It's time to prognosticate. After months of going back and forth, watching 2023 tape and crunching the numbers, I'm ready to commit. This week, I'm making my annual selections for the NFL teams most likely to improve and decline in 2024. After hitting the improvement side Monday, this piece evaluates the other side of the coin.
I've been doing some version of this feature for ESPN going back through the 2017 season. Over that time frame, the results have been pretty good! Twenty-seven of the 33 teams I've picked to decline have produced worse records the following season. Those teams declined by an average of 3.3 wins per 17 games. (Much of the data for this column dates back as far as 1989, which means a lot of weird numbers after adjusting for the 17-game slate.)
Last year's column went 3-1, although it didn't lack for drama. The Giants and Vikings collapsed quickly, as the two 2022 playoff teams failed to keep up their luck in close games and fell from a combined 22-11-1 mark to 13-21. The Eagles got off to a hot start, but their late-season collapse landed them three wins below their 2022 total.
More: Barnwell picks five teams likely to improve
Subscribe: 'The Bill Barnwell Show'
The Steelers, though, managed to defy the odds. Appearing on the list for the second consecutive year, many of the concerns I had about them heading into the season turned out to be true. They just didn't matter, though. Mike Tomlin managed to will a team with three different starting quarterbacks to a 10-7 record and an AFC playoff berth. In all, last year's improve and decline columns went a combined 7-1, which we'll take any time.
After going from 9-7-1 to 9-8 and then 10-7 the past three seasons, you would think the Steelers have earned their way off the decline list. Well, whether it's because I'm foolish or stubborn, guess where this year's list begins?
Jump to a team that ...
... has to miss the playoffs one of these seasons, right?
... could bench its quarterback by December
... dominated the regular season a year ago
... looked old, overmatched and out of ideas last season
... has a high ceiling but low floor because of its roster
Pittsburgh Steelers
Record in 2023: 10-7
Point differential in 2023: minus-20
2023 record in games decided by seven or fewer points: 9-2
Projected strength of schedule, via ESPN's FPI: Third toughest in the league
The résumé is the résumé. Leave the Mike Tomlin aura out of the picture and there's no more obvious pick for a team whose record doesn't hold up under any sort of scrutiny. The Steelers will find it extremely difficult to win 10 games again if they play the way they did in 2023. There's just no track record for a team being able to do this year after year without eventually either improving their underlying performance dramatically or having their record fall back to Earth.
Since the Steelers went 9-2 in close games, let's think of their win differential in those matchups as plus-seven. Since 1989, there have been 27 teams that posted a close game win differential of plus-six or higher. (The 2022 Vikings set the record here at plus-nine.) Those teams went 210-32-1 (.866) during their season of clutch victories. The following season, those teams went a combined 111-104-1 (.516) in the same games. They went from an average close game win differential of plus-6.6 to plus-0.2. Their overall record declined by an average of more than three wins.
I mentioned this in my story about teams that are unlikely to return to the postseason in 2024, but the evidence that Pittsburgh breaks everything we know about how to win football games falls apart if you look back toward the entire Tomlin era. The Steelers are 29-10-1 (.738) in games decided by seven points or fewer over the past three seasons. Over the first 13 years of the Tomlin era, with much better quarterback play, they went 61-50-1 (.545) in those same contests.
Or take last season's funhouse mirror, in which they won games while being outgained in yardage. The Steelers started 2023 by being outgained in each of their first nine games, going 6-3 in the process. It was a fun trick, but not something they or anybody else could sustain. They were 0-3 when they were outgained in the second half. From 2007 to 2022, they were outgained in fewer games than any other team, so it was hardly a core component of how Tomlin wanted to play.
Instead, the Steelers win with an exacting, spectacularly narrow emphasis on the turnover battle. Over the past three seasons, they went 28-7 when they won or tied the turnover battle and 0-15-1 when they lost it. They have the league's fifth-best winning percentage when they win or tie the turnover battle, and they're the league's worst team when they don't.
The Steelers have been spectacularly efficient over the past few years in terms of outplaying their point differential. Over the past three seasons, they have six more wins than Pythagorean expectation would dictate. That's the fourth-largest gap between win total and expected win total over a three-year span since 1989. Is that enough to prove they're the exception to the rule?
If history is any evidence, no. If we look at the 20 teams that most significantly exceeded their expectations over a three-year span and see what happened next, they went from beating the expectation by an average of just under two wins per season to a half-win in that fourth year, regressing way back toward the mean. That group includes the 2022 Packers, who were a struggle for this column to predict before they took a step backward in Aaron Rodgers' final season at the helm. Even the 2023 Chiefs weren't immune -- they fell from 14-3 to 11-6 last season, although they righted the ship and won the Super Bowl.
That list includes lots of teams with Hall of Fame quarterbacks, including Rodgers, Patrick Mahomes and Peyton Manning. The Steelers have managed to pull this off without even average quarterback play, having cycled through Kenny Pickett, Mason Rudolph and Mitchell Trubisky. This season, they're starting over with Russell Wilson and Justin Fields, both of whom were acquired on the cheap.
Between the two, Fields offers more upside given his rushing ability and age, but Wilson fits the formula for how the Steelers have won more comfortably. Both players fumbled 10 times last season, but Wilson has thrown interceptions on 1.9% of his passes over the past three years, while Fields has been up at 3.1%. That's about six more interceptions over the course of a full season. If the goal is to try to find a long-term solution, I'd go with Fields, but Wilson will help Pittsburgh right now.
Had the Steelers upgraded at quarterback this season, they would have had a stronger case for improving their underlying level of play. I'm not sure Fields and Wilson qualify. Pittsburgh traded Diontae Johnson and didn't really replace him with a starting-caliber receiver. Their best case for improvement on offense is the arrival of coordinator Arthur Smith and the upgrades they've made on the offensive line, where they used two much-needed draft picks on Troy Fautanu and Zach Frazier.
So for another season, the defense will have to carry this team. Can it? I'd be a little nervous, given that this was the league's oldest defense in 2023. The two stalwarts up front are a year older; Cam Heyward turned 35 in May, while T.J. Watt will turn 30 in October. They've each had seasons impacted by injury in recent years, and the Steelers struggled to rush the passer when Watt was out of the lineup.
On the other hand, there are reasons to be excited about what surrounds those players. The Steelers nailed their Day 2 picks in the 2023 draft, as both cornerback Joey Porter Jr. and defensive tackle Keeanu Benton looked like building blocks as rookies. The secondary will be younger after swapping Patrick Peterson for Donte Jackson, the return in the Johnson deal with Carolina. And while Pittsburgh was once known for not making big moves in free agency and building from within, general manager Omar Khan made a big splash by signing away Patrick Queen from the Ravens, hoping to finally solve the inside linebacker woes that have plagued the organization since Ryan Shazier's tragic injury in 2017.
Dan Graziano and Bart Scott discuss the Steelers' QB battle between Russell Wilson and Justin Fields.
There are a couple of ways they managed to survive last season that might not be sustainable. One was playing against an uncommonly high rate of second- and third-string quarterbacks. Just under 41% of Pittsburgh's dropbacks on defense came against players who weren't their team's preferred quarterback. The Steelers got two games against Jake Browning as opposed to Joe Burrow. In five other games, the Steelers' opposing starter -- Dorian Thompson-Robinson, Will Levis, Gardner Minshew, Bailey Zappe and Tyler Huntley -- was a backup. Then again, they went 4-3 in those games.
They also came up with stuffs inside the red zone. Opposing teams failed to score even a field goal on 11 of their 50 trips inside the 20-yard line against the Steelers, which was the league's highest rate (22%). That's an element of defensive performance that is tough to keep up. The top 50 red zone defenses in stuff percentage since 2003 averaged a rate north of 25% in their big season. The following year, that fell to 14.8%, which was just above the league average of 14.2%. The touchdown rate they allowed in the red zone jumped by eight percentage points in the process. (Pittsburgh, for what it's worth, had a stuff rate just over the league average in 2022.)
There's also the reality of being stuck in a difficult division on the stronger side of the league. The Steelers will face a brutal schedule, with the FPI projecting them to battle the third-toughest run of opponents. Then again, last season's slate wasn't easy, either; my model had them facing the league's third-toughest schedule. They lost to the Cardinals and Patriots and beat the Packers and Ravens.
I don't think there's a materially significant difference between this team and the Steelers teams that have exceeded expectations in previous years. If they're going to do it again in 2024, it's more likely going to be by sustaining their formula as opposed to drastically improving their underlying level of play. You can probably understand why I'm skeptical, but then again, I can also understand why Pittsburgh fans would be skeptical of what I'm presenting here.
New York Giants
Record in 2023: 6-11
Point differential in 2023: minus-141
2023 record in games decided by seven or fewer points: 4-3
Projected strength of schedule, via ESPN's FPI: 14th easiest in the league
It's time for another repeating team on this list, but unlike the Steelers, the Giants lived down to our expectations last season. There was plenty of hype surrounding Daniel Jones & Co. this time a year ago, and the fan base seemed to fall into an argument that almost never goes well. If you're telling yourself that everything that went wrong last year was fixed and everything that went right will keep happening, you're probably too optimistic about your team.
And after adding Darren Waller, Bobby Okereke and Deonte Banks last offseason, that balloon popped about halfway through the first half of the season-opening 40-0 loss to the Cowboys. It took a dramatic second-half comeback against the Cardinals to keep the Giants from starting the season 1-5. The record improved afterward when they swept the Commanders, beat the Patriots and topped an Eagles team that was in a full meltdown in Week 18, but outside of an impressive victory over the Packers, this team simply didn't play very well all season. New York ranked 30th in DVOA and 31st in FPI.
If your baseline level of expected play for the Giants was that they were going to build on making the playoffs and advancing to the divisional round, well, last season was a surprise. If you were paying closer attention to their underlying performance, it wasn't. They were outscored by six points during their 9-7-1 season in 2022. They went 5-3-1 in one-score games. They were 23rd in DVOA, albeit better (13th) by the FPI. Throw in a tougher schedule and losing their quarterback to a season-ending injury in November and what happened shouldn't have been a surprise.
Why are the Giants back here? Well, as scary as this might be for the fan base, they might have actually been a little lucky to even finish with six wins. That seems remarkable given that they lost a game in which they were up three points and attempting a 35-yard field goal with 28 seconds to go against the Jets, but they were even worse on a snap-by-snap basis than their record.
Let's start with something I mentioned in Monday's column: turnover differential. In writing about the Commanders, I brought up the simple rule that picking the NFL team with the worst turnover differential as a candidate to improve was a quick, easy way to land on a frequent winner. The opposite case also holds; picking the team that led the league in turnover differential to decline is often a wise move.
Two teams tied for the lead in turnover differential last season, and they're both going to appear on this list. One had the best record in football. The other was the Giants. It's virtually unprecedented for a team this bad to lead the league in turnover margin; the last time a team managed to post the league's best turnover differential without bringing a winning record along for the ride was in 1993, when the Chargers went 8-8. (If you want a piece of good evidence for the Giants, that Chargers team improved to 11-5 the following year and made it to the Super Bowl.)
The majority of these teams, though, decline. Their average turnover margin fell from plus-19 to plus-3. Their records dropped by an average of 2.2 wins per 17 games. Forcing takeaways was pretty much a necessity for New York to prevail last season; it forced three or more turnovers in four of its six victories.
Coordinator Don Martindale's defense drove the turnover margin and was also seemingly paradoxical. How can a defense that forces a league-high 31 takeaways simultaneously rank 26th in scoring defense? A bad offense didn't help matters, but the Giants were the ultimate boom-or-bust unit. That makes sense, given that a defense that blitzes as often as Martindale's does would give up plenty of big plays and simultaneously force lots of interceptions.
That combination makes it difficult to project the Giants, now that they've replaced Martindale with former Titans coordinator Shane Bowen. I agree with the general philosophy shift away from the blitz and toward rushing a front four given it's the strength of this team, especially after trading for Panthers standout Brian Burns. The play-to-play performance of the defense should improve, but the unit won't force as many turnovers as it did a year ago.
You might argue the offense is designed to protect the football, given that Jones posted the league's lowest interception rate while throwing its shortest average pass in 2022. I'm not sure that holds up under closer inspection. His interception rate nearly quadrupled last season. His backups were better at avoiding picks, but the Giants still managed to throw interceptions at a slightly higher rate than league average last season.
Instead, they managed to survive on offense by recovering an unsustainably high percentage of their fumbles. They fumbled 24 times and managed to recover 17. That 71% recovery rate ranked third, topped only by the Cardinals and Bengals, the latter of whom fumbled a mere 10 times. The Giants recovered only about 47% of their fumbles on offense in 2022, so this isn't a skill. Had they continued to recover fumbles at something close to a league-average rate, it would have cost them six more footballs over the course of the season.
Dan Graziano joins "Get Up" to break down how new Eagles OC Kellen Moore can get the best out of Jalen Hurts and the rest of the offense.
Jones is back, but should the Giants really expect a boost? He now has one season of even average quarterback play over his five-year career. He was outplayed by journeyman Tyrod Taylor last season. If you leave aside scrambles, his 27.9 QBR ranked 45th among quarterbacks with at least 100 pass attempts in 2023. The only players who were worse on plays ending in a pass attempt or a sack were Bryce Young, Tommy DeVito, PJ Walker, Bailey Zappe and Trevor Siemian.
If you're optimistic about Jones given the additions the Giants have made on offense, the other concern has to be his health. That fateful 2022 season was the only time Jones has managed to make it through an entire campaign without missing time because of injury. He has battled neck injuries in multiple seasons and is coming off a torn ACL, which could hamper the scrambling ability that has kept the offense going during the Brian Daboll era. Unlike someone like Kirk Cousins, who has been healthy throughout his career before suffering a catastrophic injury last season, it's tough to project Jones to play a full season.
The Giants might also squeeze him out of the lineup in December because of his contract situation. Jones has $23 million in injury guarantees on his deal next year, meaning the Giants would be on the hook for that money if he is unable to pass a physical in 2025. In much the same way the Raiders benched Derek Carr in 2022 and the Broncos took out Russell Wilson last season, the Giants could take Jones out of the lineup late in the season, which would open the door for Drew Lock, a quarterback who hasn't been productive as a pro.
There's clear top-end talent added to the roster on both sides of the ball in Burns and rookie wideout Malik Nabers, but unlike most 6-11 teams, the Giants also lost key players. Saquon Barkley, who produced excellent rushing yards over expectation over the past two seasons, left in free agency and was replaced by Devin Singletary, which should slow down the run game. And Xavier McKinney, the team's top safety, left for the Packers and will need to be replaced by rookie second-rounder Tyler Nubin.
I can envision a scenario in which New York improves. Jones, who was average to very good during the 2022 season, stays healthy. Evan Neal moves inside to guard, Jermaine Eluemunor takes over at tackle and the much-maligned offensive line improves in two spots. Maybe Nabers is the second coming of Odell Beckham Jr., and a young defense rides an excellent front four to adequacy. Put all that together in a division in which the top two teams took a step backward, and you could imagine a world in which the Giants put together an eight- or nine-win season.
If everything goes right, the Giants will be fine. I'm just skeptical we'll see most of those things occur. As it stands, they look like a team with too many replacement-level players on their roster with a difficult-to-sustain formula for winning, built around a quarterback who hasn't often been healthy or good.
Baltimore Ravens
Record in 2023: 13-4
Point differential in 2023: plus-203
2023 record in games decided by seven or fewer points: 3-4
Projected strength of schedule, via ESPN's FPI: Ninth toughest in the league
Here's the other team that tied for the league lead in turnover differential. The Ravens were more of a traditional leader in this category, as they thrived on both sides of the ball and dominated some of the league's best teams. While the playoffs ended in disappointing fashion in the AFC title game, the Ravens were the NFL's best team during the regular season, and it might not have been particularly close. DVOA pegged their 2023 as the fifth-best regular-season performance by any team going back through 1981, behind the 2007 and 2010 Patriots, the 1985 Bears and Washington's 1991 team.
The Ravens weren't secretly a bad team last season, and while anything's possible, we shouldn't project them to fall below .500. A lot of things have to go right for a team to be one of the best in history, though, and it's tough to count on those things going right year after year. Throw in a roster that is in transition after the Lamar Jackson contract extension last year and there's enough to be skeptical that Baltimore will reclaim the AFC North again.
I've already covered the history of how turnover differential isn't sustainable from year to year, even for the league's best teams, so I won't rehash that for the Ravens. Jackson posted a career-low interception rate, and while his true talent level is MVP-caliber, we've seen how that can fluctuate. He has thrown interceptions on 1.5% of his passes during his two MVP campaigns and 2.6% of his throws during his four other seasons. That doesn't sound like a big difference, but the gap between those two rates would have been four or five more interceptions for him in 2023.
John Harbaugh's team dominated in a more subtle way last season: They were an absolute juggernaut in the red zone. The offense scored touchdowns on nearly 62% of its trips inside the 20, the league's eighth-best rate. The defense ranked second-best, keeping teams out of the end zone at the second-highest rate while throwing in one of the highest stuff rates in the process.
In all, the Ravens averaged about 1.2 points per red zone trip more on offense than they allowed on defense. That's a dramatic outlier. The second-place team in terms of red zone differential were the 49ers, who were closer to 13th place than first.
The red zone data I'm working with goes back through 2001, and there haven't been many teams that managed this sort of dominance inside the 20. The Ravens are just the 33rd team over that stretch to have a red zone differential north of one point per drive. Those teams were collectively and entirely unable to sustain that difference. Their average red zone differential the following season was just 0.12 points per drive. Their records felt the impact of that drop-off; they declined by an average of 2.1 wins per 17 games.
On the field, even the most die-hard Ravens fan would have to admit the team is in a transition after a wildly successful season. To start, they lost promising defensive coordinator Mike Macdonald, who became the coach in Seattle. He was replaced by former Ravens linebacker Zach Orr. The 32-year-old has spent the past eight seasons on staff with the Ravens and Jaguars, but this will be his debut as a coordinator.
Orr will start his run without several key pieces from last season's defense. Patrick Queen, Geno Stone and Jadeveon Clowney all left in free agency, and the salary constraints on the roster meant the only veteran signed to replace the three departed players is Eddie Jackson. They can hope to be healthier in the secondary after dealing with a rash of injuries at cornerback and safety, but they have less to work with on the defensive side of the ball.
Those concerns might be even more pressing on offense, where the line looms as a point of concern. Baltimore traded away right tackle Morgan Moses and let guards John Simpson and Kevin Zeitler leave in free agency. Again, the only veteran brought in to replace the departed starters is former Texans utility lineman Josh Jones. The franchise used a second-round pick on Roger Rosengarten, but when you consider the injury woes that have afflicted left tackle Ronnie Stanley's availability and level of play after he suffered a career-altering ankle injury in the 2020 season, this line has major questions.
The Ravens will get Mark Andrews back from his ankle injury and added Derrick Henry to the backfield. But the other factor the Ravens enjoyed in 2023 was a healthy season from Jackson. Both of Baltimore's 2021 and 2022 campaigns were seriously impacted by season-ending injuries their star quarterback suffered in Week 13. They went 2-8 in the games he missed after getting hurt. You don't need me to tell you they are better with him on the field, but with the offensive line in flux, I would be a little concerned about his chances of playing a full season again in 2024.
Damien Woody and Harry Douglas get heated when debating which AFC North QB is under the most pressure to succeed this season.
Even with a full year from Jackson and something close to a vintage season from Henry, it would be tough for the Ravens to win 13 games in back-to-back years. Allowing for the move from 16 to 17 games, teams that are this dominant in any given season often struggle to keep up their performances. Go back through 1989 and you'll find that 31% of the teams that won 12 or more games in a given year did so again the following season.
The question, more realistically, is what the drop-off looks like. Could the Ravens be like the 2023 Chiefs, where they fall to 11 wins and still win their division before getting hot in the playoffs? That's entirely possible. There's also a scenario in which they're the 2023 Bengals, a team that struggled to overcome an outflux of talent, dealt with an injury to their quarterback and ended up shockingly missing the playoffs altogether.
Philadelphia Eagles
Record in 2023: 11-6
Point differential in 2023: plus-5
2023 record in games decided by seven or fewer points: 7-3
Projected strength of schedule, via ESPN's FPI: Sixth easiest in the league
As it turns out, there's a third team from last year's list that did enough (or didn't do enough, maybe) to qualify for the decline side of things again. The Eagles already dropped from 14-3 in 2022 to 11-6 in 2023, but the evidence suggests they were lucky to even come away with those 11 victories. While this is the most difficult projection of the bunch to parse, I'm concerned they might still have some ground to cover before hitting bottom after their 28-5 stretch between the end of 2021 and the halfway point of 2023.
Let's start with the fundamentals. The Eagles were within a touchdown of being outscored last season. While they had some impressive victories in close games -- they beat the Bills, Chiefs and Cowboys in narrow contests -- that's not something we associate with teams that produce double-digit victories, even in the 17-game era.
To think of things another way, the Eagles outscored their opposition by 0.3 points per game. If we take the 73 teams from 1989 to 2022 that outscored the teams they played by an average of between 0-1 points per game and see how they performed, just 11 of those teams produced double-digit win totals. Unsurprisingly, they were 74-25 in one-score games that season. And also unsurprisingly, they went 40-43 in those same contests the following season.
The Eagles' Pythagorean expectation was that of an 8.6-win team. That 2.4-win gap between their actual record and their expected win rate is trouble. Again, just take the teams that had a gap of two to three wins by that metric and see what they did in close games. After going 317-97 in one-score contests in the season that defied the numbers, those same teams went 157-197-1 the following season. Their overall records declined by an average of nearly three wins per 17 games. In other words, they typically fell right back to what their point differential suggested about their record.
Philadelphia went 7-3 in one-score games. And while some of those games might not have been as close as they seemed, taking a look back reveals some underwhelming performances:
In Week 1, facing what would be a woeful Patriots team, the Eagles allowed a touchdown to make it 25-20 with 3:37 to go, only for the Pats to fail on their 2-pointer. Mac Jones & Co. then drove into the red zone on the final drive of the game. Needing a touchdown as opposed to a field goal, New England came up short.
In Week 4, the Philadelphia defense allowed a touchdown with no time left on the clock to tie up the game. Allegedly analytics-friendly coach Ron Rivera chose to kick the extra point as opposed to attempting a 2-pointer to win the game as a 9.5-point underdog at home, though, and after the Commanders went three-and-out, the Eagles hit a 54-yard field goal to win in overtime.
In Week 9, the Eagles stopped another 2-pointer that would have made it a three-point game against the Cowboys with 6:30 to go. Dallas then drove to the Philadelphia 6-yard line with 27 seconds to go, only to fall apart with a false start, sack and delay of game penalty.
In Week 11, with the Chiefs trailing 21-17 and 1:40 to go, a wide-open Marquez Valdes-Scantling dropped a would-be touchdown pass that would have given Kansas City the lead.
Those late-game heroics weren't sustainable, and we saw that late in the season. The Eagles couldn't hold a late lead against Drew Lock and the Seahawks in Week 15. Two weeks later, they allowed a game-winning drive in the final minute to Kyler Murray and the Cardinals, who never even needed to see a third down on the seven-play possession that won them the game.
You're already familiar with the defensive collapse the Eagles endured last season. High school teams typically make fewer coverage mistakes than they made at their worst in 2023. A pass rush one year removed from racking up 70 sacks went totally dry, as over the second half of the season, they ranked 30th in sack rate and 28th in pressure rate. The team essentially fired Sean Desai and replaced him in a panic with Matt Patricia, who didn't make things any better.
Changes, understandably, have been made. Veteran coach Vic Fangio, who oversaw the Dolphins defense last season, was brought in to shore things up. The Eagles brought back defensive back C.J. Gardner-Johnson after letting him leave for the Lions in free agency, moved James Bradberry to safety and used their top two draft picks on cornerbacks Quinyon Mitchell and Cooper DeJean. After treating linebacker as an afterthought for most of his tenure, general manager Howie Roseman made what was for him a significant deal at the position, signing Devin White to a one-year pact. And while Philly traded away lead pass rusher Haason Reddick, it replaced him with a younger option in free agent Bryce Huff.
Should the Eagles be better on defense in 2024? Yes. Are these moves locks to work out? Absolutely not. Fangio was just let go after one year in Miami, with Dolphins players actively celebrating his departure on social media. Roseman didn't want to give Gardner-Johnson a multi-year deal last offseason, then changed his mind after a year in which Gardner-Johnson barely played in Detroit because of injuries. Bradberry struggled badly and is only on the roster because he has a salary guarantee. Corner Darius Slay is 33 years old. The Bucs benched White during last postseason. Huff is a liability on run downs. And while Mitchell and DeJean were much-needed additions, rookie cornerbacks often struggle to make an immediate impact.
The reality is somewhere between those two universes. Some of these moves will work. (I think Huff will be a star, and one of the two rookie corners should be a starting-caliber player quickly.) Counting on them all to work is probably naive.
And the core element of what the Eagles have had at their best -- a deep, dominant defensive line -- might be neglected here. Philly lost Fletcher Cox to retirement, has 36-year-old Brandon Graham playing a smaller role and didn't get much out of Josh Sweat last season. Roseman prepared for this by using premium draft picks on young Georgia linemen, but it remains to be seen how they play. Jalen Carter faded badly last season, although he looked like the best player on the defense for stretches, too. Jordan Davis hasn't lived up to expectations as a pro, while Nolan Smith barely made it onto the field as a rookie and was briefly used in coverage. I'm not giving up on any of those players, but there aren't any guarantees Philadelphia has three young standouts from that group, and it's relying on them to play meaningful roles.
Likewise, are the Eagles set on the offensive side of the ball? There are still three proven linemen in tackles Jordan Mailata and Lane Johnson and guard Landon Dickerson, but the other two spots are question marks. Legendary center Jason Kelce retired and will be replaced by Cam Jurgens, and while Kelce helped the team identify and select Jurgens in the draft, asking Jurgens to fill the shoes of a Hall of Famer in his first pro season at center is an impossible task. He'll move over from right guard, where the likely starter will be oft-injured former Jets tackle Mekhi Becton, who will be playing a new position.
Jeff Stoutland is one of the best offensive line coaches in the game, but there's just more uncertainty in this line than there's been in previous years. Tyler Steen, who was expected to compete with Becton for the starting job at guard, was carted off in last weekend's win over the Patriots with an ankle injury. Utility lineman Jack Driscoll, who started 17 games over the past four seasons, is now on the Dolphins. If Johnson's ankle issues recur, or if Becton isn't what the Eagles hope on the interior, there's not much depth for them to deal with those concerns.
Kelce's departure also raises questions about the get-out-of-jail-free card that has helped propel the Eagles on offense over the past two seasons. Will the Tush Push really be as effective without Kelce leading the way? Jalen Hurts is still part of the pushing equation -- we saw they were more effective at running their fabled sneak than just about any other team last season -- but you have to figure Kelce played at least a small role in making Philly's fourth-down play work. If that loses any of its effectiveness, the calculus for how teams defend this offense and how Nick Sirianni makes decisions will change.
At the same time, can an offense with Hurts, A.J. Brown, DeVonta Smith, three Pro Bowl-caliber linemen, and Saquon Barkley really be all that bad? Probably not. There will be an adjustment period as they get used to Kellen Moore's offense -- and there are perennial injury concerns that have hampered or outright removed Hurts, Barkley and Johnson from the lineup -- but I'm more confident about the offense than I am about the defense.
There are also other numbers that suggest the Eagles were a little unlucky last season. They finished with a minus-10 turnover differential, owing in part to a fumble recovery rate that was 27th in the league. ESPN's FPI had them facing the 10th-toughest schedule, and this season, FPI sees the slate lightening up, with them instead facing the eighth-easiest schedule. Adjusted games lost pegged the Eagles as having the league's fourth-most injured defense.
After the second half of last season, changes had to be made. A team that had looked like the best in the league during the winter of 2022 looked old, overmatched and out of ideas. I like most of the moves Roseman made during the offseason, and I'm open-minded about the impact the new coordinators will have on the coaching staff. I also know that trusting the best indicators of underlying performance often leads to the right answers about what a team will do in the upcoming season, and those don't look great for the Eagles.
Cleveland Browns
Record in 2023: 11-6
Point differential in 2023: plus-34
2023 record in games decided by seven or fewer points: 6-2
Projected strength of schedule, via ESPN's FPI: Eighth toughest in the league
Three AFC North teams! That seems like too many, but it's not out of the question. Three teams in this division taking a step backward happened between 2020 and 2021, remember: The Browns (11-5 to 8-9), Ravens (11-5 to 8-9) and Steelers (12-4 to 9-7-1) all lost more games, opening things up for the Bengals to jump from worst to first and shock the AFC.
The Browns were on the decline side of the list that season, and while it was a controversial pick given the hype they were getting at the time, it turned out to be accurate. The 2020 Browns had gone 11-5 with a negative point differential, and those sorts of teams overwhelmingly decline the following season.
The case isn't quite as strong for the 2024 Browns. Kevin Stefanski's team was in the improve column last year, and while they jumped from 7-10 to 11-6, point differential suggests it was more of a modest stride forward. The 2022 Browns had the point differential of an eight-win team, but they went 2-5 in one-score games.
The 2023 unit improved to a Pythagorean expectation of 9.4 wins, which is a solid stride forward, but their real-life record jumped because they improved to 6-2 in one-score games. The margin between winning and losing in those contests was truly microscopic:
The 49ers were in position to pull out a last-second victory when they drove into field goal range while trailing the Browns 19-17, only for kicker Jake Moody to miss a 41-yard attempt with nine seconds left.
The following week, the Browns gave up a 75-yard touchdown to give the Colts a 38-33 lead with 5:38 to go. PJ Walker appeared to take a game-ending strip-sack on the ensuing drive, only for an illegal contact penalty to extend the game. The Browns then failed three times on the 1-yard line before converting a fourth-and-goal to win.
Trailing the Ravens 31-17 with 8:57 to go, the Browns produced a massive comeback, spurred on by a pick-six on a pass tipped into an entirely different path at the line of scrimmage and returned for a score by Greg Newsome. A 40-yard field goal as time expired gave Cleveland a one-point victory.
Down 17-10 to the Bears with less than four minutes to go, Joe Flacco somehow threaded a throw perfectly through three Chicago defenders for inch-perfect completion to Amari Cooper, who ran forward for a 52-yard touchdown. David Njoku then produced two long catch-and-runs to set up another game-winning field goal.
Those are all fine plays, and they are overly simplistic retellings of what happened over the course of 60-minute football games. At the same time, if two 40- and 41-yard field goals go different ways, the Browns fall from 11-6 to 9-8. The line between victory and defeat in these close games is just so impossibly thin, and that's why metrics like point differential can be more valuable and predicative than using the previous season's win-loss record.
The strength of the 2023 team was a dominant defense. Jim Schwartz took over an oft-disappointing unit and coaxed career years out of Newsome, Grant Delpit and Jeremiah Owusu-Koramoah. With many of the same players in place, a Cleveland team that ranked 22nd in points allowed per drive in 2022 jumped to the second-best performance in the league.
Schwartz's top nine defenders by snap count from a year ago are returning, and with so many of those players in the prime of their careers, it's fair to expect the Browns to rank among the league's best defenses again. Can they count on being quite as good as they were, though? I'm not sure, owing to an old Bill James corollary known as the plexiglass principle.
When teams make a dramatic leap forward between one season and the next, they often struggle to sustain that improvement the following campaign. If we go back from 2001 to 2022, there have been 30 defenses that improved by 20 spots or more in points allowed per possession, as the Browns did last season.
The majority of those defenses fell back some the following season. The average team from that group declined by an average of eight spots in the rankings. If Cleveland fans are looking for a bright spot, they might look toward the 2022 Jets, who improved from 32nd to second in points allowed per drive, then stayed up toward the top of the league and finished fourth last season. The Browns could still be a top-10 defense, but I'd expect them to finish more toward the bottom half of that range than the top.
Can the offense make up some of the slack? I could see the argument. The Browns didn't have star back Nick Chubb for most of the season after a knee injury, and their running game naturally suffered as a result. They added a second receiver to play behind Cooper in Jerry Jeudy. The offensive line will be healthier than it was a year ago, when they had 11 different players start at least one game. And Cleveland has to be the first playoff team in modern history to start five different quarterbacks during the season, something that probably won't happen again with a hopefully healthier Deshaun Watson.
Let's unpack that, though. Chubb is coming off a serious knee injury and isn't expected to be ready to start the season. Like everyone else, I hope he'll come back at 100%, but that's a big ask a year removed from a multi-ligament injury. Jeudy wasn't very good for the vast majority of his time in Denver. And while the offensive line should be healthier, the Browns were able to weather missing starters by leaning on legendary offensive line coach Bill Callahan, who left the team after the season to join his son's staff in Tennessee.
Watson's ability is the biggest X factor for the Browns. Arguments that he was better than you remember last season don't really hold up. They went 5-1 with Watson as their starter, but that includes a game against the Colts in which he threw five passes and three others in which he had a passer rating below 75. He was excellent in the second half, most notably in that comeback win over the Ravens, but he was one of the league's worst passers in the first half and hasn't exhibited that sort of split before as a pro. The Browns went 5-1 with Watson because the defense allowed an unreal 1.0 points per drive, a mark that went up to 1.7 points per drive with anyone else under center.
As I wrote back in January, while the Browns were better on offense with Watson than they were with Walker or Dorian Thompson-Robinson, they were even better with Joe Flacco, who was sitting on his couch as a 38-year-old journeyman before stepping into the Cleveland lineup. We just don't see this happen with other teams that have highly touted quarterbacks; the Ravens, for example, were much worse with Tyler Huntley under center than they were with Jackson. The Jets didn't look as good with Zach Wilson as we would have expected them to look with Aaron Rodgers. Flacco did that with a third-stringer at right tackle, a backup at left tackle and without Chubb in the lineup.
The hope will naturally be Watson's shoulder surgery gets him back on track. It's now been three full seasons, though, since we saw him playing at a Pro Bowl level. The Browns looked and played better on offense without him. At this point, there have to be questions about whether he's going to be an adequate quarterback, let alone the guy Cleveland traded three first-round picks to acquire in 2022.
The impact of those missing picks also won't help Cleveland. While the roster was stacked with young, cost-controlled players after years of tanking and trading down for picks, the trade for Watson cost the Browns key selections who would otherwise be expected to play meaningful roles on this roster. They didn't have a top-65 pick in 2022 or 2023 and didn't have their first-round pick in April's draft. That's five players who would be meaningful parts of their offense or defense. General manager Andrew Berry will have to hope the players he has acquired to fill in for those missing pieces -- Jeudy, Jordan Hicks, Devin Bush and even backup quarterback Jameis Winston -- can hold their own when they're called upon to play.
The Browns are another high-ceiling, low-floor team on this list. If the surgery really does get Watson back on track and the line returns to form as they get healthier while the defense maintains its level of play from last season, this could be a Super Bowl contender. The more likely scenario, though, is the defense takes a step backward and the offense isn't able to do enough to overcome that decline.