This year, people are taking the salt recommendation far too seriously. I can\u2019t remember quite as much early-season doom and gloom being spread around the league. Oh, it\u2019s not universal \u2013 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<\/a> out of town on a rail, so there\u2019s 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!<\/p>\n Perhaps what\u2019s pushing that feeling forwards is the fact that most of our top 10 projected teams<\/a> 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\u2019re all set to go, and ready to play on Thursday night in what would be the Game of the Week if there wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t 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\u2019s check in on these panicking starts and see which teams have real concerns, and which just have some September blues.<\/p>\n Ravens Fourth Quarter Follies<\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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\u2019s plenty of time to recover to hoist the trophy at the end of the year. It\u2019s just one game, after all.<\/p>\n Unless, of course, it\u2019s more than one game. The Baltimore Ravens keep finding themselves in situation where it\u2019s mathematically improbable to lose, and then they lose anyway. A team of Baltimore\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n Well, yes and no. Baltimore\u2019s underperformed with late leads for sure, but not outrageously so. They win about 80%<\/a> of their games where they have an 80% win probability \u2013 which sounds right, until you realize that includes games where they had, say, a 90% WP or a 95% WP, so they should be a bit higher than that. But they\u2019re not an unusual outlier \u2013 if you simulate thousands and thousands of seasons<\/a>, usually someone ends up having the Ravens\u2019 luck in close games. It sucks, for Baltimore fans, that they\u2019re the ones holding the idiot ball these last few years, but as Dan Pizzuta noted in the Almanac<\/a>, it\u2019s been a frustrating series of \u201chey \u2013 don\u2019t do that [fumble, throw a bad pick, etc.]\u201d as opposed to some kind of systemic flaw. It will, one day, get better. We promise.<\/p>\n Then again, there are a couple bits of blame you could throw John Harbaugh\u2019s way. A large part of the Ravens\u2019 dynamic offense is that you\u2019re never quite sure what they\u2019re going to do \u2013 Lamar Jackson<\/a> can beat you with his arm or his legs, and Derrick Henry<\/a> will destroy you if you take your eye off him to try to stop Jackson. But, when coasting on a big lead, the Ravens tend to take all that dynamism out of their offense and go run on first, run on second, pass if need be on third. Every play on offense the Ravens had after going up 40-25 fit that pattern, and a Bills defense that could do nothing all game (we\u2019ll get back to that) suddenly looked a lot better when they knew exactly what the Ravens were going to do. It took the Ravens out of the Ravens offense and makes them boring vanilla \u2013 and even a bad defense can handle boring vanilla.<\/p>\n You could even stretch that lack of boldness into not going for it on fourth-and-3 with 1:33 left in the game, when a first down would have clinched it right then and there (and a failure still potentially leaving them 40 or so seconds even if Buffalo successful made a go-ahead score). That\u2019s a tough call to make in the moment, even if the various fourth-down models<\/a> strongly advocated aggression there. I\u2019d rather win or lose the game with the ball in the hands of my MVP quarterback, but that\u2019s easy to say sitting at my desk and not having to face the media the next morning. A lot had to go wrong for the Ravens to actually lose that game \u2013 a rare Henry fumble, a tip-drill touchdown for Buffalo, and so forth \u2013 but they didn\u2019t do anything in those last 10 minutes to really try to seal the win, instead playing not to lose. That typically will work up 40-25, but it\u2019s frustrating when it fails. A little more creativity when trying to slam the door would not go amiss, and these are real problems that they could really do better on, and not just wait for the random luck gods to go their way. But this is a reason to be mildly perturbed over Harbaugh, not trying to kick him out of the building as some of the more reactionary Ravens fans have been doing<\/a>. Take a pill, give Harbaugh credit for building a team regularly in position to have huge leads, and work on evening things out over time. Lord knows they\u2019ll have another chance to prove they can hold onto a big lead soon enough.<\/p>\n Destruction of a Dynasty?<\/p>\n Kansas City Chiefs fans can be maybe a little more agitated, but if people could cut out the \u201cthe dynasty is over<\/a>!\u201d chat, that would be great, thanks. The string of luck that Kansas City had last season, with all the one-score game shenanigans going their way, was never going to continue, and the Chiefs still turned in a strong offensive performance despite their gameplan immediately going haywire with Xavier Worthy<\/a> being knocked out of the game early. No, the problem isn\u2019t the loss \u2013 it\u2019s the fact that the loss hit most of the pre-season worries so squarely on the nose. It\u2019s not so much jumping to conclusions, then \u2013 pessimistic Chiefs fans were already here months ago and are just watching the rest of the fan base catch up to them now.<\/p>\n There were worries about the Chiefs\u2019 receiving corps, as their plan to fix last year\u2019s problems was basically to do nothing, hoping that the trio of Worthy, Marquise Brown<\/a> and Rashee Rice<\/a> would finally get together after never seeing the field simultaneously in 2024. Maybe that will work, eventually, but Rice\u2019s suspension already had them on the back foot there, and now Worthy\u2019s dislocated shoulder puts that further in jeopardy. Kansas City really didn\u2019t do much to bolster that corps, with Jalen Royals<\/a>, fighting through knee tendinitis being the only new face on the roster. With so many players out, Patrick Mahomes<\/a> and the offense were forced to try to scrape together a passing attack, with uninspiring results. Sure, Hollywood Brown got to 100 receiving yards, but most of that came on one miracle fourth-down heave late in the game \u2013 his -24.5% receiving DVOA and 43.8% success rate are both not going to cut it going forward. Depth continues to be a significant concern here, and Friday did not provide any real confidence that the Chiefs have gotten out of the purgatory they\u2019ve been in the last two years at the wideout position.<\/p>\n The revamped tackle position may need to continue to be revamped, as well. Jawaan Taylor<\/a>\u2018s time at right tackle may need to end sooner rather than later \u2013 he\u2019s taken an early lead in the penalty race once more, getting hit twice for holding and twice for false starts. It\u2019s almost unimaginable that Kansas City would let him threepeat as the most penalized player in football, and yet here we are. It already seemed a forgone conclusion that Taylor would be gone at the end of the year, as cutting him after this season will save Kansas City $20 million against the cap, but you could certainly forgive Chiefs fans who were hoping that they\u2019d just leave Taylor in Brazil and slot Jaylon Moore<\/a> in there instead. Moore may not be as good as Taylor on the whole, but he also has a grand total of one career false start flag and zero holds. That sounds really nice right about now. I\u2019d be less concerned about Josh Simmons<\/a>\u2018 rough start \u2013 he\u2019s a rookie and some growing pains are going to happen. But the Taylor experiment has to come to an end sooner rather than later, and I don\u2019t think it would be premature rushing to conclusions to pick now.<\/p>\n But the most concerning thing about the Chiefs\u2019 performance Friday might have been how easy the Chargers seemed to have it, with Los Angeles having the third-highest offensive VOA of the week. When Quentin Johnston<\/a> is suddenly catching everything thrown his way, your defense has to take a long, hard look at itself. Kansas City couldn\u2019t get any pressure on Justin Herbert<\/a> without blitzing, and so they sent extra guys early and often \u2013 16 blitzes against Herbert, with only Daniel Jones<\/a> facing more in Week 1. That left the secondary on an island maybe a bit more than Steve Spagnuolo would have liked, leading to the young secondary (and especially Chamarri Conner<\/a>) getting roasted multiple times by both Johnston and Ladd McConkey<\/a>. This is probably the spot where it\u2019s a bit too early to panic, as the secondary is young and might just need some time to gel, but the lack of a pass rush isn\u2019t great. The Chiefs\u2019 high pressure rate in 2024 (35%, fourth in the league) was mostly prompted by heavy blitzing, and if they have to rely on that again, they need that secondary to get its act together, and fast. It\u2019s certainly far too early to panic in Kansas City \u2013 they have far too long of a track record to be hitting the alarm after one loss to a division rival \u2013 but they\u2019ll have to earn victories more in 2025 than they did last year. And, of the three top teams that lost in Week 1, they\u2019re the most likely to find themselves in an 0-2 hole to start the year as the Eagles come to town this week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Week 1 of the 2025 NFL season is in the books, and it\u2019s time to hate everything.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":357080,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2071],"tags":[146,113,2506,7,6170,147,6],"class_list":{"0":"post-357079","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-detroit-lions","8":"tag-detroit","9":"tag-detroit-lions","10":"tag-detroitlions","11":"tag-football","12":"tag-football-outsiders","13":"tag-lions","14":"tag-nfl"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/115180555759730207","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=357079"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357079\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/357080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=357079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=357079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=357079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"BALTIMORE,](\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Derrick-Henry.jpg\")
BALTIMORE, MD \u2013 SEPTEMBER 29: Baltimore Ravens running back Derrick Henry (22) runs up the sideline during an NFL game between the Buffalo Bills and the Baltimore Ravens on September 29, 2024, at M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore, MD. (Photo by Charles Brock\/Icon Sportswire)<\/p>\n