With two weeks of NFL action in the books, it is time to celebrate the rich tradition of making sweeping and reactionary declarations about teams and players across the league. Football is already a small-sample sport, and with so few 2026 datapoints to go off of, nobody should reasonably be held liable for the crapshoot of extrapolation.
This fact – combined with collective long-term memory loss caused by an omnipresent barrage of low-latency information – practically gives us a get-out-of-jail free card. So, let’s look at some 2025 and 2026 data to decide if we’re buying or selling some storylines around the league.
‘Kenneth Walker was the best acquisition of the 2026 offseason’
Walker has nearly twice the amount of rushing Total Points (15) as the next-highest player on the leaderboard, and more than two times the next-highest running back. To further contextualize this: it took five weeks of action for any running back to reach that threshold in 2025.
As we all know, Walker got hot down the stretch and was eventually crowned Super Bowl MVP, but he was a somewhat inconsistent runner for most of his time in Seattle. However, I may have overlooked how well he fits Kansas City.
This table paints a pretty clear picture that the running backs, rather than the offensive line, were what held back Kansas City’s rushing attack last year. They were given room to operate and could not maximize the opportunity. Walker, on the other hand, ranked 5th in broken and missed tackle rate, (23%) among running backs in 2025, and was 11th in EPA/attempt when not contacted at or behind the line of scrimmage. Perhaps most importantly, he was 4th in the latter metric on shotgun runs; most of the Chiefs runs in 2025 came from shotgun (57%, 9th-highest), whereas the Seahawks ran out of shotgun at one of the lowest rates in the league (26%, 7th-lowest).
Kansas City did have the third-highest 1st-down rate last year, but this is largely selection bias buoyed by third-and-short runs, whereas their early down EPA/attempt and success rate were both in the bottom quartile. EPA/carry has jumped considerably year-over-year (+0.15), but early returns show just a slight uptick in 1st and 2nd down rushing success (42% to 46%). In terms of creating manageable situations for Patrick Mahomes, his average yards needed for a positive play on 2nd and 3rd down dropbacks was already very low last season, and his ranks in those categories haven’t moved much.
This means that the run game is better in and of itself, but it also means that it is not readily apparent that it is creating situational balance or making the passing game better, which is important because a lot of running’s hidden value is acting as a constraint. (That is: its feasibility in given game situations attenuate pass rush get-off at a player-level, and force defensive coordinators to account for more potential plays and deter or block them from deploying calls which are likely to depress the value proposition of dropbacks). That’s a much harder link to trace empirically, and I’m also not sure that Walker’s 38% BMT rate will hold. At the risk of missing the Chiefs going to the moon, I’m selling this.
‘Bryce Young has made a big jump in Year 4’
Hard sell. How long are we going to let this Acolyte Elven Archer farm low-level boars for experience points (bonus points if you get the reference)? Nobody on either side of the aisle is going to argue that the traits changed overnight, and this is the Chicago and Atlanta defenses we’re talking about. Surely that doesn’t move the audience enough to ignore how bad this player has been for three seasons.
Even if we give him a mulligan on his atrocious rookie season, he’s not done much except inflate his efficiency numbers in the NFL’s Triple-A affiliate, the NFC South. He ranks 13th in Passing Total Points/Play since the start of the 2024 season – hey, not bad at all! If you remove every game a quarterback has played against an NFC South opponent during that timespan, he’d rank 26th.
If that seems arbitrary, consider that he plays six games a year in a division that has had the worst winning percentage of any division since he was drafted. There hasn’t been an NFC South team to win 11 or more games since 2021. It’s just four franchises all trying to win a race by sabotaging one another in a cartoonish fashion that predictably backfires. But, for the sake of argument: his Expected On-Target Plus-Minus (xOnTgt+/-) since 2024 has been average, his ADoT has been average, his IQR has been mediocre, etc. He absolutely has to do more than plink scarecrows for a couple of games to be taken seriously.
‘The Los Angeles Chargers are done for’
The Bills are 7-point favorites against the visiting Chargers, and then Justin Herbert and company will travel back to the west coast to play the defending Super Bowl champion Seahawks at Lumen Field. There’s a very strong possibility that they start 0-4, which would be a near-impossible hole to have to dig themselves out of in a competitive division.
This was a team that went 6-2 in one-score games last year – always an omen of regression! – and then failed to upgrade some key areas.
They were 10th in pass defense EPA/play last year in spite of ranking 21st in pressure rate; they added no pass rush juice. Tight end David Njoku was a nice pickup but is now on IR, and a pass-catching group that ranked 29th in receiving Total Points last year saw no additions to the receiver room. And their offensive line that ranked 24th in blocking Total Points/play returned Rashawn Slater and Joe Alt from their 2025 injuries, but they reshuffled an interior which has been their Achilles heel for years – not that Rome was built in a day, anyhow.
Firing Greg Roman was addition by subtraction, but perhaps we should’ve expected a breaking-in period with new OC Mike McDaniel. Fine-tuning some things over the course of the first month of the season could be okay if they hadn’t lost to the Raiders and the Cardinals, but alas. This team is probably, at best, a spoiler down the stretch.
