Is There A Favorite Hiding Somewhere In The NFL's Big Muddle? [View all]

Is There A Favorite Hiding Somewhere In The NFL’s Big Muddle?
By Ray Ratto
2:19 PM EST on November 3, 2025

So after nine weeks of the NFL season, give or take a shared and very valid dread at the condemned warehouse that is the Cardinals-Cowboys Monday night matchup, we can all agree that the only thing we can all agree on is that Dan Quinn really filled his trousers by not taking Jayden Daniels out of last night's lost cause of a Seahawks-Commanders game. It is a rare point of consensus in a season that has mostly been unsettled and uneasy—it is indeed suboptimal to have your starting quarterback/franchise future mangle his elbow trying to make a play he doesn't need to make late in a game his team is losing by four and a half scores.

But that's the only thing on which there is anything remotely close to universal agreement; everything else in this year's NFL can be considered day-to-day and highly questionable. Baseball fans can snark away in the direction of their Dodgers-shaped straw man, basketball fans can opt in to All Wemby All The Time, and college football will always be able to find that get-your-ass-off-our-campus energy every Saturday, but the NFL has no galvanizing player or team at this moment. The best teams are all vulnerable, and not just because the odd coach will occasionally forget that there aren't any 32-point plays.

Take Chiefs-Bills on Sunday, for instance. This was a game between two Super Bowl contenders, provided you believe that the Chiefs are a Super Bowl contender until proven otherwise, and so about as significant as a Week 9 matchup can be. The game, which was a fairly thorough hammering disguised as a 28-21 Buffalo win, did not necessarily elevate the Bills to a Dodgers-level favorite, but did effectively undermine Kansas City's role as the league's once and future king. The Chiefs came in on a giddy three-game bender, with one of those wins a dominant performance over a fellow contender in Detroit (which we'll get to momentarily), and they looked game enough for a quarter and a half in Buffalo. But that was it, and the story of the rest of the game was Kansas City slowly but carefully being dismantled by a team that had just lost two games in succession to a confusingly competitive Patriots team and a not-confusing-at-all Falcons side. Are the Bills good? Yes. Are they that kind of good? Is anyone?

And therein lies the challenge of trying to define the league this year. It is a grand parade of teams regressing, at different paces, toward variously unsustainable means; taken as a whole, it is like watching a marathon in which everyone is walking backwards while looking at their phones. No team makes for a credibly hateable powerhouse, and the eight teams with only two losses are far more ambiguous in their achievements than the eight with just two wins. The latter group of teams is all irredeemably awful, but the former is anyone's guess.
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