The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL - Cold Takes Revisited

Episode Date: May 7, 2025

Almost every take comes scorching hot, right out of the oven. Some of them get cold awfully fast. But the good news about those cold takes is that we can learn a thing or two from them! So, what did our cold takes from 2024 teach us about the NFL and the way we think about it? Robert Mays and Derrik Klassen dig back in the shadowy past and bring it to light on this episode of The Athletic Football Show.Rundown The Jaguars are a playoff-quality team The Texans offense is elite Giants over Broncos and Commanders in the Wins Pool Everything about the Commanders Missing on the Eagles and Vikings defense Buying Jerod Mayo and the Patriots defense More pass-catchers is always good! (Stefon Diggs and Keenan Allen additions) Where was our 49ers doubt?Host: Robert MaysCo-Host: Derrik KlassenExecutive Producer: Michael BellerProducer: Michael BellerSubscribe to The Athletic Football Show...⁠⁠Apple⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠Follow Robert on Bluesky: @robertmays.bsky.socialFollow Derrik on Bluesky: @qbklass.bsky.socialFollow Robert on X: @robertmaysFollow Derrik on X: @QBKlassTheme song: HauntedWritten by Dylan Slocum, Trevor Dietrich, Ruben Duarte, Kyle McAulay, and Meredith VanWoert / Performed by Spanish Love SongsCourtesy of Pure Noise / By arrangement with Bank Robber Music, LLC Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Athletic Football Show. I'm Robert Mays. Today we're having some tough conversations. This is our Cold Takes Revisited show. We did this last off season, going back and kind of digging through forensically the biggest misses that we had in predicting the previous season. So we had a bunch of them this year. Both Derek and I were very wrong about Washington. We were pretty wrong about the Eagles. Derek said the Jags were going to be a playoff team. I said the Texans were going to go to the Super Bowl. So there are a lot of misses that we're going to chat through today, you know, as a way to punish ourselves and keep us accountable, but also hopefully as a way to learn some lessons that we can take with us moving forward so we don't do the same thing again. So let's get to that conversation with Derek Classen right now. It's a day of atonement on the athletic football show. We're going to have some mea copas this afternoon.

We did the show last year. I really enjoyed doing it. I think it's a good way to create an error of accountability. but also to potentially learn some things. So here to help me dig into our cold, cold takes from the 2024 preseason. It is my co-host here at the Athletic Football Show. Derek, how you doing it, man? So it's a fun one.

Going back and looking at some of the, you're trying to gather material for this. It's just like some of them I knew I said, right? Like I knew, we'll get to them. But I knew I already had those were not some of my best takes. And then you look back at some of your old notes from, you know, season previews and all that jazz and you're like, I really said that? Why did I believe that?

So you kind of learn about yourself and like what are some of the traps that I tend to fall into and what are the ones I need to maybe avoid this off season? And that's what we're trying to do today. This is not about self-flagellation. This is about trying to be better moving forward and how we can take some of these lessons

and potentially apply them to the 2025 season and beyond. I don't want to get too far into that today. Like there are going to be a couple instances where maybe I allude, to a couple of teams that could fall into similar buckets as we look forward to 2025. It's May 6th. We don't have to start previewing the 2025 season quite yet, but trying to figure out what the potential themes might be.

And again, some of the potential lessons to learn from an exercise like this, I think it's good. I enjoyed doing it last year. I got a lot out of it. And as long as we're doing this show, I think it's probably an offseason exercise. We will make annual because there's a lot to be taken from it. There always is. And it's funny, too, because you see some of these. and you're like, oh man, I can't make that mistake again.

And then you look at some of them, you're like, maybe I would and maybe it just went wrong. Like you try to cope yourself out of it, even though it obviously was terrible. I'm going to put your feet to the fire first here because among all of these, I feel comfortable saying this. I think the first one we're about to dig into that's yours

is probably the most egregious out of all of these on several different fronts. The take itself, but also a couple bumper stickers that we've pulled from the take is probably the worst thing that's on your record for 2025. That or you deciding that everyone in Washington should be written off

before the season even starts. But we're going to get into that. That one was maybe my stronger one in terms of like how bad it actually looked because they were obviously so successful. But at least everyone got that wrong, right? At least you were in a bucket with most other people. This first one, this is squarely at your feet here

as we dig into it. Yeah, this followed my theme of the entire off season. I was just like betting on the quarterbacks, I think, are good. And in a lot of ways, that worked out for me. It did not work out for me with the Jacksonville Jaguars. I thought, well, I thought two things. The first step is I thought they would be a playoff team. So like that is obviously the part where this looks really, really bad. I think I had them maybe as to succeed in the AFC wild card, which the AFC wild card in general, by the way, was a nightmare. I think I had Bengals, Jaguars, Jets, and obviously none of them made it. I don't know if anyone going into

the season really got the AFC wild card rate. But that was a lot. obviously terrible. But the second part of the take was it's going to be good because they're going to be good because they can't get worse. Like 2022 is just like, or 2023, I was just like, man, so many things went wrong for them, all these injuries. Like, you know, like it just felt like 2024 had to be the year like, ah, they'll rebound. They have enough adults in the room here. They've got enough talent. And then it just, none of that came to fruition. The offensive line was worse. None of the defense came together. And I was excited about the defense. They'd hired Ryan Nielsen from the Falcons who had done some really cool stuff.

They brought in a lot of guys I liked, like Eric Armstead. And it just, none of the things I thought were going to be good about that team were good, except for like Brian Thomas Jr. was way better than we thought he was going to be. That was really the only silver lining. It was the only thing. Every once in a while, you'll stumble into one of these and you'll be so wrong about a team. And it's because they had a devastating amount of injuries of their quarterback got hurt. Trevor Lawrence only played 10 games. The Jags were two and eight in those 10 games.

that Trevor Lawrence played. So this was a problem before Trevor Lawrence got hurt. Pretty much from the jump, this was not looking great. I'm curious, was there a moment at some point in the first month of the season or even earlier than that where you were like, oh, I've made a grave mistake here? I'm trying to think. It was probably... The Cleveland game was pretty unwatchable.

The Cleveland game was pretty bad. There was also they played the Packers. definitely in the first half of the season because Trevor was still playing. It was in week eight. Yeah, okay, week eight. So this was like right before he ended up playing.

He threw a couple of interceptions in that game that were just like, all right, you are clearly trying to do things that are outside of your capability because you feel like that's the only way to win here. And that was coupled with the fact that like Brian Thomas Jr., I think at that stage was a good player, but still you could tell

was not on the same page with Lawrence. So you had this mix of like, He wasn't on the same page with his best receiver. The offensive line was still terrible. And also, he was clearly trying to do things that were a little bit too aggressive, trying to guess coverages a little bit to try to get out ahead of it. And he just, he was wrong a few times. And he got bit.

And I think McKinney got him for, I don't know if he ran it back for a pick six, but I know for sure he picked him off. The problem with the Jags, even if the offense stagnated a little bit, fell short of what you thought it might be in the same way they have for the last couple years. You know, I remember going into the 23 season, and I was really bullish on their offense because of what they had done down the back half of the 22 season. You looked at those numbers. I remember the Ravens game really sticks out and even just everything Trevor Lawrence did in the last two months of that year.

I think it really, the arrow was pointed out for what they could be in 23. And then it kind of fell apart. The running game was awful. I mean, it was one of the more frustrating offenses I can remember watching. And we'll talk about another one that I think is similar with the 2024 Texans here in a second. The defense last year for the Jags, that's where things were just shocking from the get-go. And I know Tyson Campbell was hurt for the first month of the season, essentially. But other than that, this is a defense that I think people thought would at least be competent,

if not on the verge of potentially being good. And during that stretch of the year, they were probably the worst defense in the entire league. So this was coming at you from all directions, unfortunately, if you were somebody who had any Jags stock last year. The way that Jags defense ended up playing out was they had, I think a solid, they had a good ed room. Like Josh Heinz Allen and Trayvon Walker are actually a pretty good edge duo. Almost everything else, including Tyson Campbell, obviously being hurt, was just not good enough. Like the safety play, I don't think they were playing very well last year. We never really got the step that we won out of Devin Lloyd.

And then Foyer is a fine linebacker, but if he's like your third best defender, your defense is not very good. And then the interior of their defensive line was despite all of the investments among the worst in the league. Like whether it was their draft picks not playing quite well, Eric Armstead, obviously coming in and like kind of being an edge, kind of being an interior player. They didn't know what they wanted to do with him. It just unsettled. Unsettled. Yes, that is the best way to put it.

And so like honestly, outside of the two edge guys, they just weren't getting a whole out of play from almost anybody on the roster for large stretches of the year. All right. What can we learn from this? What can you take from the 2024 Jaguars experience to potentially project it moving forward so you don't make the same mistake again, whether it be about this team or another team that shares some characteristics and qualities to them. I'll start with each side of the ball one lesson.

I think with the, they were a bad enough team that they deserve that. For the offense, I would say it was probably a couple things. One, I still think Trevor is very good. He is probably not in the tier of quarterback that is going to lift dog shit environment into something else. Like, he probably just isn't that level of player. And that's fine.

You can still be a very successful team without that. She's probably not like a top seven guy, which is, which is fun. So I probably overestimated him there. And then the offensive line, I think I sold myself a story a little bit on like, oh, it'll be fine. They'll get away with this. They'll get away with that. And then one thing goes wrong.

Anton Harrison doesn't play quite as well as you want in his second year. And it just all collapses. And they're one of the worst offensive lines. So that's probably what I get from the offense. From the defense, it was probably getting a little bit too in front of my skis with what Ryan Nielsen was going to be. Like he did some cool stuff in Atlanta. right. But that still wasn't a great defense. And I think he was kind of just doing a lot of the stuff that

you know, the cover six quarter quarter half stuff that a lot of the other league was doing. So he wasn't doing a lot of stuff that was necessarily unique. It just felt like it was put together. And I think as soon as he went to a new environment, it collapsed very quickly. And I think I should probably be I guess it's more that I just want a little bit more proof of concept maybe from these coordinators before I go like fully diving into like, man, that guy's going to be awesome at his next spot. we're going to dig into this with a bunch of different teams. But just admitting that it's very hard to predict what sort of impact and new play caller on either side of the ball will have, that's a common theme with all of this.

And you can take that a bunch of different directions. Ryan Nielsen, I think, is a very good example where he did a good job in Atlanta. That was a defense that was better than its talent, better than based on the numbers than at any right to be. So you'd assume, all right, similar sort of performance with Jacksonville might have a similar sort of impact on that talent, which is solid, and that's going to be an average to above average defense. And that calculation just didn't play out.

And this happens all over the place. We'll talk about Vic Fangio and Sean Payton. I don't think we really knew what to make of either of those guys heading into last year. Cliff Kingsbury is another example of this. There's so many guys where a new play caller in a new environment on either side of the ball, even a guy with a track record, without a track record, I think it's sometimes difficult to know what the performance is going to look like in different circumstances. circumstances over multiple years. And I think that leads to some pretty serious missteps. And,

you know, there are times where you think, okay, there's bet on the talent. Well, the Bucks were a top five offense last year with most of the same talent that they had in the previous year, but they had a new coordinator. Like, it's just really difficult to piece together all of these different factors. And that's why in a league where there are only 16 games and I think coaches can have an outsized impact both good and bad, it can be really, really difficult to pin down who's going to be good and who's going to be bad when there are a bunch of changed out components from year to year, especially on the coaching staff. And with the young guys like Nielsen, it can be hard sometimes because you want to be ahead of it

and find like, okay, who is the next guy? Whereas like some of the other coordinators, like Vic Fangio, it was less like, is he going to be good? It was more just like, does he still have it? Because he'd obviously been out of it for a long time. And so it's just a different calculus that sometimes with that. My next one, or my first one here, everything about the Houston Texans offense and just the Houston, I guess mostly the Houston Texans offense, but their offense and as a result, their season long projections, I was wrong about this. And we've talked about why this happened

with the Texans. We've talked about it ad nauseum, the struggles along the offensive line, the struggles in past protection, the run game never finding its footing in a way similar to its inability to do so in 2024. My question for you is, not why did this happen? Because I think we know why it happened. Should we have been able to see this coming more than we did for last year's Texans? As somebody who picked them to be, I think, the number two offense in the league to go to the Super Bowl, I get why that didn't happen. Should we have been able to identify it from a little bit further away in your estimation? I think the bottom falling out the way it did would have been really hard to predict because they went from a pretty exciting offense in

2023 and then obviously you just think the quarterback's going to be even better you've got this ascending receiver you just think it's going to keep going up and so even if we got a little over our skis with how good they were going to be like you know us predicting them maybe top five toxic offense maybe that was a little bit too enthusiastic but i just think predicting how much the bottom was going to fall out was was going to be hard because the offensive line went i mean they they just completely collapsed into one of the worst units in the NFL and so i do think there was an element coming off of 2023 where it was like almost like the Nielsen thing like I just said Sloick wasn't doing a lot of interesting stuff I would say he was just playing the Shanahan

hits and it was just kind of working and their run game last year wasn't very good in 2023 and the offensive line was more okay than anything and I think maybe if we were trying to bake in a little bit of caution it should have just been like hey the ceiling might still be limited because we didn't see that much from the play caller and the offensive line probably isn't going to be better. But again, predicting that the bottom was going to fall out like this and that they would be a bottom eight unit, I think that would have been like impossible. The offensive line, that's one I think was really difficult to see coming because they were

the most injured offensive line in the NFL in 2023 and they were still a middle of the road offense. So you could expect better offensive line play in theory because they were going to be getting some of their guys back. That obviously didn't happen. And it's kind of all over the place as to why. obviously the past protection plans were bad, but Shaq Mason was just a demonstrably worse player,

even if you isolate for that kind of stuff, last year than he was the year before. And I think you can say that about a lot of the guys in the line. All of them are the worst versions of themselves. But with him specifically, I think there was a little bit of decline just as a player combined with some of the ecosystem concerns. So that's why this is hard.

It's like, well, how much is the environment? How much is the player just getting older? So I think the offensive line for Houston, and it was coming at them from several different directions. I think there are a few elements to the underlying numbers from 2023 that maybe should have given us and given me more pause as we were projecting them moving forward. They were 16th in offensive success rate in 2020. Like just firmly in the middle.

They were third in explosive play rate. And we knew that and we talked about that coming into the season, right? We knew that they were going to need to be more consistent down to down if they were going to go from an exciting offense to one. of the best offenses in the league. And I think it's natural when you look at a team going from year one to year of a new system to just bake in a little bit of improvement and progress in areas like that. And they knew that. Like talking to those guys in the summer, it's like, yeah, we were explosive last year.

We weren't as efficient as we want to be. So here's X, Y, and Z how we're going to try to do that. So it's like, okay, they know that. Let's bake in some of that. Let's have them go from the 16th in offensive success rate to ninth an offensive success rate, it still be a top five explosive offense with a better offensive line because they're healthier and a quarterback who's going to take a step from year one to year two, it's easy to get yourself there. It's not that hard. The problem is, and I think this is the lesson, that growth is never

linear. It's never as linear as we want it to be. This idea that in year one, you're going to be here on a little X, Y axis, and in year two, you're going to be here. It's just going to go up at the same rate because, well, obviously, the young players are going to get better. The young quarterback is going to get better. That doesn't always happen. There are times where a unit or a player or a play caller can take you by storm in year one. And then for a bunch of different reasons, things fall off in year two. The league catches up. They don't innovate a bunch of different things.

So I think that was the problem is that I looked at all of these numbers. And even if there were some that might indicate they weren't as good in 23 as we wanted them to be, there was still reason to believe those things might get better and other things that they were good at might stay the same. That line of thinking, oh, the bad stuff will be better. Good stuff will still be good. That leads to a lot of mistakes that I have personally made. And I think that this is another one of those examples. That's what June is for.

And I think what you're describing is significantly easier when it is this young quarterback that we're excited about. Because we're just like, oh, we're so excited about him and what he can be and all this stuff that we kind of will the other things around him to be better than they might be. And like, I've done this with Trevor. Certainly. I'm probably doing it again with Drake May. but like this is something that happens when you get a quarterback that so clearly you think has all of this talent and all this ability.

You just want you kind of tell yourself that the other stuff will be better. And it doesn't even mean that the player isn't who you think he is like. CJ Stroud, I think we came into the year being like he is a top 10 quarterback. Maybe he'll get better. I wouldn't say he got better last year. I would still say he played like a top 10 quarterback individually for a large part of the season until it, everything completely kind of cratered for them. And so I just think we can fall into the trap with the young quarterback. specifically of like he's going to be good so everything else will be it's it's hard for those guys

to truly lift unless you are like you know second year lamar jackson or or patrick mohams and even then when you have protection concerns and protection deficiencies it can be really easy for the house of cards to kind of fall apart and it can be easy for a quarterback to not be able to transcend those even if he is a really good player and we think he's going to be a really good player i still feel like c j stroud's going to be a very good NFL quarterback i think he'll make a bunch of pro bowl I think he'll lead some really good offenses, but obviously in year two, that growth was not where we wanted it to be. Getting back to the Trevor Lawrence thing, and I just wanted to say this very quickly, because I think a couple shows ago, when I just didn't immediately throw him into the group of quarterbacks that could make the Eagles a contender.

Jacks fans got pissed off, which is fine. Part of that is that I feel like I've needed to take a more Trevor pessimistic stance on this show because you're in the other chair and someone needs to be a conduit for the audience. But the other part of this is I haven't given up on him. Because I think there are examples here. And the best example to me is Matthew Stafford. I remember so vividly the year that Matthew Stafford was available, or we thought Matthew Stafford would potentially be traded. And talking to people in the NFL that could have acquired Matthew Stafford and some of the concerns

about, oh, you know, if he was really that good, would they have one more? If he was really that good, would the offense have been better? If you look at those offenses in Detroit, I mean, we're talking about average to slightly below average offenses for a really long time. Matthew Stafford was drafted in 2009 and was traded to the 2021 Rams, and I still don't think we truly understood what Matthew Stafford was in that moment when he was traded. And I'm not saying that Trevor Lawrence is Matthew Stafford. I'm just saying that circumstances around quarterbacks for most quarterbacks are actually

more impactful than we think they are. Even at this stage, when we talk about them so often and at such length, I still think we actually underrate how important they are and how much impact they have for a vast majority of the guys who play the position. And I still think that Trevor Lawrence could be one of those people. I don't know how much it's going to change, but I think you could absolutely make a straight-faced argument and say, we have not seen the best version of him yet because of what he's been surrounded with. I don't think we have either. And because of how young he still is, like he's the guy who came into the league as a three-year player.

like he's still very young and so I am probably doing the thing again this offseason where I'm going to try to sell myself on on what the Jaguars are doing and say that it's going to work out and all that stuff. I'm not doing that yet. I probably will. Probably not to the same degree.

I think I'm not going to call them a playoff team but I still think Trevor is, I do think there is something to, so Trevor Lawrence has never looked outright bad. And I think the guys who can clearly stay around for a long time and look at the very least competence despite all of their surroundings, that is always a guy who's going to get a lot of chances. And I think bringing it back to the CJ Strathen, just to put a bow on this, again,

when you can't necessarily account for all the things that are going to be happening around a quarterback, and all of those things are probably more influential on a quarterback's performance than we like to admit or acknowledge. When all of that stuff craters, the quarterback is going to get pulled down. And I think that I just didn't expect it to crater to that level for us to kind of have the final product that we did with last year's Texas. offense and just last year with the Texans in general. There's me one more Texans offense point, but I'm going to tie it into something else when we get a little bit deeper into this.

What is your next one? Let's see. I'm trying to see which one I want to dig into here. Okay. So last year we did the team's draft, right? We'll do it again this year. It was a very good time. For the most part, I did pretty good there.

However, when we were picking our bad teams, which was what under six and a half wins, projected win total, I believe, per Vegas. the two teams I picked were the Patriots and the Giants. Now the Patriots, I knew that was dumb, but I just wanted to be invested in Drake May. And I was like, I realized this is not the best choice, but this is what I want to do. The other team I picked was the New York Giants,

which is terrible in and of itself. I don't even think I believed in them that much, but I just was like, neighbors will be fun, all this stuff. But I picked them over both Denver and Washington. Not good choices. Both of them were playoffs. teams. Both of them had very exciting rookie quarterbacks. Both of them had defenses that were better than they were probably supposed to be. Like they checked every single box and the Giants ended up being,

I mean, maybe the most embarrassing team in the league. Let's take these individually. I don't want to do Washington now because both of us were very wrong about Washington. Yeah, we've got another one on that. Yeah. I want to hit that in tandem. So let's take the Giants part of this and the Broncos part of this, which was something else I wanted to hit on this show individually. What about the Giants do you think you miscalculated heading into last season. I think I probably had a little bit more faith that the pass rush was going to be good. And it wasn't bad, obviously. And then obviously Dexter Lawrence gets hurt.

So some stuff kind of fell away from them there. But I thought maybe we were going to get more out of Tibido. And I thought the rest of the front was going to be more helpful and that they would be not a great defense because the secondary thought of a lot of questions, but at least like a pretty functional unit. And then offensively, I don't know why I told myself this, but I believed that they could get something similar to what the 2022 offense was where it's just like, okay, we can gum all this stuff together. And we have our one explosive guy, obviously in 2022, it was Sequin, 24, it was

Malik Neighbors. And I was like, this will be enough. And then very obviously the season goes along and it just wasn't nearly enough. And I was just betting on getting the best that we'd ever seen out of that version of the offensive line and that quarterback happening again. And like chances are, it was probably just not going to happen again. Where do you stand on, Brian? Dable as the way we're going to talk about this at some point in the show just the idea of play callers as multipliers what are you doing with the talent that you have and how much are you getting out of that group compared to what an average coach would where do you stand on Brian Dable's kind of place in the hierarchy of offensive play callers and his ability to do that this is a genuine

question yeah I don't really think he's that level of of difference maker and I don't think he's like an actively bad play caller right like I think I think in a given time in the league there probably like seven-ish, like truly special play callers. There's like 20 guys in the middle. And then there are four or five that are just like, oh my God, it's very obvious that he's going to be replaced. Where I've gotten with Dable is he's probably somewhere closer to the middle. It's just that he's not a guy who moves the needle for me anymore.

And I think for a while I gave him some benefit of the doubt from it or for it because obviously did really good work. He was around the Josh Allen development arc, which I do think there is something to just being one of the guys in the building for that. And then that 2022 year, he got out of Daniel Jones. where even though it was so limited by Jones, it was probably the best that he'd ever played in the NFL. And so it's like, okay, they're doing something here.

But I just, other than that, haven't seen enough out of dable that makes me convinced that he's one of the best guys right now. Let's get to the Broncos. What do you think we missed about the Broncos? Is there something about the construction of that team, some of the things they showed us in 2023, that would lead you to believe they could have the season

that they did last year and we just didn't pick up on it? I think a lot of it was just how good do you think Bo Nix was going to be at some point. And for six weeks, he wasn't good at all. And then he honestly turned it on and honestly became a pretty good player. I think the other part of it, and we talked about this a lot during the season, they were the best past protecting unit in football. And I think part of that was they did a really good job of tying together some of their run stuff and being in good down in distances, using RPO's and screens to really keep defenses guessing.

And I think there was some element of that. you could have expected out of Sean Payton rate, like he has been a very good play caller for a long time, the degree to which that worked for them, I think would have been pretty hard to predict given what we knew about the team. So I would say that's where it was, is that the offensive line as the past protecting unit

was just way better than I thought it was going to be. And then Knicks played pretty competent football for the second half of the season. I think those are good things to point out. The quality of the offensive line and a misjudgment on that heading into the year leads to a lot of this. Washington is a good example of it, which we'll get to in a second.

Like, their offensive line was better than we thought. That was for like schematic reasons. The Broncos were just a really good unit in a way that we couldn't really have anticipated. So I think that lifted the floor of the offense. With a rookie quarterback, it's always hard to know. And I think he played, Bo Nix played much better last year, especially over the final two-thirds of the season. I think a lot of people could have anticipated coming into the year.

He ran that offense very well. And then the offense was just better constructed than I think we could have anticipated, based on everything that had happened in 2023 with Russ. And they had more useful players than it seemed like they did. Like Marvin Mims actually. Way better. Right. Mims becoming what he was was a shock given what he was as a rookie. Devon Velae just randomly being kind of useful for them as an undrafted rookie or late round pick.

And then Sutton being like playing probably the best ball of his career after like having a few years where he was a little bit up and down. Like he just almost every part of this offense was just the best versions of themselves. The Sean Payton question and the Sean Peyton like, of considerations, I think is something that we probably take something from moving forward. One down year, relatively, does not extinguish a decade plus of track record. One down year where he obviously hated the quarterback that he was. Yes. Yes. And I think that's sometimes, I'm guilty of this, being a little bit too reactive to one season.

The Vic Fangio thing is another good example of this. Like, Vic Fangio was a great defensive play call for so long. He has one down year in Miami, and then he comes to Philly, and it's like, okay, like, what is Vic Fangio now at this point in his career? And sometimes that can get you into trouble because you give guys or teams the benefit of the doubt beyond when they deserve it, and then you're wrong on the other side of it. But I think not being too reactionary to one down year for a guy who's been really good at his job for a decade plus when some of the circumstances are changing, quarterback, team, etc.

that's something that I think we should probably learn from being too low in the Broncos offense. On the other side of the ball, the defense is the best part of this team. And that I think was maybe even a little bit harder to see coming in some ways. The exception to that is if you look at the back half of the season numbers from 2023, I remember the 70 point game. It's not that far away where that happened and we all watched it. So I think that part of it where the Broncos were historically bad on defense for a month, kind of colored what the entire 2023 season felt like, even though they were much, much better in the second half of the year. If you look at 10 weeks 10 through 18 and 2023, the Broncos were a top 10 defense by EPA per play.

Sometimes that should be a signal, but it isn't always. There are times where you see that sort of improvement and it doesn't necessarily lead to better things the following year. So maybe there were a couple little things you could have picked up on about why the Broncos defense would be better. But I don't necessarily think they were so overt that I'm kicking myself for missing them. I think the front came together in a way that would have been hard to anticipate. You guys take a step on that side of the ball. Your Nick Benito's, etc.

Jonathan Cooper played a really good football for them last season. So their defense, having the rise that it did, played a huge role in the Broncos being the team they were last year. I just think that picking up on that or expecting them to be that good on that side of the ball would have been hard to do coming into the season. I absolutely think it would have been hard to do. If anything, maybe I underrated how good the front might be. Because Zach Allen, even though he played his best ball in 2024, he was already a good

player. DJ Jones was already a good player. Benito was a good player. They had a lot of good. It was just, is anyone going to be great? I don't know. I don't feel bad about betting on the secondary the way I did. Like in terms of not knowing what we were going to get.

Like, I think the safety room was a huge question mark. We didn't know what the hell we were going to get from their second outside corner spot. obviously Certan is the best corner in the league, so we knew that was good. We had no idea what we were going to get out of Riley Moss. And he played really well for six, eight weeks. And then he was kind of just okay. But even that was significantly better than I think what we thought we might have got out of that room.

So that's probably what we miss with the defense, if anything. It's funny because if you go back and you listen to our Broncos preview heading into the year, I was actually really bullish on the front. I thought they could be a really good unit. And I probably should have listened to myself more than in. in projecting what kind of defense they would be overall than I actually did in the moment. But even as somebody who was excited about that group, I still think it would have been hard to pin down them being a top three defense over the course of the year based on how the entire

23 campaign had gone, even if they got a little bit better over the course of the season. You had like a very curious optimism about them where you were like, I kind of think that this could be really good. But it wasn't like, I know that this is going to be good and I want to bet on it. Because again, I think it was hard to forget that 70 point game. saw a couple of guys you were trying to see what their next step was. When you're talking about a team in those terms, like, all right, maybe they can be the 12th best defense in the league.

And if they're the 18th to 20th best offense, which they were a middle of the pack offense. They weren't that good on that side of the ball when you look at the numbers. The defense is what was exceptional about them. It was just way more exceptional than I think I ever could have predicted. All right, we're going to take a quick break, and then we're going to come back and talk about the team we got wrong in the NFC wildcard race. All right, both of us are,

I'm going to be taken to task on this one. We both got Jaden Daniels and everything about the Washington Professional Football franchise wrong last year. Where do you want to start? What element of this do you think is the most interesting? Is it the Jaden Daniels part of it? I mean, it has to be. And I would have been, so trying to think about how I want to approach this.

I did not think Jaden Daniels was a bad prospect. I thought, I just thought he would be like Tairad Taylor-ish. And I think people took that a really wrong way. but Tyrone Taylor at a certain point had put together some like top 12 offenses for the bills. He stuck around for a long time. I thought he would be like that quality of player. Obviously, he ended up way better than that. And the hardest part of this that is going to be the hardest part of this for me to ever live down is that I think there was a report a month before the draft that Washington was looking to draft Jayton Daniels over Drake May.

And I just straight up called them incompetent. Like I just said that that was a completely incompetent thing to say. And I still believe that Drake May is the better player. But like, Jaden Daniels is obviously in the same category of player where he is a franchise shifting quarterback. And I was a little bit too aggressive with that one, I think. You think Drake May was a better player last year than Jaden Daniels?

Well, okay. I mean, last year probably not, but like long term, May is still a player. Okay, okay. I wanted you to clarify that stance. I'll concede how insane he was last year. Yeah, okay. So you would rather,

You would bet on Drake May over the next five years, but you can concede that Jaden Daniels was better last season. Yes, he had one of the best rookie seasons I've ever seen. I mean, it's probably him, Dak, Herbert, Luck. Like that, I mean, that's probably the list, right? Yes. That's why I wanted to give you an opportunity to potentially backtrack that comment a tiny bit

before we moved on. I still, you know, like I said, I'm still in on Drake May, but it's, it's, uh, Jaden was incredible. This framing of it, I think, is, fine. I think this saves you a little bit. I was just trying to throw you a little life raft as you're kind of driving there. I do appreciate it. Otherwise, I was going to get clipped in a pretty bad way. Exactly. Exactly. So I, we've talked about the Jane Daniels as part of this a lot. I don't think we have to rehash all of this. But the way that I was wrong about Jane Daniels, I think it was a couple different things.

Coming in, I was a little bit worried that there were elements of his game. There were a little bit too robotic, right? In the same way that Jay and Hertz is a little bit robotic. Justin Fields is a little bit robotic. I saw elements. of his game that reminded me a little bit of that. And that worried me a little bit. He didn't make plays as a creator, as a passer in college. When he was pressured, he scrambled. So that element of it to me is like, that element of his game is just kind of missing. And that worries me a little bit. And you watch him play in the league. That wasn't untrue. He was just so good at everything else that it turned out not to matter. And I think that's what I got wrong about Jaden Daniels. It wasn't that I was wrong about some of the relative weaknesses he was bringing in because I do think some of those are still relative weaknesses.

He takes sacks every once in a while. He's not a crater. He scrambles a lot. He's not a creative passer. He scrambles a lot. But the strengths are so pronounced that it ends up overshadowing the weaknesses by such an extreme degree. I think it's two different things. He is an exceptional scrambler, right?

Like one of the best scramblers we've ever seen in terms of his ability to wiggle out of harm's way, the way that he can escape out of the best. back of the pocket and get away from pressure, all that kind of stuff. And he's decisive. He doesn't dilly dally. Like, he just goes. That kind of plays into this part of it. What he does as a decision maker and how quickly he processes stuff and how fast he makes those decisions, especially when teams are bringing extra bodies at him. That is something I just didn't account for. And that is such an overwhelming strength of who he is that it kind of makes all of the other stuff matter way, way less and almost become inconsequential. And And I think that's why I'm so bullish on him moving forward and why I'm so excited about

him because you see how quickly the decisions happen and how confident he is in them, how assertive he is in the way that he plays. That's just something that isn't really going to go away. That's something that is shared by all the best quarterbacks in the league, no matter what their play style is. And I think he has that. And I think that's why I'm so excited about him. I just didn't know he had it to that degree coming into the league.

That's the thing is that for me, for some of the weaknesses, I thought he had, which were kind of pocket management and then throwing over the middle of the field. And I still think that those are relatively the weaker parts of his game. It's just not what he does at the high level right now, even if he was slightly better towards the back half of the year at that stuff than he was early on. I just thought, okay, if he's going to have those weaknesses, you better be an S-tier player at the other stuff. And then he was.

And it's just like, okay, well, then you can get away with being this way. I think the other thing I probably didn't appreciate enough coming out of college was, okay, I knew he was a really good scrambler and I knew he generally made good decisions with the ball. But when I was, I was actually rewatching one of his games the other day and it dawned on me that,

okay, if you are a special scrambler and you never throw the ball to the other team, your team is just going to have the ball all of the time. And so you just get more bites at the apple at putting up points.

And it kind of dawned on me. I was like, man, that is a pretty special combination of traits to have. And it's honestly what, it's part of what's made Josh Allen work,

right? is that he used to, okay, be an elite scrammer, but he also would throw the ball at the other team. When he learned to stop doing that a little bit less, he became a truly dangerous player. And so, Jaden Dan was walking into the league with that combo. It's like, okay, that's, again, that's probably not going to go away either

until, you know, he's 30 and his legs finally start to give. I like this because I actually think that's a reason we underrate Jalen Hertz in some ways. Early in the season last year, he was turning the ball over too much. But for most of his career, he is somebody that has done a very good job of taking care of the ball. And last year, he was the best scrambler

that he's ever been. So for the back half of last season, when the turnover's dipped again and he was a really good scrambler, you just become this quarterback that becomes such a headache for opposing defenses to deal with because you're always keeping the ball

and you're always keeping possession and you have some of those one, two, three of those backbreaking plays almost every single game. So actually, I think that's a really, really good way of thinking about what makes quarterbacks frustrating and dangerous in ways maybe that aren't so overt

that we're not always noticing. I think Jaden Daniels absolutely falls into that category. Yeah, that was, it was a revelation watching him again a little bit this off season, like coming to the realization of like, that's why it works the way that it does for him. It also helps that he's pretty explosive what he needs to be. Yes, yeah. The fact that again, he's like one of the most explosive scrambleers we've ever seen is part of this. So the Jane Daniels part, it's hard to predict one of the best rookie quarterback seasons we've ever seen.

Even if the rest of it wasn't good. Well, so that's the other part of this is that every once in a while, and this gets back to the play caller thing on offense or defense. When we have guys that we've never seen in this exact role before, and we have never seen Cliff as a offensive coordinator only in the NFL. We have seen him as a play calling head coach when there was a million other things on his plate. Every once in a while, you're going to have guys come in that role, and they're just going to hit immediately because of some of the stuff that they're doing.

And I want to talk about this more in depth at some point this offseason, but like the tempo stuff that Washington does, some of the unique elements of the offense that other teams aren't doing. If you bring a wholly unique approach to the league, you can take the NFL by storm in your first year. We've seen it happen a decent amount of times over the last 10 years. The other three examples I would throw out just kind of off the top of my head, what McVeigh did in year one in 2017. Like, you just never could have anticipated them going from the worst offense in the league, even with a couple personnel upgrades, to what they were in 2017.

The Mike McDaniel Dolphins were like this. They were the 23rd best offense in the league in 2022. He comes in and they're just so difficult to deal with. Obviously, again, you have some personnel upgrades, but how they were approaching this, I think that made them really hard to play against. And the last one I would throw out there, the Chip Kelly Eagles.

Remember, like, when teams are trying to deal with the Chip Kelly Eagles in the first half of that year, they were number one in the league and explosive play rate. Every once in a while, there is a team and a coordinator bringing such a unique approach to things that combine with the, quarterback combined with some of the talent on the roster, they just become really, really hard to deal with over the course of that first season. And I didn't know if Cliff or Washington was going to be that. And they absolutely turned out to be exactly that. I really didn't think they would be either. And I like, it's funny because there were some parts of it that I thought would be good for Jaden Daniels. Like, okay, Cliff being a guy who loves to do some RPO stuff and have some of the spread run game and have just a really full short game spread passing playbook. I was like, okay, that's the stuff that Jaden Daniels is good at. It's him doing some of the protection stuff that I just,

I really didn't think Cliff was going to have that in his bag in terms of protecting the offensive line that he did, mixing and matching like where the tight ends are playing so that they can block. Because sometimes, you know, maybe they would have one on each side of the line of scrimmage and they would both block or maybe one would stay in and one would just chip or they would have, you know, a play where they're in pistol and both tight ends are to the right side.

And they just full slide the line the other way and just have those two guys block one end. And like just the different ways they found to it to manipulate the number counts and keep them in their favor. one was impressive and then two you can get away with it when you don't need as many guys out in the route concept when jaden daniels can just be the checkdown you don't have to think you don't have to think about having as many guys out if this guy can just go be our third option and you know if jaden daniels's legs can be our third progression and if you try to tie together washington and denver

both of those offensive line and protection units played much better than we expected them to denver it was a lot of the players just ended up cohesively playing better than we expected Washington, the schematics, the offensive line coach, what their plan was lifted that group in a way that we didn't expect them to. Teams playing better at front than you can imagine often leads to teams overperforming. And I think both of them are very, very good examples. And then I don't want to not mention Dan Quinn in this because I think this is another lesson to be learned. If you want to throw out the Chargers who made the playoffs last year, we did not pick, neither of us picked them to do that. Sometimes it's just hard to predict what a culture shift will look like in the NFL.

If you can create top to bottom buy-in and you have the requisite amount of talent, then you can do things people never could have anticipated or few people anticipated. And I think that's what happened in Washington to a degree. And that's what happened with the Chargers to a degree. It's like those guys played their asses off and every single one of them was the best version of themselves. And sometimes it's hard to know what sort of influence a coaching change is going to have. But both of those are examples at the high end of the spectrum. Dan Quinn, yeah, him kicking ass.

and really just like getting the culture into the right spot, I think was important. And you saw it in the way that those guys played like obviously. And they made the right signings for that, right? Like Jeremy Chin last year, Frankie Louvre, they went and sought out the right guys to do it. But I, when I looked at the roster coming in, I was just like, man, they're just going to be too slow. Like Bobby Wagner's getting old. Like Benjamin St. Juice was starting a corner. The rest of their corner room didn't look good.

It was like they're just not going to have the speed to, one, be a good defense. And two, play the way that I thought Dan Quinn was going to want to play. And then Dan Quinn played differently than I thought he was going to play. and then they all just played out hair on fire anyway. So Quinn did a fantastic job. He's done really well there. I'm not ready to do this full exercise yet, but I actually,

because I literally do think we can spend a whole show on it, like the teams that, which sort of teams do we underrate, which sort of teams do we overrate and trying to apply that to the 25 season, but that's like a July idea. But trying to figure out teams that have a new play caller and some of them having a new quarterback,

but even just the play caller, we're underrating what sort of impact they're going to have. Because we do this all the time. We did it last year with Washington. We did it last year with the Bucks. So you look at some of these teams like the Raiders, the Bears, the Jags, these teams that had pretty bad offenses last year and now have new play callers. One of these teams is going to be drastically better than we think they're going to be. One of these teams is going to have like the sixth best offense in the league.

I'm not ready to pick who that is quite yet, but it is going to happen because it happens pretty much every single year. Yeah, it really does. And like the the Bucks are such a funny example too because last year obviously the thing was like Oh we didn't know what Cohen was going to be We didn't know how well their offensive line was going to be Can they fix their run game that wasn't that good? And now they've got the same guy who did all that

And he's going to be at a new spot But again you don't know how well it's going to go at that new spot And now he's the head coach And the offensive line talent They didn't quiteably invest as much as the Bucks did like it just The factors change And I think that's why it's such a fun exercise When you look at the top 10 offenses that we picked

I actually got eight of the top 10 offenses I think you were probably in a similar range for the teams that we picked. I got eight of them. The two I didn't were Washington, which we just talked about, and the Bucks. And the Bucks are another good example of this. It's just hard to know who the difference-making coordinators are going to be. The Bucks finished 20th in Offensive DVOA in 2020, 23. 20th.

Their play caller got a head coaching job, and the only personnel changes that they had where they drafted a center in the first round, yeah, historically definitely takes you from the 20th best offense to fifth. And then they signed Ben Bredesen in free agency. Those are the personnel changes. Chris Gowen played 17 games in 2023. And they were a top five offense compared to 20th the year before when their

offensive coordinator got a head coaching job. So it's just hard to pin these things down sometimes. And the only move they made to fix their run game in the running back room was spending a pick on Bucky Irving, who was like a fourth or fifth round pick. And it was just like, yeah, is that really good? Is that in a new center who's going to be a rookie who didn't play center in college? Like, is that really going to be enough? to make you an elite rushing offense

in one of the better spots where, you know, I think in 2023, we were like, okay, the Baker thing and the passing thing is cool, but can that sustain? And then, well, yeah, when the offensive line becomes one of the best and the running game becomes one of the best,

it can sustain. And you're the best screen game. And there's so many different layers to it. It was funny looking back at that top 10 offenses list because, you know, the Eagles, I think we were both relatively down on the Eagles,

all things considered. The Eagles, I had them at 13th on that list. They finished 13th in offensive DVOA. The defense is where we're wrong in the Eagles, which we'll get to in a second. And I even had the Cardinals at 12 and they were 11th. So for the most part, I think there were a lot of hits on that list. But the two that we didn't hit on, I think it's important to acknowledge those.

Let's get to, this is a way to talk about the Eagles, but also a bunch of teams. Looking at the top 10 defenses. I had the Browns and Jets as top 10 defenses heading into last year. The lesson to be learned from that, I don't think is all that interesting, right? defenses are really volatile season to season. In the case of the Browns, when you have an offense that just completely craters, right, just completely craters. And it wasn't good the year before, but last year it was the worst in the league.

It's really hard to maintain a certain level of success on defense. And so I think there are a bunch of different things that played into the Browns not being as good as we thought. The Jets, that entire thing just fell apart over the course of the year. I actually think the more interesting observation is that I didn't have the Eagles or the Vikings on that top 10 list. Why we missed on those, I think is actually probably more, is worth digging into more than why

the Browns and the Jets weren't top 10 defenses. So the Eagles specifically, we talked about this already. I think that we probably underrated the impact that Vig Fangio would have based on what happened in Miami the year before. And it's really difficult to predict what type of impact rookies will have.

Like in your mind, you want to see, okay, we're going to drop Quinnion and Mitchell into one corner spot. We're going to drop Cooper DeGine into the nickel. and then the entire secondary with C.J. Gardner Johnson is just going to be solved. It's going to go from being a unit that was actively bad last year to a unit that is probably the best in the NFL, or at least in the conversation. That's really, really hard to predict. And there are other elements of this, like the Zach Bond part of it, no one. No one in America could predict something like that happening.

And then Jalen Carter takes a huge step. And so when you get to it all at the end of the road, all of those different factors have controlled. you have a team that the bottom fell out of the defense the previous year that ends up becoming the best defense in the NFL and a defense that defines the season and ultimately is the singular and most important reason why they won the Super Bowl. So I think there are some of those things we probably could have picked up on. There are some of them that I think would have been much, much harder to predict. Some of the Eagles stuff, I think we probably did underrate Fangio, but with almost everything else that happened talent-wise with the defense, how can you expect that

you're going to have like, I don't know what. If we rank defensive rookies, you had two of the top five, probably. Like, you're probably not betting on that for almost any rookie draft class. You have the Zach Bond thing. Ncobo Dean finally looks healthy for a lot of this season and takes a step forward. Carter, we maybe could have predicted, but like, if that would have been the only one that we're predicting takes a step, like that wouldn't have been enough to put them in the top eight. We also just talked about this.

Sometimes that's not how it works with young players. He was really good as a rookie, but it's like, oh, he's automatically going to be better. who knows if he's going to be better. We just have no idea. I think what I'm trying to get between linking why we maybe missed on the Browns and Jets and even the Patriots actually to a different degree, because I had them, I think, like my third. And that was before the Barmore thing.

But even then, I think we did a show after that. And I was like, oh, I'd still put them top six. Yeah, I had them in a similar range. So I was also very wrong about that. Yeah. And then, like, trying to tie together some of those misses with some of the ones that we didn't put in, like whether it was the Vikings or a team like this, like the Eagles, with the Jets and actually even the Niners,

who I had some concern with, and the Patriots, a lot of why they weren't as good is they lost what their identity was. Like with the Patriots, it was obviously, okay, you lose Billichick, you just don't have as much cohesion in that sense.

With the Jets, we talked about it going into the year. Okay, if you're going to be this team that wants to do a lot of four-down stuff and you want to be able to defend the run with four, kind of need bigger bodies, you kind of need guys who can kick some ass, And they lost that.

And we showed some concern over it, but it was like, ah, it'll be fine. But then they lost their identity. And then obviously in the second half of the season, they lost a whole bunch of other things. And then with the Vikings, it was like, if you really wanted to, and the Eagles, if you really wanted to buy it, it would be like, man, they're going to really have an identity under Vic Fangio. And then with the Vikings, it's like, okay, they have an identity under Brian Flores. With the other guys, they kind of just lost it, whereas these guys, you knew they were going to have it. The last thing point I make about the Eagles, and I think one of the reasons that we didn't pick the Eagles and the team, draft. We were just skeptical and kind of pessimistic about their season-long outlook is that

I just felt like what happened at the end of the previous year, I thought that they were closer to the brink than they probably were. You swap up both coordinators, you fire those guys, you bring in new guys. I feel like Nick Siriani had a decent amount of pressure on him heading into the year. I think his ability to pull that entire locker room back from the brink and for them to turn it around to the degree that they did, I just underrated their ability and his ability to do that. And I think that they did a really impressive job on that front. And that's why we were just so off on predicting what their season overall was going to look like independent of the quality on offense and defense.

No, that's a really good point though, because I thought he was a little bit more of a, like I just thought it was going to be volatile. And I thought things were crashing a little bit. And I thought, I didn't know if he was going to be able to pick up the pieces. And then it turns out in 2024, he does his best Tomlin act. And he just gets everybody to play their best ball and brings everybody together. and at the end of it, you get a Super Bowl. The Eagles being the best defense in elite by DVOA,

that I think would have been hard to predict. I do think that we, I'll put this on myself, I should have been able to better predict the Vikings being really good on defense. Because the interesting stuff that they had done the year before, that didn't go away, right? Like there's continuity from the play caller and the scheme and everything else heading into from year one to year two.

And when you're taking some of those ideas where, you know, you think, all right, they're utilizing these guys in their right way. They're difficult to play against. They're harder to play against than their talent might suggest. When you increase the talent level for a team like that, you should probably be able to bake in some real gains. And I just don't think I did that heading into last year.

Even if I should have known that could happen. When you go out and you get Jonathan Grenard and Andrew Van Ginkle and some of the other guys that they signed, maybe it would have been hard to know exactly what type of impact like Van Ginkle would have had, even though I liked the signing at the time. Yeah, maybe. I liked it at the time, but I don't think anybody could have predicted what he ended up doing. I still think it probably, but it should have been more obvious that the Vikings defense that punched way above its weight the previous year when it got better players would have been

like a borderline top 10 sort of unit. That one I think we could have probably seen coming from a little bit further away. That's a good point because even though they increased the talent, I think I still got too hung up on the parts of the roster that still weren't good yet. But it was like, okay, well, if they figured it out last year and there's better overall, like their good is better, then they probably, I should predict that they'll be good. It's kind of the opposite of the Texans where like they were the structure of it all, you had questions about it and maybe that should be something that plays more into how we predict

these teams where it's like, okay, the structure was bad, that we like some of the players, so maybe they'll be good. But then at the same time, it's like the Eagles won the Super Bowl. We had structural issues about their offense or concerns about their offense too. So it's hard to know. It's hard to know like when the structure of it should win out and when the talent of it should win out and when to pick either one of those as you're trying to weigh both of them. It's not easy. Well, because that's the thing with the Eagles offense. It's like I was questioning like, okay, is the structure going to be good enough and is Hurts going to take to it all that stuff? And then it turns out they're so talented. It doesn't matter.

Yes, exactly. It just turns out they're so talented. So maybe that's the answer is that there is a certain level of talent that just becomes so overwhelming that you shouldn't pay attention to the other shit. Maybe that is the lesson to be learned from last year's Eagles. If you clear the bar for both and then are excellent in either scheme or talent, you'll probably be pretty good. As long as you clear the bar for both. Yeah, exactly.

You need to get to a certain level of competence, but if one is way on one end of the spectrum, it's probably going to be the most important element of it. All right, we're going to take one more quick break and then get back with a couple more of these. All right, you alluded to this, but you're thinking that the New England Patriots defense would be good. that one's looking pretty rough, considering the Patriots finished 29th and off and defensive DVOA last year. That was definitely one of my worst takes.

And I think... 30th, excuse me. Jesus. And I think I had them at like third, so they literally ended up at like flip-flopping where they would have been in the rankings if you just flipped it upside down. That's where they ended up.

I thought Gerard Mayo was going to be a good coach. So that is certainly part of it. I think the reason I really got it wrong is that the roster outside of like three players was just not good enough. Like Christian Gonzalez, I think was fantastic. Barmore when he was healthy and obviously he wasn't for a lot of the year is a really good player. I like Juan Bentley, but probably not a, you know, pro bowl level player. And then Kyle Dugger is pretty good.

But outside of that, you're like kind of asking a lot of these players. And for a while, that was okay because Bill Belichick could always put them in the exact spot that they needed to be. He got the best ball out of guys like Jolani Tavai, all those weird edge players that they had. a lot of their other just like long-term defensive line players like Devon Godchai isn't a great player but he was just consistently put in good spots by Bill Belichick same goes for the corner room like I didn't think that the corner room was even that good at the back end of the Belichick era it's just that he consistently found ways to make it work other than Gonzalez and I think I just told myself Mayo and the new staff because there's enough continuity they'll be able to

not do the same thing but do enough of the same thing that they'll keep it together and then Barmore goes out, Bentley ends up going out, the corner room just doesn't look any good, and just none of that feel, that cohesion, that physicality stays around the way that it had during the Belichick era. I love that. That's very well articulated because I think I had the exact same journey. It's like, oh, well, this is a good chunk of the same staff. Like, they'll be able to pull it together.

Maybe not to the same degree, but they're not going to totally fall off. And then you have a couple of injuries and then they totally fall off. So that's very well stated because I think that's exactly. exactly how I looked at them and saw them heading into last year. It just felt like there was enough. And you know what? The mistake was, I was like, oh, well, there's enough of the Belichick guys around that they'll be able to do it.

And then I think about the Belichick guys that have gotten hired. It's like most of them don't actually do the thing that Belichick does anyway. So why did I think, why did I think that Mayo was going to be different? I really don't know. And I think I just wanted to give them benefit of the doubt because it seemed like he was kind of groomed to be the head coach by Bill Belichick and all that stuff. And it seemed like they really picked him. And maybe that's why I believed.

But again, most of those Belichick guys didn't end up turning out well. So I don't know why I went in hook line and sinker the way I did. I think this is good. And I think this points out one area of bias that I'm picking up on that I've had an issue with over the last couple years. I think that I've admitted this and talked about this a lot. Just the idea of the shiny new thing being attractive to me more than it should be at times. I think that kind of creates a little bit of a bias toward older coaches, right?

And those guys who have been doing this for a really long time, talk about with Sean Peyton, talk about it with Vic Fangio. And I think to a degree, we probably did this in the other direction with Belichick, where we didn't appreciate the job that he had done because it seemed like he had lost his fastball in some other areas. So just maintaining the proper level of respect for guys who have been very, very good at this for a prolonged period of time, you can think. throw Jim Harbaugh in there too if you want to.

I think that's something, you know, where are those examples going to come up this year? It's just like Pete Carroll. Like maybe Pete Carroll wasn't throwing 100 during his last couple years in Seattle as they were trying to sort through things. But Pete Carroll's been doing this for a while. Like there is reason to believe that Pete Carroll can still get guys moving in the same direction. So these guys who are in their 60s and have been in the league for two, three decades,

like their ability to have an impact is no less than the 35-year-old hot shot offense. coordinator. And I think sometimes I personally have to remind myself of that a little bit. No, that's really good, though. And Vic Fangio, again, not to bring him up for the eight hundred time, but he's a good example because, you know, five years ago, six years ago, the stuff he was doing was kind of cool and novel. And now it's not. But then you realize just like the way that it's obviously taught in the way that he gets those guys to play fast, it's like, well, that's just the mark of a good coach. That's not any of like the new schematic stuff. Like, that's just clearly a good coach. Maybe I should have bet on that a little bit more than I did.

A couple quick ones here that I think we can just run through pretty fast. I was wrong just about what the Diggs and Allen additions would look like for the Texans and Bears specifically. We've talked enough about this that I don't think we have to totally rehash it here. But my takeaway from that is essentially more past catching talent doesn't necessarily equal good. Like you have to consider what the roles look like, what the usage looks like, how are guys getting deployed? You know, there's only one ball. how do you make sure you guys are getting the correct workload? If you have three receivers, are they playing the right roles within your offense?

And I think some of that stuff is getting blurred. I think a little bit too often these days we're a little bit too rigid in how we think of receivers, especially in a condensed formation world where your slot receiver and your outside receivers, maybe there's a little bit more similarities there. But I still think just trying to collect as many weapons as you can without necessarily thinking about how it's all going to fit together cohesively, there can be missteps there. And I think that was the case with both the Texans and the Bears last year in addition to some of the protection stuff that they ran into.

That's a really good point. It's like at the end of the day with offensive stuff and defensive stuff in general, just scheme in general, the pieces do have to fit in the right spot for them to do the thing that you want, the thing that you paid them to do. And I think that that was obviously the case with digs. And I do think the digs thing was also hurt by the fact that to unlock a player like digs. I think you kind of need to be more of a dropback pure pass offense. And with the state of the Texas offensive line, that was just never, they were never going to get into that world the way

that they wanted to. My other last one here, we just should have been more worried about the Niners heading into the year. And this is something we just completely ignored it. Like, I went back and looked at my notes from the NFC West preview this morning. And it's everything we had written out about the Niners. Like McCaffrey, we hadn't seen him. He was hurt. Trent Williams was holding out. Brandon Ayuk was holding out. He was bad in the first like month of the season. even before he got hurt. So I don't think there's any way you could have predicted the catastrophic level of injuries that the Niners endured last year that torpedoed their season.

But I still think there were enough signals that the vibes there might not be totally correct that it probably should have influenced the way that we thought about that teaming and heading into the season more than it did. Yeah, I think we probably should have. The offense was, I mean, I was full steam ahead on the offense. I think I might have said that they were going to be the best in the league. Both of us did. How could you not after the last season had gone?

They were so incredibly good. They were historically good. Had most of the same guys. It's like, why would I not bet on that again? And then the defense, I'm actually more mad that I didn't fade the defense because I kind of wanted to like a little bit. I was looking at the front and it was just, all right, you've got Nick Bosa and Fred Warner and there's a whole lot of like, I don't know in this front.

And I was still dubious about their other corner spot, which actually that kind of ended up working out. But the front just ended up so bad that it was. like, I'm kicking myself that I didn't like fully lean into that one. I don't know exactly where I put them, but them and the Cowboys. I put them either just outside of the top 10 or yeah. So I, this is, I had them at 9 and 10. That was a way just to have them in there just in case, but also a sign that I wasn't that

excited about them. My first note under the Cowboys at 10 is this is a way to hedge on the Cowboys. boys. Which sometimes when you get into like eight, nine and ten with these with these things, that's what you do. It's funny bringing up to Cowboys. I think my last one here is that I really thought Mike Zimmer was going to have it figured out with that defense.

And that did not turn out to be the case because obviously so in 2023, the Cowboys defense was, I mean, they were one of the worst run defenses in the league. And I think outside of some of the talent, the issue was that they were just playing hair on fire almost in a bad way. Like defensive linemen were just shooting gaps doing whatever. linebackers running around, who knows what. You had a 210-pound safety playing linebacker and Marquis Bill. I was just like, this is not a serious way to play football.

And I think I put too much of that on the coaching and not enough on like, oh, the talent is not good enough because we walk into 2024 and I'm like, oh, no, Mike Zimmer, he's done this for a while. He's done really well. He'll get them to like, you know, stay in your gap. Let's hold these double teams, do all that jazz. And it just turned out, nope, they just didn't have the talent for it, no matter how good the coaching was going to be.

I also, even though we've done a lot of, you know, maybe we should give more credence to older coaches. And obviously Zimmer was incredible. He ended his two years out of the NFL were both spent with Dion Sanders, one at Jackson State and one at Colorado. I think that should have maybe been like a, that's a weird spot to go if you're taking like a little bit of a reprieve and then coming back to the NFL. Yeah, if you're taking two years off, I think that's a little bit different than I had one down year as a coordinator in Miami where the players hated me. I think, again, there are nuances to all of this. looking at the defenses and how it all shook out. I will say, I did have the Vikings

of my honorable mentions on the defense show at like 13th. So that makes me feel a tiny bit better. And then I had the Seahawks on that list as well. But if you look at the final rankings in terms of like DVOA over the course of the season, the Niners were 13th. So having them at nine isn't that bad.

Yeah. And I had the bills, bills are my first team off. They ended up finishing 11th. I had the Seahawks in that top 15. They ended up finishing 10th. and I had the Packers as a top 10 defense, and they finished as a top 10 defense.

I had them seventh, and they finished seventh. So there's some misses here, but there are also ones that did end up working out okay. That's why the defense list is actually more fun. The offensive list is like, because of quarterbacks, there's just a lot more consistency generally. Of course.

With defense, it can be a little bit more up and down. So you know you're going to have some disgusting misses, but it's just like, can I get the one or two hit that's going to feel good? Like mine was the Lions. I had them in the top. 10, I threw them in there. And if anything, that was too low. They ended up being pretty dang good.

Yeah, they were in the top. They finished in the top five. I had them at like 14th. They were one of the teams that I had off. The Bears are another team. I'm glad I kept off, but they were probably closer to that. See, I put them in there. That was not my best week.

Yes. Well, listen, listen, I, you'll learn. Not to trust Chicago. The Chicago Bears. That's exactly right. But, you know, again, when new play caller, you never know, maybe, maybe the tide is starting to shift a little bit. Maybe they'll be the team that will be most wrong about heading into this season.

All right, that was fun. Again, we'll do that. I think every single off season just as a way to keep ourselves in check, but also to potentially learn some important lessons each year and kind of take some of those moving forward. So we'll see which of those we remember and which of those we forget when it comes time to predict what's going to happen this season. For now, that is all we've got.

We will be back tomorrow with the first episode in our lingering question series for this off season. Last year, we did a show about every single division, just stuff that we didn't think could get answered in real time over the course of the year because, I don't know. Let me try to pick a team. Like the Titans, the perfect example. Like the Titans offense, we weren't really grinding Titans offense tape in Week 14.

Like, even if we were, we weren't talking about them. Once you realize Will Levis was just going to keep doing this, it was easy to kind of tune them out. So there are questions that I think deserve to be answered about some of these teams that maybe we didn't have the bandwidth to answer in real time. But instead of doing every division this year, because I think that probably sent us in some directions that we didn't need to go. Like, I don't need, my lingering question about the chiefs probably doesn't matter. We're going to kind of pair that down to four shows this year and answer what are the most pressing lingering questions that we couldn't get to last year. Spoiler alert, how should we feel about the Titans offensive coaching staff and what they're dropping Cam Ward into? That's going to be one of the questions that we answer on tomorrow's show.

So we're going to do four of those tomorrow and then keep chipping away at them over the course of the next. next month. We'll do one a week in addition to the buying or selling offseason shows that we're doing. So that's part of the programming that's going to be coming your guys's way over the course of May. For now, that's all we've got. Sincerely appreciate you listening. We'll talk to you very soon.