2025 Was Weird. 2026 Has Already Started Acting Suspicious.

Every August, NFL fans perform the same adorable ritual.

We decide we understand football.

We know the contenders. We know which teams are rebuilding. We know which players are declining. We know which coaches are geniuses. We have strength-of-schedule charts. Some of us have spreadsheets. There are podcasts longer than most international flights devoted to determining whether a 24-year-old wide receiver is “primed to take the next step.”

Then football begins and immediately starts throwing furniture around.

In 2025, Matthew Stafford had arguably the best season of his career at 37. Indianapolis started 8–2 and never won again. The Jets went an entire season without intercepting a pass. Jacksonville gained nine wins. Christian McCaffrey touched the football 413 times.

The Patriots won 14 games.

Sam Darnold won the Super Bowl.

Read those last two sentences again if you need to.

We spent months preparing for the 2025 NFL season, and the NFL responded by putting our preparation into a little paper shredder.

So before we confidently explain what is about to happen in 2026, perhaps we should review the evidence.

2025, in one deeply suspicious table

Recorded 2025 regular-season and postseason results. Linked sources appear below.

Football remains a perfectly healthy activity for people who crave certainty.

Running backs got tired of hearing about the death of running backs

For several years, the NFL conversation around running backs sounded like a meeting with an accountant.

Don't pay them.

Don't draft them too high.

They're replaceable.

Then Bijan Robinson produced 2,298 yards from scrimmage, rushing for 1,478 yards and adding another 820 on 79 receptions. He averaged 5.1 yards per carry.

Bijan caught more passes than CeeDee Lamb.

I no longer know what positional labels are supposed to accomplish.

Christian McCaffrey was even stranger.

He carried the ball 311 times for 1,202 yards, caught 102 passes for 924 yards and scored 17 touchdowns.

That is 413 touches.

Four hundred and thirteen.

The 49ers spent years managing McCaffrey's health and then apparently decided the best medical plan was to hand him the football until his fingerprints disappeared.

His 102 receptions ranked sixth in the entire NFL. Not sixth among running backs. Sixth among everyone whose employer legally permitted them to catch a football.

Bijan and McCaffrey combined for 1,744 receiving yards.

If they were one fictional wide receiver—which I realize is not traditionally how statistics work—that player would have finished second in the NFL in receiving yards.

They also combined for 598 carries.

Apparently the running back position wasn't dying. It was just quietly acquiring the responsibilities of several other departments.

James Cook led the NFL with 1,621 rushing yards. Derrick Henry was second with 1,595. Jonathan Taylor finished third with 1,585 but led the league with 18 rushing touchdowns.

Third in rushing touchdowns?

Josh Allen.

Fourteen.

Allen threw 25 touchdown passes and ran for 14 more. His rushing-touchdown total was 56% of his passing-touchdown total.

A wonderfully quarterback-shaped running-back statistic.

Wide receiver production became a casino

At the top, everything was beautiful.

Jaxon Smith-Njigba led the NFL with 1,793 receiving yards and won Offensive Player of the Year.

Puka Nacua led the league with 129 receptions and added 1,715 yards.

Both scored 10 receiving touchdowns.

Together: 3,508 yards and 20 touchdowns.

Then there were CeeDee Lamb and Justin Jefferson.

Lamb saw 117 targets and gained 1,077 yards but scored three touchdowns.

That's one touchdown every 39 targets.

Jefferson received 141 targets, caught 84 passes for 1,048 yards and scored twice.

Combined:

258 targets. Five touchdowns.

One touchdown every 51.6 targets.

Somewhere, a fantasy manager just felt an unexplained pain shoot through his lower back.

This is also a useful reminder of the absurdity of touchdowns. We spend all summer projecting them to one decimal place, which gives the exercise the appearance of science.

Then one of the best receivers alive gets 141 targets and scores twice.

Brock Bowers joined the statistical rebellion.

As a rookie, he caught 112 passes for 1,194 yards and five touchdowns.

In Year 2, injuries limited him to 12 games. He finished with 64 catches and 680 yards.

Everything declined.

Except touchdowns.

Those increased from five to seven.

Sure.

Why should those have behaved normally?

Matthew Stafford waited 17 years to peak

Stafford's 2025 season sounds like something Lions fans would have predicted in 2011 while being escorted from a Buffalo Wild Wings.

At age 37, he led the NFL with 4,707 passing yards and 46 touchdowns, threw only eight interceptions, won MVP and earned the first first-team AP All-Pro selection of his 17-year career.

Stafford spent nearly two decades constructing a Hall of Fame résumé and apparently saved “become the best quarterback in football” for the age when most people begin making involuntary noises while getting off the couch.

And then Myles Garrett had 23 sacks.

Twenty-three.

He broke the NFL single-season record.

That's less a football statistic than something prosecutors would read aloud in court.

The standings completely lost control of the vehicle

Indianapolis might be the purest representation of the 2025 season.

The Colts reached their bye 8–2.

Then:

Loss.

Loss.

Loss.

Loss.

Loss.

Loss.

Loss.

They finished 8–9.

Indianapolis became just the sixth team since the AFL-NFL merger to start 8–2 and miss the postseason.

Going 0–7 after starting 8–2 is not really a collapse.

It's more like getting on an escalator at the second floor and somehow ending up underground.

Jacksonville basically performed the reverse maneuver.

The Jaguars went 4–13 in 2024.

They went 13–4 in 2025.

Their defense increased its takeaways from nine to 31, and Jacksonville won the AFC South behind Liam Coen and a Trevor Lawrence breakout. Lawrence accounted for 24 touchdowns against six turnovers during Jacksonville's eight-game winning streak to close the regular season.

From four wins to 13.

One offseason.

Every NFL general manager currently overseeing a terrible roster will be printing this paragraph and sliding it under the owner's office door.

Then there were the Jets.

Seventeen games.

Five hundred and fifteen opposing pass attempts.

Zero interceptions.

Not “few.”

Zero.

Interceptions became an official NFL statistic in 1933. No team had ever gone an entire season without one.

Then came the 2025 New York Jets.

You intercepted exactly as many NFL passes last year as the Jets secondary.

Congratulations on your historic season.

And somehow the year ended with Seattle and New England both 14–3 and playing each other in the Super Bowl.

Seattle won 29–13.

Sam Darnold became a Super Bowl-winning quarterback.

Kenneth Walker III ran for 135 yards, produced 161 yards from scrimmage and became the first running back to win Super Bowl MVP since Terrell Davis in January 1998.

This sport has no respect for old tweets.

So what are we watching in 2026?

This is where we make the traditional mistake.

We have just spent 1,000 words establishing that football enjoys humiliating predictions.

Now we will predict things.

1. Can Seattle actually do this again?

Repeating is difficult under normal circumstances.

Seattle is attempting it after losing the player who just won Super Bowl MVP.

Kenneth Walker is now in Kansas City. Zach Charbonnet is working back from the ACL injury he suffered during the playoffs. Seattle responded by using the 32nd overall pick on Notre Dame running back Jadarian Price, a player who never had more than 15 touches in a college game.

Nothing says “defend the Lombardi Trophy” like giving a major offensive role to someone whose previous workload was essentially we'll see how he feels after lunch.

The Seahawks also lost offensive coordinator Klint Kubiak, meaning Brian Fleury takes over the offense.

The good news is Jaxon Smith-Njigba still exists.

The problem is that after 1,793 yards and Offensive Player of the Year, defenses are probably aware of him now.

There will be no meeting in Week 1 where an opposing coordinator points at No. 11 and says, “Who is this Smith-Njigba fellow?”

And Sam Darnold gets perhaps the most fascinating encore in football.

His career went from Jets punchline to Vikings revival to Seahawks Super Bowl champion.

The redemption movie has already ended.

Now we find out whether Hollywood greenlit an unnecessary sequel.

2. Was Jacksonville real?

This may be my favorite non-fantasy question entering the season.

Going from four wins to 13 wins is enormous.

Going from nine takeaways to 31 is also enormous.

And enormous single-year swings invite the obvious question:

How much sticks?

The encouraging part is that Jacksonville didn't stumble into 13 wins by accidentally finding several four-leaf clovers in the parking lot.

The Jaguars finished in the top 10 in both points scored and points allowed, and their offense averaged 32.5 points per game over the final eight weeks.

Trevor Lawrence looked like the quarterback everyone has spent approximately six years insisting Trevor Lawrence could become.

Now comes the annoying part.

Do it again.

Jacksonville hasn't made the playoffs in consecutive seasons since 1998 and 1999.

If Coen and Lawrence turn this into something sustainable, Jacksonville's 2025 season stops being a fun turnaround story.

It becomes the beginning of something.

Which is much less charming for the rest of the AFC South.

3. What exactly is Kansas City now?

Patrick Mahomes suffered ACL and LCL injuries in December as Kansas City missed the playoffs for the first time in the Mahomes era.

That's a sentence that would have sounded like fan fiction two years ago.

Now Mahomes is back.

He was fully cleared for training camp, and early reports have been encouraging.

Kansas City also added Kenneth Walker III.

And because apparently the Chiefs wanted their quarterback room to become an internet argument, they acquired Justin Fields too.

Mahomes returning from major knee surgery with Fields behind him creates a very unusual arrangement.

The starter is the most accomplished quarterback of his generation.

The backup is one of the most dangerous rushing quarterbacks in football.

And fantasy managers will behave extremely normally the first time Fields enters near the goal line.

I'm sure of it.

4. Are we sure the running back is dead?

This might be my favorite recurring NFL argument because the running back position keeps attending its own funeral.

Bijan Robinson just received a three-year extension with $51 million guaranteed, the most guaranteed money ever given to a running back on a non-rookie contract.

He earned that after leading the league with 2,298 yards from scrimmage.

McCaffrey is coming off 413 touches.

Jonathan Taylor scored 20 total touchdowns.

James Cook led the league in rushing.

Kenneth Walker won Super Bowl MVP.

Arizona drafted Jeremiyah Love third overall.

Seattle drafted another running back 32nd.

NFL teams spent a decade telling us running backs were replaceable and have recently begun behaving like someone quietly unsubscribed them from the newsletter.

That doesn't mean we're returning to 1997.

But it does make 2026 worth watching.

Maybe the position wasn't becoming less important.

Maybe teams were simply becoming more selective about which backs deserved enormous roles.

That is a much more interesting conversation than “RBs don't matter.”

5. Can New England handle expectations now that expectations exist?

The Patriots went from 4–13 in 2024 to 14–3 in 2025.

Then they reached the Super Bowl.

Drake Maye finished second in MVP voting.

Apparently New England's post-Brady rebuilding period lasted roughly as long as it takes some people to renovate a kitchen.

Now they added A.J. Brown, trading a future first-round pick to Philadelphia.

Maye gets a legitimate alpha receiver.

Mike Vrabel gets Brown again.

And the Patriots enter 2026 not as an adorable surprise but as a team people expect to win.

That changes the emotional math.

Nobody gets congratulated for being surprisingly good twice.

The first season is a breakthrough.

The second season comes with television graphics titled WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE PATRIOTS? after a 2–2 start.

Welcome back to relevance.

It's terrible here.

6. Josh Allen finally has another established receiver

Buffalo's offseason might be even more interesting.

The Bills traded for DJ Moore, sending Chicago a second-round pick. Training camp reports have already been positive regarding Moore's connection with Allen.

Buffalo also enters the Joe Brady head-coaching era after moving on from Sean McDermott.

So Allen—who scored 39 combined passing and rushing touchdowns last year—gets a new top receiver and a new organizational setup.

For years, every Bills season has essentially become the same question:

Can Josh Allen finally get Buffalo through January?

There are entire civilizations with shorter-running plotlines.

7. The Rams are behaving like the salary cap is an urban legend

Matthew Stafford is now 38.

He is also the reigning NFL MVP.

Puka Nacua just caught 129 passes.

And Los Angeles added Myles Garrett, fresh off setting the NFL single-season sack record.

The Rams also drafted quarterback Ty Simpson 13th overall.

This is both a Super Bowl push and a succession plan happening at the same time.

Very few franchises are comfortable operating like this.

The Rams are the football equivalent of someone refinancing the house to buy both a Ferrari and a sensible retirement portfolio.

And there is even an Aaron Donald subplot floating around. Donald worked out for the Rams this summer, though as of late August there has been no official announcement that he is returning.

Myles Garrett and Aaron Donald on the same defensive line would be wildly unnecessary.

Which is precisely why I would like to see it.

8. What does McCaffrey look like after 413 touches?

This is where the fantasy portion becomes impossible to avoid.

McCaffrey was incredible.

But 413 touches is an extraordinary workload for any running back, particularly one entering his age-30 season with a long injury history.

San Francisco is also trying to get several stars healthy after its starters missed more than 50 combined games last season.

There is no grand prediction here.

I just want to know what the human body thinks about all of this.

NFL coaches talk about workload management constantly and then occasionally hand one man the football 413 times.

It's like your doctor recommending moderation before prescribing four cheeseburgers.

9. Which receiving numbers were real—and which were football being weird?

JSN: 1,793 yards.

Puka: 129 catches.

Lamb: three touchdowns.

Jefferson: two.

Bowers: seven touchdowns despite losing nearly half his receiving production.

The fun part about entering a new season is figuring out which numbers are signals and which are artifacts of one ridiculous year.

I would be stunned if Lamb and Jefferson combine for only five touchdowns again.

But that's sort of the point.

We are constantly trying to separate sustainable performance from statistical noise while the sport is actively introducing new noise.

It's like trying to organize a filing cabinet during an earthquake.

10. Can the Jets intercept one pass?

I don't need analysis here.

I just need closure.

The 2025 Jets faced 515 pass attempts without recording an interception.

New York added Nahshon Wright this offseason after he personally intercepted five passes for Chicago last year.

Five!

The Jets acquired one human being who had five more interceptions last season than their entire defense.

If New York intercepts its first opponent in Week 1, I believe the game should stop temporarily.

Fireworks.

Confetti.

Present the ball to the Hall of Fame.

Maybe Aaron Glenn gets carried off the field.

We're celebrating growth.

And naturally, the season itself starts weird

The NFL could have eased us back into this.

It declined.

The 2026 regular season opens September 9 with Seattle hosting New England in a Super Bowl rematch.

Then, one night later, the Rams and 49ers play in Melbourne in the first regular-season NFL game ever held in Australia.

So within roughly 24 hours, we get a Super Bowl rematch followed by professional football being played 8,000 miles away at Melbourne Cricket Ground.

Nothing strange.

Just Week 1.

Here we go again

That is what 2025 should probably teach us.

Not that predictions are pointless.

Not that numbers don't matter.

Not that everything is random.

Just that the range of plausible NFL outcomes is much wider than we want it to be.

A 4–13 team can win 13 games.

An 8–2 team can finish 8–9.

A team can defend 515 passes and intercept none of them.

A 37-year-old quarterback can suddenly have his best season.

Sam Darnold can win a Super Bowl.

The league keeps showing us this.

And every August we nod thoughtfully, absorb the lesson, then immediately publish our list of the 10 Things We Know For Sure About This Season.

I am absolutely going to make predictions about 2026.

You are absolutely going to make predictions about 2026.

We'll argue about them.

We'll feel smart about some.

We'll quietly delete evidence of others.

And four months from now, some completely ridiculous thing that nobody discussed in August will feel obvious in hindsight.

That's football.

We don't actually want certainty.

We want just enough certainty to be surprised when everything goes insane again.

Sources: NFL — 2025 player statistics; Pro Football Reference — 2025 receiving; NFL — 2025 award winners; NFL — 2025 standings; Jacksonville Jaguars — 2025 statistical review; NFL — Jets' interception-less season; AP — Super Bowl LX recap; NFL — 2026 roster and transaction tracker; NFL — 2026 first-round draft tracker; NFL — 2026 Week 1 schedule; NFL — Mahomes cleared for training camp; NFL — Bijan Robinson extension; NFL — A.J. Brown trade; NFL — DJ Moore trade; NFL — Aaron Donald workout. All statistics are recorded results or announced transactions; no Auto Draft Years model data or projections are used. For informational and entertainment purposes only.