7 Surprising Team Projections

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. How do you turn 16 games, injury reports, team notes, betting lines, and matchup trends into one clear weekend preview? Chat GPT work can help. Give it the goal, plus real inputs like notes, files, data, and project plans. It can help turn them into an analysis, tracker, deck outline, or workflow you can keep shaping. You stay in control, reviewing the work, and choosing the final result. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro Plans. Scams don't always look like scams anymore.

0:41AI can make a fake ticket offer look legit or a sportsbook text sound official. And once an identity thief gets your personal information, they can start using your name like it belongs to them. And then what? LifeLock helps detect potential identity threats and suspicious activity. And if identity theft happens, LifeLock's restoration specialist can help restore your identity, guaranteed, because only LifeLock truly protects your name and identity. Get LifeLock at LifeLock.com and use promo code FOOTBALL for up to 30 % off your first year. That's LifeLock.com, code FOOTBALL. Lowe's knows Sundays are for football.

1:19So tackle your home improvement projects by Saturday and earn your Sunday with great deals on LG and Bosch appliances. Select Ego, DeWalt, Filtrete products, and more. Then once your to-do list is done, get ready to kick back, relax, and enjoy the game. Shop in-store or online now and earn your Sunday with help from Lowe's, official partner of the NFL. Life moves fast. At American Military University, they're ready to help you keep up. AMU's flexible, affordable online programs in cybersecurity, IT, space studies, and more are designed for service members, veterans, and their families. AMU provides the support you need to take the next step wherever life takes you.

2:02American Military University. It is made for what's next. Learn more at amu.apus.edu.

2:14Hey, guys. This is Greg Rosenthal. This is NFL Daily. The regular top of the show is going to be in just a minute. But after we recorded a great show with Aaron Schatz looking at some team projections, we got the news that Christian Wilkins of the Raiders has been released by the team. The Raiders are one of the teams that we talked about at length in this show. So we wanted to get it updated, especially because this is the first news bomb drop that we've had. To remind you, Christian Wilkins, formerly of the Miami Dolphins, signed a five-year,$110 million contract just a year ago. At the time, it was reported that$84 million of it was guaranteed.

2:55Wilkins has already gotten just about$50 million of that guaranteed. And it sounds like, according to our insider, Ian Rappaport, who has been out front with this story, that there is a disagreement between the Raiders and Christian Wilkins about how he has been rehabbing that surgically repaired foot. They wanted him to get surgery. They had multiple medical opinions that said to get another surgery. He didn't want to do it. They tried to take away a big chunk of his guaranteed money, about$35 million. He and the NFLPA apparently has filed a grievance to get that$35 million. So sometimes when the insiders report fully guaranteed, it might not be fully guaranteed, but that will be settled in the court system.

3:44And I guess between the money and the injury, the Raiders in this new era with John Spitek at GM and Pete Carroll at head coach decided this guy just isn't worth it, which is pretty surprising for a guy who was a top 10 defensive tackle really when they brought him into Las Vegas. But obviously the injury has really changed his career. He was only able to play five games for the Raiders. The money situation is going to be done in the court system, but it really leaves the Raiders in an interesting spot. They are putting a ton of dead money onto their cap this year, basically taking the pain of all that money this year and saying, it's not even worth keeping Christian Wilkins.

4:33We'll eat the money this year and try to be free of everything a year from now. But very disappointing for them because it's not like it helps their cap situation. It actually raises their salary cap situation. And this is one thing you can do with an excess of salary cap situation is eat it all now and move it into the future. But man, if you look at the Raiders roster at defensive tackle, it is about as thin as any team in the entire NFL. Adam Butler is their number one defensive tackle. After that, it's really a question mark who is going to be starting for this team, whether it's Lucky Foto, I believe is listed as the starter right now.

5:10They have a rookie, you know, third day pick Tonka Hemingway. It's not great. They're going to have to maybe look at free agency, but I think it's a sign of an organization. Pete Carroll, John Spitek, who want their guys, who are willing to take a little short-term pain. So maybe it makes sense to take short-term pain for a little long-term game. But man, it is hard to be optimistic about that Raiders defensive line, especially in the middle. Now let's get to the rest of the show.

5:40Welcome to NFL Daily, where we're two decades into explaining what DVOA is. I'm Greg Rosenthal. And yes, we are going to have the originator of the stat on this show throughout. It is Aaron Schatz of the FTN Football Almanac. And Aaron, I have been like quoting DVOA as just sort of like a quick and dirty best way to measure a team's overall efficiency for like two decades. And at this point, I feel like I should just stop explaining what it means. But there is really no easy way to explain what it means. No, there is. It measures the success of every play compared to a league average adjusted for situation and opponent.

6:23Okay. That's the short version. I'm going to copy that, but it's a very smart way. And I'm a simple man to get where a team is, where they're potentially going. And we use it throughout the course of the season. And of course, Aaron uses it to write what to me is the best primer preview. you if you're going to get one thing to get ready for the season. To me, it is the FDN Football Almanac. If you've listened to this show and around the NFL for a while, used to be called Football Outsiders. And I recommend everyone go and get that. And so I got it. And what I thought we would do today, Aaron, is just go through a handful of teams and we'll try to pick ones that maybe we haven't talked about as much on this show.

7:09And then we'll also pick ones that just stuck out kind of for surprising projections. And we'll start with the 49ers, who I noticed in your projections and out in Vegas, you're basically looking at a total rebound. You have the 49ers projected for 11.2 wins, which is the most in the NFC. it's the third most in the NFL. You have them with a 79.7 % chance to make the playoffs. And what really surprised me was you have them almost two wins ahead of the Cardinals and the Rams who are very closely bunched behind them. Give me kind of the statistical reasons why you guys are so bullish on San Francisco.

8:00First, I'll mention San Francisco is actually our sample chapter. So if you want to see what the FTN Football Almanac is about, you can go to ftnfantasy.com slash almanac and actually read the entire San Francisco chapter that Brian Knowles wrote. The 49ers were better than you think last year, despite the injuries. They were 14th in DVOA, despite leading the league in adjusted games lost to injury. and they were 14th in part because their special teams were really bad, which doesn't tend to carry over from year to year. So offense and defense-wise, they were even better than that. They were the best 11-loss team since 1978 by DVOA.

8:49That's a wild stack. I realize you don't put a banner up for that. It's a weird one. As far as what they're going to do this year, it suggests good things. Now, they obviously have questions to me more than anywhere on the defensive line, like a lot of changes there. You're counting on potentially three rookies to have pretty big roles and a couple of guys who haven't played at a particularly high level at defensive tackle. What is it, though, that makes them stand out in terms of having that big of a projection other than the schedule? Because the rest of the NFC West on some level has has a similar schedule.

9:30What puts them like a couple wins ahead? Is it just the tried and true Shanahan offense, essentially, plus all the injury games that they missed a year ago? That's a lot of it. And schedule wise, you know, the NFC West has mostly the same schedule. But the three games that are based on where you place in the standings, it just because of which divisions that is, the 49ers is much easier than the other three teams in the division. Defensive. I mean, again, they were better than you think last year. Defensively, they were 13th. Offensively, they were nine. So let's imagine that the defense, right, is healthier, but you've got rookies, guys left, whatever, does about the same thing, 13th.

10:14the offense, we're big believers in Shanahan, healthier again on offense. They have McCaffrey for most of the year. If they have Ayuk for most of the year, although it does seem like he's going to miss the beginning of the year, right? They get a little bit better on offense, let's say. You combine that with the really easy schedule, you have a division champion. Yeah, I think that the case against them, and that all makes sense to them, and I haven't decided whether they're going to be one of my playoff teams or not, but I'd probably lean towards yes, and your projections influence that some.

10:47The case against them to me would be, okay, the two things on offense that you feel like you can count on opposite the scheme is Purdy, who I think is a good, young, improving quarterback, and Kittle, who's still playing at a very high level. After that, it gets pretty murky because counting on Christian McCaffrey to just be healthy is a little murky. Ricky Pearsall in his short career hasn't shown too much and he has got some injury issues. Obviously, Debo Samuel's gone and wasn't playing at the same level. We don't really know about IUC and every year 49ers fans look at their offensive line and they're like, why didn't we invest more?

11:24And it's kind of another season like that. You feel great about Trent Williams. You feel great about the youngster Dominic Pune. After that, it's pretty shaky. If Trent Williams, for instance, were to miss some games this year, like he has, you know, at points the last couple of years, I don't know if they have a backup plan as much in place. And so I get the projection. To me, they seem like, along with the Cowboys, who we might hit as well, as one of the highest variance teams in the league, you could absolutely see a scenario where they are back there, where Kyle Shanahan lives in the NFC Championship game.

11:56And I think you could see a scenario where they're closer to 500. But one of the things I love about your almanac is it does point out things like, not only were they not as bad as you remember a year ago, like, man, they lost a lot of tight games to really good teams until the injury wheels fell off. It was like at the last second. And sometimes the emotion of watching the season, you do overrate that. You guys are absolutely right. They were losing the very good teams. They were very close games. And really, they probably weren't as bad as they were a year ago. A lot of variants, though. I feel like they're not.

12:28Yeah, I feel like I know more about the Rams, at least. I think about part of the variance is something you alluded to a little bit with the offensive line. This is a team with bad depth. If they get hit by a lot of injuries again, that's what they really lost when they lost guys this offseason is they lost a lot of their depth, right? Pearsall is no longer depth. He's now a starter, right? Like defensively, they're going to depend on rookies and they don't necessarily have good guys behind them. If they have the injuries, I don't know if they have the depth to be, you know, 500 for five or six weeks while they wait for everybody to get healthy again.

13:09Yeah, that checks out. I did think it was interesting. You had the Cardinals just very slightly, but essentially you had the Cardinals and the Rams at the same spot. And that is really supportive of our Cardinals love on this show. And I like hearing that. Let's go to the AFC South. You have the Jaguars projected to win the division. It's only by half a game in your projections, but you have the Jaguars at nine wins. You have them at a 54.7 % chance to make the playoffs. What helped the Jaguars? It was probably the most surprising, maybe not the most surprising, but it was up there with the most surprising division winners over the Texans this year.

13:54Well, the Texans, you have an issue that comes up with a number of teams, which is defense is less consistent from year to year than offense. So when you have a team that was so good on defense and not good on offense, which was the case with last year's Texans, you expect it's more likely that the defense comes back to the pack a little bit than that the offense improves, especially since they still have tons of questions on their offensive line. With Jacksonville, we see a defensive improvement. they were the lowest team in the league in takeaways per drive last year. Only 4.7 % of drives ended with turnovers.

14:32That is something that heavily regresses to the mean from year to year. They were terrible against the run on third downs, better on first downs. That's also something where first down run defense tends to carry over more. Third downs are obviously really important, but there's less of them, so the sample size isn't as big. I think some of this is we had to guess about Travis Hunter. Like we give credit for drafting defensive players in the first couple of rounds because defensive players actually tend to have a more predictable effect on the team than offensive players when you draft them. Is Travis Hunter a defensive player?

15:10Like that, I mean, I don't know. Does he count as an offensive player? I mean, he counts as both. Why wouldn't he? Does he count as both? Right. We counted him as both. So if he's not a big addition to the defense, then maybe we're overrating their defense a little bit. Maybe their defense is below average. And now they fall behind Houston. But on offense, I think we may be underplaying them. Listen, I'm one of those people, and there's a lot of us out there, who still think that Trevor Lawrence has got it. Right? He just needs a coach to unlock it. And there is a feeling like Liam Cohen can be that coach.

15:45Brian Thomas Jr. is so good. Having Travis Hunter now as the second wide receiver. yeah there's questions about the offensive line but but trevor lawrence god should still be good so this even if the defense doesn't live up to our projection i feel like the offense can be better than our projection i agree with you on the offensive side i never thought i'd hear the day where aaron shots uses the word that a quarterback has it um you know very uh not analytically sound there and it's funny because i would push back on that for trevor lawrence i he's got everything but it. And that's... Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking, I guess I'm thinking more about his natural abilities rather than instincts.

16:22I guess when people say that someone has it, they're thinking more instincts and leadership skills. And I'm thinking more the arm. Yes. I do think he has the talent to get it done. I think in the right system he can pop up. I think there is something whether it's mentally, whether it's just as simple as reading defenses and needing more time in the NFL to kind of mature on that front or yeah, just that je ne sais quoi that you want out of your quarterback. I don't think he's shown that yet and yet I can see the case for them on offense because immediately if Travis Hunter is as good as I personally think he is I think that's up there with the best wide receiver combinations in the league and not like the best young wide receiver combinations, just one of the best wide receiver combinations and then I think Liam Cohen is going to be able to scheme up a pretty good running game to support them as well.

17:18The offensive line definitely has question marks. We don't know enough about Anthony Campanile, their defensive coordinator, but I see the case there. Was surprised to see them over the Texans. I was even more surprised though, Aaron, to see the optimism that you guys have for the commanders. This was probably the number one thing that stuck out to me when I first opened. The first thing I do is check the projections. You have the commanders at 10.6 wins. that's about a win ahead of the Eagles. So you have the Commanders with a 74 % chance to make the playoffs, a better chance to win the NFC East over Philadelphia.

17:55It's the second best odds in the NFC to make the Super Bowl. What is it that your numbers are telling you about the Commanders? Because for readers of your Almanac, very often a team that improves so much one year to the next, you often expect a regression the next year and you're kind of predicting the opposite here. This is a little abnormal. You're right. And also fourth downs are going to regress. They were like possibly the best fourth down team ever last year. If you consider how successful they were on fourth downs and how often they went for it. And there's no way that that continues again.

18:31But the system thinks that that is going to be countered by the additions like Samuel and Laramie Tunsell. and it doesn't necessarily think Daniels is going to get better, but it doesn't think he's going to get worse. There is an individual quarterback projection part of the team projections and it likes Daniels a lot. And it has the defense was 23rd last year, going to improve a little bit to be more like 16th or 17th, which I think they can do if Lattimore is healthy and Trey Amos is good. And I know that there are questions about who is going to exactly rush the passer other than Frankie Louvoo.

19:09But if they can put an average defense out there with a very good offense, then this is a pretty darn good team. And schedule, again, plays a role. They have an easier schedule than the Eagles, who, like the Texans, we think the defense was so good last year and so important to what they did, even if it is still one of the best defenses in the league, if it's not as good as it was last year, and they lost a lot of talent. The Eagles lost more veteran defensive talent than any other team with the variable that I use for losing veteran talent. If the defense is not quite as good as it was last year, then the Eagles, they're still one of the top teams in the league.

19:51But in their own division, they have to fight with the commanders who we also think are one of the top teams in the league. Yeah, you have them in your overall DVOA projections for the year, the Eagles, as the seventh best team in the NFL. So not that much different than where Washington is at five. But that's interesting because to me, I'm thinking the Eagles have a very high ceiling for the offense. But what your numbers are looking at, and you still have them in the top 10, you have them ninth, is that for so much of last season, really for the last season and a half, the offense during the regular season has been inconsistent.

20:29And it's why Eagles fans are frustrated with Jalen Hurts' quarterback rankings and all that sort of stuff. But I'm amazed that you have the Commanders so high. And I think it's something Commanders fans can put in their pocket and push back against everyone who just naturally, as analysts, Aaron, like no one wants to predict the same teams to make the Final Four or the Final Eight every year. And when you're looking at it from a year ago, like Washington is the team, I think that the national media is just going to expect to fall off, except for you. Yeah, no, I understand that. And normally we absolutely believe in the plexiglass principle, which is teams that significantly improve from one year to the next tend to then take a step back in year three.

21:14The fact that we have the commanders going counter to that is counter to what normally comes out of our projection systems. There's no question about that. And I was talking on our last show with Jordan Rodriguez and with Bridget Condon that, yeah, something doesn't sit right that we've had such elite consistency at the top of the league, really, for the last couple of years. And really, if what you project to happen happens, which is the 49ers who have been around, but them rebounding, Philadelphia coming back to the pack quite a bit, we will have a little bit of a shakeup. But man, just seeing that 4.4 % chance for Philadelphia to win the Super Bowl 8th or 9th, I think you have them among all the teams, that's pretty low on the list.

21:58Let's take a quick break. We're going to come back with more teams that caught my eye in terms of their 2025 projections.

22:13How do you turn 16 games, injury reports, team notes, betting lines, and matchup trends into one clear weekend preview? Chat GPT work can help. Give it the goal, plus real inputs like notes, files, data, and project plans. It can help turn them into an analysis, tracker, deck outline, or workflow you can keep shaping. You stay in control, reviewing the work, and choosing the final result. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting work mode available on plus and pro plans. For adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matters.

22:55Tremphaya offers self-injection or intravenous infusion from the start. Tremphaya is administered as injections under the skin or infusions through a vein every four weeks, followed by injections under the skin every four or eight weeks. If your doctor decides that you can self-inject Tremphaya, proper training is required. Tremphaya is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's disease and adults with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis. Serious allergic reactions, increased risk of infections or lower ability to fight them, and liver problems may occur.

23:29Before treatment, get checked for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms, or need a vaccine. Explore what's possible. Ask your doctor about Tremphaya today. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more or visit TremphayaRadio.com. Life moves fast. At American Military University, they're ready to help you keep up. AMU's flexible, affordable online programs in cybersecurity, IT, space studies, and more are designed for service members, veterans, and their families. AMU provides the support you need to take the next step wherever life takes you. American Military University.

24:11It is made for what's next. Learn more at amu.apus.edu. Every player in the league has a scouting report. Strengths, weaknesses, history, tendencies, everything an opponent wants to know. But what if somebody built a scouting report on you? Data brokers collect your personal stats, your name, address, phone number, family details, and other private information. Then they package it up and legally sell it to anyone willing to pay, sometimes just for pennies. And then what? The person buying your information may not be looking to draft you. They may be looking to scam you, steal your identity, and start using your name like it belongs to them.

24:49That's where LifeLock comes in. LifeLock's automatic data broker removal tool helps you find exposed personal information and remove it from those data brokers. If you fall victim to identity theft, LifeLock's restoration specialist will block and tackle for you, which means they'll handle your case from start to finish and restore your identity guaranteed. Because only LifeLock truly protects your name and your identity. So go get LifeLock at LifeLock.com and use promo code FOOTBALL for up to 30 % off your first year. That's LifeLock.com code FOOTBALL. Again, LifeLock.com code FOOTBALL. Lowe's knows Sundays are for football.

25:26So tackle your home improvement projects by Saturday and earn your Sunday with great deals on LG and Bosch appliances. Select Ego, DeWalt, Phil Treat products, and more. Then once your to-do list is done, get ready to kick back, relax, and enjoy the game. Shop in-store or online now and earn your Sunday with help from Lowe's, official partner of the NFL. Back on NFL Daily. talking with Aaron Schatz, who's in Worcester, Massachusetts, which I know you didn't grow up in, Aaron. I don't believe. No, I'm from Sharon, Massachusetts, which is right next to Foxborough. Used to kind of be the butt of jokes, but Worcester's on the comeback trail.