Jay L
Jay L
Sep 7, 2018 · 11 min read

NFL Preview 2018 — The Big Predictions

There is the easy part of this, and then the hard part.

The easy part is the outright excitement and intrigue of a new football season finally hitting the rails tonight a little after 8PM Eastern Standard Time, when the defending Super Bowl Champion Philadelphia Eagles will take on the Atlanta Falcons on opening night. Say what you want both for and against the NFL’s realization of its modern ideal of parity — and on any given day, I could go either way in preferring the “everyone has a chance to win” philosophy versus watching a few powerhouse teams pulverize everyone else as they embark on a collision course with each other by year end, such as what it feels like we see every season in the NBA — but there isn’t another professional sport in which the first few weeks feel more fraught with possibility than in football. I can make a case for why every single team in the NFL is interesting as we head into the 2018 season. They won’t all remain interesting by the time a few weeks are in the books, but right now there are narratives worth following, and hopes that seem to be on the verge of being realized, in every single city where professional football is played in America. To wit:

In the NFC, the Eagles bring back Carson Wentz to lead perhaps the best roster in the NFL on their quest for consecutive championships. The Cowboys will look to see if Dak Prescott and Ezekiel Elliott can recapture their magic from two years ago, when they led Dallas to the number one record in the NFC and had two of the best rookie seasons in the history of the sport at each of their respective positions. The Giants will shape their season around two transformative offensive talents in rookie Saquon Barkley and Odell Beckham, Jr., the latter of who was just lavished with a long-term contract by the team. Washington traded for Alex Smith, the NFL leader in passer rating a year ago, to try and return the team to relevance once again. The Vikings will see if Kirk Cousins can help them win just two more games than they won in 2017. The Packers get back Aaron Rodgers, which means Super Bowl hopes are alive and well in Wisconsin. The Lions will see if they can meld the defensive acumen of new head coach Matt Patricia with the offensive ability of Matthew Stafford to produce a perennial contender in the NFC. Chicago adds in one of the truly elite defensive players in all of football after trading for Kahlil Mack late in the preseason, but much of the intrigue for this team will still rest on the development of second-year signal caller Mitch Trubisky. New Orleans and veteran quarterback Drew Brees appear to have loaded up the roster for one final Super Bowl run. The Atlanta Falcons could be on the cusp of fielding one of the very best defenses in the National Football League. Carolina will always be relevant as long as former Most Valuable Player Cam Newton is healthy and on the playing field. Tampa Bay will try and get the final answer as to whether or not Jamies Winston is the right quarterback to lead their franchise to contention. The Rams went absolutely all-in on their title hopes after tasting the postseason last year, acquiring Brandin Cooks, Ndamukong Suh, Marcus Peters and Aqib Talib to try and push them over the top in the NFC. The 49ers found their franchise quarterback, and now we will see if he will ever lose a start. Seattle still has the super-human talents of Russell Wilson to fall back on. And Arizona will seek to begin a new era around rookie quarterback Josh Rosen, all while continuing to employ two of the very best defensive players in the game.

And that’s just the NFC.

The harder part is saying what will happen. All sports inherently defy logic, and that is one of the things we love about them as fans, but professional football happens to be a special case…with the most compacted regular season in all of the major professional sports, and with all the inner machinery the league has in place to encourage competitive balance and equanimity among its teams, it’s almost impossible to make predictions about the coming season with any level of confidence or certainty. But that doesn’t stop some of us from trying. Below, I will attempt to paint a picture of what’s to come in terms of both the potential postseason field and the season-ending player awards for the 2018–19 NFL season. Just be aware it’s more an art than a science.

AFC Playoff Seeds

1. Pittsburgh

2. New England

3. Tennessee

4. Kansas City

5. Baltimore

6. Los Angeles

Wild Card Playoff Round: Tennessee over Los Angeles, Baltimore over Kansas City

Divisional Playoff Round: Pittsburgh over Baltimore, New England over Tennessee

AFC Championship Game: Pittsburgh over New England

Although you can rightfully accuse me of droning on and on about the impossibility of my task and then selecting mostly chalk for my AFC picks, the likeliest outcome appears to be a coin-flip between the Pats and the Steelers for the number one seed in the AFC, with their match-up in December once again being the ultimate determining factor. If that’s the case, fans in Pittsburgh may want to load up on the lithium now, as the Steelers have won just three of their past 15 games against the Patriots. I expect the AFC North to be much more competitive than the AFC East, where none of the other three teams in the division are likely to even sniff the playoffs. But I am going to hedge my bets that a 41-year old Tom Brady may be in self-preservation mode at least a bit as the season goes on, which could lead to less focus on winning every game and more focus on entering the postseason gauntlet as healthy as possible, so I’ll give Pittsburgh the nod for the number one seed. I think six teams will be vying for the other four playoff spots — Baltimore, Tennessee, Jacksonville, Houston, Kansas City and Los Angeles. I had Oakland as a seventh club in the mix, but that was before Jon Gruden started firing off nonsensical transactions at the end of the preseason like he was going shot-for-shot with the ghost of Kenny Stabler in a California roadside bar. I believe the battle for first place in the AFC South will be somewhat of an exercise in splitting hairs, but I’m still not a huge believer in Blake Bortles, and I worry that J.J. Watt — and therefore Houston’s defense — will never be the same again, at least not anytime soon. The Titans made the playoffs with Marcus Mariota struggling for a wide swath of the season due to injury, and if he is once again able to pick up the trajectory of his development curve from two years ago, Tennessee has a chance to be very good. I made my cases for the Ravens and the Chargers in the various divisional previews I posted over the past couple of days, and I also believe the Chiefs have a real shot at breaking out behind Patrick Mahomes Jr., a young player who could split the team’s play-making potential wide open this season with his cannon arm and penchant for turning risk into reward. My dark-horse Super Bowl teams would be the Ravens and the Chiefs. So of course I didn’t pick either one of them to get past the Divisional Round. Sometimes we are our own worst enemies.

Speaking of our own worst enemies, I see the most likely candidates for the number one pick in the 2019 NFL Draft coming from Denver, Buffalo and Cincinnati, at least on the AFC side of the draw.

NFC Playoff Seeds

1. Minnesota

2. Atlanta

3. Philadelphia

4. San Francisco

5. New Orleans

6. Green Bay

Wild Card Playoff Round: Philadelphia over Green Bay, New Orleans over San Francisco

Divisional Playoff Round: Minnesota over New Orleans, Atlanta over Philadelphia

NFC Championship Game: Atlanta over Minnesota

I think the NFC is absolutely stacked this year. I could also make cases for Dallas, Detroit, Carolina and the Rams as potential playoff participants, and maybe even Chicago, Seattle and the Giants, although those latter cases would be assigned to an over-worked public defender with a track record for rarely winning anything at trial. The biggest surprise here will obviously be the Rams getting left out of the postseason dance. Los Angeles was eliminated with minimal resistance in the Wild Card Round last year, which prompted a crisis of confidence that saw the team seemingly acquire every available Pro Bowl player with a history of locker-room divisiveness over the offseason. On paper, at least, this is now easily one of the five most talented rosters in all of football, and logic would dictate that the Rams are a no-brainer selection for a potential Super Bowl run this season. I don’t have a good answer to that argument, except to offer up Dostoevsky’s underground man, who said “that (if) it is possible to anticipate all things and keep them under the sway of reason by means of an arithmetical calculation, then man will go insane on purpose so as to have no judgment and to behave as he likes.” In many instances, it’s not the most talented teams that end up being the most successful ones in sports — it is the teams that get the most out of their respective talent, and have the best synergy, that end up maximizing their potential. Minnesota, Atlanta, Philadelphia and New Orleans all enter 2018 with more upside than they had a year ago, when they all were participating in the Divisional Round of the playoffs. Green Bay is also a lock to advance if Aaron Rodgers stays healthy — the Packers haven’t missed the postseason in any year in which their star quarterback made the majority of the starts outside of his first season as the lead signal caller in 2008. That leaves the Rams and the 49ers fighting for one spot. I am a huge believer in Jimmy Garoppolo as a franchise quarterback, and their path to the postseason will be a bit easier by virtue of the NFL’s balanced scheduling process, which will flex Los Angeles into two contests against a pair of first-place teams from 2017 at the same time San Francisco will get a pair of games against last-place opponents. I could also talk myself into any of the NFC teams outside of the 49ers making a run to the Super Bowl. A lot of where it all ends up could be determined by whoever hits the playoffs with the least amount of injuries, and which of those five teams is also hitting their stride at exactly the right time at year-end.

As for potential candidates for the number one pick in the 2019 NFL Draft on the NFC side of the fence, I see Washington, Tampa Bay and Arizona heading for difficult seasons.

Super Bowl: Pittsburgh over Atlanta

I’m sure Atlanta fans would be chomping at the bit for revenge against the Patriots, but they will have to settle for being the first team in the history of the sport to host a Super Bowl at their home stadium. At this point you should probably stop reading, or ask for a sip of whatever Stabler’s ghost and Gruden and I am all drinking. But I love Atlanta’s potential to field a top five or better defense this year, and their offense is more than capable of playing at a playoff level as well. The game would be a match-up of the consensus two best wide receivers in football — Antonio Brown and Julio Jones. Pittsburgh’s “Killer B’s” will be breaking up after the season, as the Le’Veon Bell saga is mercifully reaching its end. After knocking on the door over the past half-decade, I see the Steelers wrapping up this mini-era of offensive excellence with a Super Bowl title.

As for the end-of-season player awards, I will take a quick stab at the most prominent ones:

Most Valuable Player: As long as he comes back within the first couple weeks of the season, I like Carson Wentz to take home a belated Most Valuable Player Award, after he looked to be the frontrunner to win this one prior to tearing his ACL last year. Wentz plays for one of the truly innovative offensive minds in all of football, and the Eagles have upgraded his supporting cast, adding Mike Wallace as a more dangerous downfield threat than Torrey Smith, and drafting Dallas Goedert to give the team more capability to run two tight-end sets that feature a pair of elite receiving weapons. It is the most potent group of skill position players that the Eagles have surrounded Wentz with in his brief career.

Offensive Player of the Year: I’ll go with Drew Brees, who is entering the Tom Brady elder-statesman phase of his career and may have a similarly sublime output in his age-39 season. Part of this is unquestionably a vote for the uncanny consistency the Saints have established as an offense — New Orleans has scored over 400 points as a team in nine of the past 10 years, including seven consecutive seasons. Part of it is also a vote for the Saints skill position talent, which includes a pair of players in Alvin Kamara and Michael Thomas who are ultra-talented and only getting better. But mostly it’s a vote for Brees himself, who led the league in completions (386), completion percentage (72.00%), and yards per attempt (8.1) last year, and who hasn’t shown any signs that he is slowing down just yet.

Defensive Player of the Year: Based on my projections for a breakout season for the Atlanta defense in 2018, I love linebacker Deion Jones for this award. Jones, an absolute beast of an athlete, led the Falcons in tackles (138, including 91 solo) and interceptions (3 for 42 yards) a season ago. If he is able to maintain that type of productivity at the same time the team takes another step forward in the NFL’s statistical rankings, and as the Falcons end up with a top seed in the NFC playoffs, Jones will be a prime candidate to win this honor.

Offensive Rookie of the Year: There are a lot of rookie quarterbacks who will get a good bit of run this season, but in the end I think Saquon Barkley is the safest choice. His talent level is off the charts, and the Giants have re-built their offensive line in support of their rookie running back. Odell Beckham Jr.’s presence also means that opposing defenses will not be able to sell out in order to stop the run. Barkley could have a very similar season to the one Ezekiel Elliott had in 2017, although New York will have to surprise a bit in the win column in order for him to reach those heights.

Defensive Rookie of the Year: Denzel Ward, Bradley Chubb, Roquan Smith and Minkah Fitzpatrick all could be in the mix here, but I like Smith over Chubb based on the rookie’s potential to pile up tackle numbers in a good defense that got even better with the team’s acquisition of edge rusher Kahlil Mack late in the preseason.

Coach of the Year: If the 49ers win the NFC West over the heavily favored Los Angeles Rams, as I predicted up above, then Kyle Shanahan could be the favorite to win this award. Expect the ‘Niners to be led by Garoppolo and their offense, which just happens to be Shanahan’s bread-and-butter.

Comeback Player of the Year: There is an obvious choice here, and that’s Andrew Luck. It feels like people have forgotten a bit about Luck when they talk about the elite young talents in the game. Part of that is because his monster 2014 season of nearly 4,800 yards passing and 40 touchdowns feels like it occurred another lifetime ago, what with all the injury issues he has faced since then. Part of it is because the ensuing three seasons — including 2017, which was completely wiped out by injury — have produced only a bit over 6,100 yards and 46 touchdowns combined. But if Luck is able to play all 16 games this year, he will put up monster numbers — the Colts have a questionable running game, and they don’t look like a team that is likely to be playing from ahead all year long. He is one of the truly elite players in the game, and I am looking forward to seeing him back out on the field once again.