With only one game per week, no major American sports league creates a pathway to ruinous thinking quite as wide as the NFL’s.
A full seven days of analysis — or four, or six, or sometimes 10 or 14 — creates plenty of time to overthink and overreact. Are the Buffalo Bills and Kansas City Chiefs back and angling for another glorious playoff showdown? Are the Cleveland Browns positioned to win the AFC North for the first time since (oh my god) 1989? Can Chicago Bears fans at least hold out hope for the 2024 season since this one is (/fart noises).
These are all understandable takes after three weeks of the 2023 campaign. But are they reasonable? Well, that’s what we’re gonna take a look at in this week’s edition of the Overreaction Index.
I gave the Dolphins’ offense, which harnesses the things that worked for the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers and engineers it in a way to best suit Tua Tagovailoa, its flowers in my Monday morning recap. I took on Sean Payton’s dire performance and the Denver Broncos’ flameout in this week’s list of the Most Fireable Coaches. Let’s move past those and head to some other emerging stories that could be trends or merely blips on a horizon loaded with data points that create a star map to Super Bowl 58.