor Lawrence looked excellent down the stretch, throwing 15 touchdowns against one pick across his final six games of the last season. Of course, Lawrence had a similar span the last time the Jags broke out in a coach's first season, but Doug Pederson & Co. weren't able to coax that same level of play out of the 2021 No. 1 pick over the ensuing two years.
Jacksonville fans will hope for a return to form from wide receiver Brian Thomas Jr. and a continuation of the late-season breakout by wideout Parker Washington, but there are real questions here. Do the drop and tight-window issues that plagued Thomas last season reappear? Is there a sustainable plan -- or even a real plan -- for how to use hybrid player Travis Hunter on a weekly basis? Is there an above-average running back or left tackle on the roster? Can Jacksonville be as healthy as it was a season ago, when it was the league's seventh-healthiest team?
On top of all that, the Jaguars suffer from a problem that is at least partially self-inflicted: They won't play very many games in front of their home fans. In addition to nine road games this season, the Jags will play two of their eight remaining home games in London, which might more realistically be characterized as a neutral-site contest than a true home game. The Jaguars will play only six games at EverBank Stadium -- amid a reduced capacity as Jacksonville works on its stadium. The Jags will enjoy less home-field advantage than any other team in the league in 2026, and that might help swing a critical call or two in a different direction.
Carolina Panthers
Record in 2025: 8-9 (7-3 in games decided by seven points or fewer)
Point differential in 2025: minus-69
Projected strength of schedule: 13th toughest
After years of desperately chasing positive vibes, the Panthers finally landed there at the end of the 2025 season. Though they couldn't get the Week 18 win to clinch a playoff spot themselves, some help from the Falcons helped the Panthers seal a division title on the final day of the season. And though they lost in the wild-card round, they gave the highly touted Rams fits twice in 2026, beating them during the regular season and coming within a drive of repeating the feat in the postseason.
The Panthers didn't post a winning season, but 2025 marked their first trip to the playoffs since 2017. There were bright spots on both sides of the football, with homegrown draftees (Tetairoa McMillan and Jaycee Horn) and free agent additions (Mike Jackson and Tre'von Moehrig) all playing at a high level. The front office showed that it believed during the offseason, picking up Bryce Young's fifth-year option and paying a premium to sign the likes of Jaelan Phillips and Devin Lloyd in free agency.
I think the Panthers are heading in the right direction. But are they quite as far along as that playoff berth made things seem? I'm not sure. Of course, 8-9 landed the Panthers only into a three-way tie for first place in the NFC South, with Carolina winning the division on a tiebreaker. Consider that the same record led the Bucs to fire many of their assistant coaches and the Falcons to move on from their head coach (Raheem Morris). I'm not suggesting that the Panthers should fire Dave Canales, who has done solid work in his first two years at the helm, but the line between success and failure wasn't very thick in the league's worst division.
Advanced metrics also suggest the Panthers weren't the class of the NFC South. FPI pegged the Panthers as the league's 25th-best team at the end of the regular season, which was actually the worst mark for any team in the division; the Bucs (19th), Saints (23rd) and Falcons (24th) all looked better to the algorithm. DVOA also had the Panthers 25th, ahead of only the Saints, who were 28th. Those numbers don't decide divisional races, but they do a good job of telling us how a team was playing on a snap-by-snap basis over a full season.
The Panthers went 6-2 in one-score games, including a 30-27 overtime win over the Falcons that probably ended up deciding the NFC South. Again, those games weren't quite as dramatic or narrow as the ones the Bears and Broncos played, but it's difficult to believe that Carolina captured any sort of sustainable lightning in a bottle that will stick around into 2026.
Though Carolina did pull off impressive wins against the Rams and on the road against the Packers, those were their only two victories against teams with winning records. Their other six wins included a sweep of the Falcons, a split with the Bucs and one-score wins over the Cowboys, Dolphins and Jets. They won exactly one game by more than one possession, a 30-0 shellacking of the Falcons in Week 3. Carolina is only the 10th playoff team in a nonstrike season in league history to win a mere one game by nine points or more all year.
Unfortunately for the Panthers, things get tougher in 2026. Though they faced the league's eighth-easiest schedule a year ago, FPI projects Canales' team to play the 13th-toughest slate this season. Six games against the NFC South cushion any sort of degree of difficulty, but by virtue of finishing first in their division, the Panthers face the Broncos, Eagles and Seahawks this year. The Saints (third easiest), Falcons (11th easiest) and Buccaneers (15th easiest) all project to play easier schedules, and that might be the difference in what could otherwise be a narrow race.
Of course, there are reasons to think the Panthers could just be a better team in 2026 than they were in 2025. Unlike the three teams I mentioned above, they didn't ride anything like an unsustainable turnover margin or remarkable run of injuries by opposing quarterbacks to the postseason. It's easier to improve on an eight-win record than it is on a 14-win campaign. They were also the sixth-youngest team on a snap-weighted basis, so there are players on both sides of the ball who could take a leap or hit their peak over the next year or two.
If those players aren't available, though, the Panthers might not have the depth to compensate. And though they ranked 21st in adjusted games lost last season, no team has been hit harder by injuries during the preseason than Carolina. The Panthers were already projected to be without former first-round pick Ikem Ekwonu, who tore his patellar tendon in the postseason and won't be ready to start at left tackle for most of 2026, and starting defensive tackle Tershawn Wharton, who underwent neck surgery in May and has no timetable for returning.
Things have already gotten much worse. Veteran right tackle Taylor Moton was diagnosed with a blood clot in his lung over the summer and is out indefinitely. Second-year edge rusher Nic Scourton and rookie wide receiver Chris Brazzell II are both out for the year because of knee injuries. Starting running back Chuba Hubbard is sidelined by a hamstring issue.
Many of the key contributors who are left also have spotty histories of staying healthy. Horn, the team's top cornerback, has sat out 32 of 85 possible games as a pro. Phillips, who signed a four-year, $120 million contract in free agency, has torn both his Achilles and ACL as a pro. Jonathon Brooks, who is expected to step up in Hubbard's absence, tore his ACL in 2023 (while in college) and then again in 2024 before sitting out all of the 2025 season. If the Panthers can get everyone on the field at the same time, there's a talented roster with real upside here. That next step forward, though, might not come until 2027.
New England Patriots
Record in 2025: 14-3 (7-3 in games decided by seven points or fewer)
Point differential in 2025: plus-170
Projected strength of schedule: 10th easiest
Have you heard about the Patriots' 2025 schedule? Pats fans might be sick of discussing the topic, and it became ubiquitous as the team made an unexpected run to the Super Bowl. But while the 2025 Patriots earned their way to compete for a Lombardi Trophy, the 2026 team is going to face a much tougher slate of opponents. And that's going to make life much more difficult for Mike Vrabel's team.
Let's put last season's Patriots schedule in context and look at what it means for the future. There are a lot of ways to estimate schedule strength. I like to take each of a team's opponents and look at their Pythagorean Expectation after removing the games played against that particular team. In other words, to measure the strength of the Pats' schedule from last season, we would take their Week 1 opponent (the Raiders) and find Vegas' points scored and allowed in every game besides the one against the Patriots, then convert that into a winning percentage.
The average Patriots opponent had a .414 Pythagorean Expectation. Unsurprisingly, that was the easiest schedule in the NFL. The next-easiest schedule belonged to the Cowboys, and they were as close to 12th easiest as they were to the Pats. In fact, this was the easiest schedule any team has had in any season by this metric since 2010.
Now let's take the 30 easiest schedules for teams by this measure since 1990 and look at what happened the following year. Their strength of schedule increased from 0.431 (the equivalent of a 7.3-win team's point differential) to 0.486 (an 8.3-win opponent). Those teams won an average of 9.3 games (adjusted for a 17-game schedule) during their season with the fatefully easy schedule. The following year, that dropped to 8.0 wins.
One obvious comparable would be the 1999 Rams, who stunningly jumped from 4-12 to 13-3 despite losing starting quarterback Trent Green just before the season. Kurt Warner came off the bench and wildly exceeded every possible expectation at quarterback, and that Rams team had added guys like Marshall Faulk to the mix ... but they also faced an incredibly easy schedule. Those Rams faced one team all regular season with a winning record: the 13-3 Titans, whom they would then beat in the Super Bowl.
The following year, those same Rams went 10-6 and finished second in the NFC West. Warner sat out five games, which hurt their chances, but their real issue was a defensive collapse. The Rams fell from fourth in scoring defense to dead last. Though the defense played from ahead against one-dimensional offenses that were throwing to catch up for most of the season in 1999, a tougher slate of opponents made life more difficult the following year.
The defense looms like an obvious point of concern for the Patriots. Though the Pats were fourth in scoring defense a year ago, there's a lot of air in that ranking. A slow pace and an effective offense meant that the Pats faced just over 10 possessions per game, the sixth fewest in the NFL. Those teams were generally forced to throw with middling quarterbacks by virtue of trailing. As Sheil Kapadia noted, seven of the 14 quarterbacks the Patriots beat in 2025 aren't expected to start in 2026.
DVOA, after adjusting for opponent, ranked the Patriots 23rd on defense. The defense got better as the season went along, and the Pats were impacted by the unexpected absence of defensive coordinator Terrell Williams after he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and left the team, but that's an incredibly large gap between the raw stats and the opponent-adjusted play-by-play rate metrics.
And though those numbers don't include an excellent showing in the playoffs, I would pin at least some of that on weather that materially affected wins over the Texans and Broncos (the latter starting a backup quarterback). The Seahawks scored only 23 points on offense in the Super Bowl, but Sam Darnold also left at least one touchdown pass on the field with a missed throw, if not more. (If you don't believe me, ask Darnold.)
Interim defensive coordinator Zak Kuhr modified the defense as the season went along, dramatically ramping up the team's blitz rate to account for a pass rush that wasn't very strong, especially on the edges. With Christian Gonzalez and Carlton Davis III at cornerback, New England certainly has the cover corners to hold up in a man-intensive, blitz-heavy scheme, but I'm not sure swapping out K'Lavon Chaisson for Dre'Mont Jones is likely to make a dramatic difference on the edge.
The Patriots were also the league's healthiest team in 2025 by adjusted games lost, ranking sixth on offense and fifth on defense. We saw how even one injury could dramatically impact the Pats, when Will Campbell returned from a knee injury late in the year and looked like a totally different player throughout the playoffs and into the Super Bowl, where he allowed a season-high 14 pressures.
Though executive vice president of player personnel Eliot Wolf hit on a number of free agent signings and appears to have landed his quarterback of the future in Drake Maye, there's just not a ton of depth behind the starters in New England. The Pats have only one player left on the roster from their 2020 (Mike Onwenu), 2022 (Marcus Jones) and 2024 (Maye) drafts. Their 2021 draft has two survivors in Christian Barmore and Rhamondre Stevenson, and though the 2023 draft delivered a couple of useful late receivers in Kayshon Boutte (traded on Monday) and DeMario Douglas, the only one of the seven top 150 picks from that year still on the roster is Gonzalez.
Could the addition of A.J. Brown, a full offseason to work with Kuhr and an MVP-caliber quarterback in Maye help mitigate some of these concerns? In some ways, of course. But I would also argue that the Patriots seem particularly vulnerable to injuries and a tougher slate of opponents. I would expect something in line with the 2000 Rams, but the Patriots have a lower floor than it might seem at first glance.
