Week 1 of the 2025 NFL season is in the books, and it’s time to hate everything.
Week 1 is traditionally National Jump to Conclusions Week. Fans across the country, starved for real, actionable football action for months, pounce atop the slightest crumbs of information, and decide that this moment, right here, will decide the rest of the season. Who can forget last year, when the Saints were an unstoppable offensive juggernaut, Anthony Richardson was an exciting prospect, and the Rams were the NFC West team doomed to an injury-plagued season. Week 1 lies to you, whispers sweet nothings in your ear and then cruelly rips them away before the first snowfall of the year. The rational thing to do is take early results with a big helping of salt, remaining calm, cool and collected.
This year, people are taking the salt recommendation far too seriously. I can’t remember quite as much early-season doom and gloom being spread around the league. Oh, it’s not universal – Bills fans are on top of the world after one of the more improbable comebacks in NFL history, Colts fans are loving the Indiana Jones era, and 49ers fans got to not only celebrate a win but also ride Jake Moody out of town on a rail, so there’s some joy in Mudville these days. But there are far more high-profile alarm bells ringing out around than there are irrationally pleased fanbases right now, which is peculiar in a week where there were only four upsets!
Perhaps what’s pushing that feeling forwards is the fact that most of our top 10 projected teams had something to fret about on Monday morning. Three of the top six teams in projected DVOA lost in Week 1, and five of the top 10 won but had had negative double-digit VOA on at least one side of the ball. The Packers and Commanders? They’re all set to go, and ready to play on Thursday night in what would be the Game of the Week if there wasn’t a Super Bowl rematch coming up on Sunday. But the other eight teams in our top 10 might have some lessons to learn from Week 1.
This isn’t the DOOM INDEX. We expect all these teams to be competitive going forward and most of them should avoid the dreaded 0-2 start that starts really knocking your playoff hopes into a tailspin. But let’s check in on these panicking starts and see which teams have real concerns, and which just have some September blues.
Ravens Fourth Quarter Follies
Fun fact: The eventual Super Bowl champions are 47-11-1 in the first game of the year. They usually win, but the 2023 Chiefs fell to Detroit when it turned out their receivers couldn’t catch a cold, the 2020 Buccaneers lost to New Orleans on a turnover-filled day in an empty stadium, and the Patriots made a habit of falling on their face in Week 1 of a Super Bowl season, losing to Miami in 2014, Cincinnati in 2001 and most famously 31-0 to Buffalo in 2003. So even when you get utterly pantsed from the word go, there’s plenty of time to recover to hoist the trophy at the end of the year. It’s just one game, after all.
Unless, of course, it’s more than one game. The Baltimore Ravens keep finding themselves in situation where it’s mathematically improbable to lose, and then they lose anyway. A team of Baltimore’s caliber should be able to grind out a 40-25 lead with 10 minutes left in the game. They should certainly be able to do it with five minutes left in the game. Instead, for the sixth time since 2022, the Ravens took a two-score lead in the fourth quarter and ended up going home shaking their head. The rest of the league, combined, has only done that eight times. So is something fundamentally wrong with Baltimore? Are they doomed to see other great teams race by them, no matter how good they are through three quarters?
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