Five NFL teams that could stumble in early season

• Several NFL teams could get off to slow starts in 2025 thanks to tough schedules and pervasive problems.
• The Bengals have been one of the league’s worst early-season underperformers in recent years, and Cincinnati is under pressure to turn things around.
• The Chiefs have been strong in September throughout Andy Reid’s run, but Kansas City faces a daunting slate to open the 2025 campaign.

NFL teams are judged on the entirety of their body of work – once they reach the season’s finish line. Until then, new verdicts are rendered constantly in a week-to-week league.

While every team has its slate wiped clean in the standings to start the fresh campaign, there’s hardly even footing in Week 1. Schedule imbalances, for one, confer advantages and disadvantages from the get-go. The latter can prove particularly troublesome to some franchises, which can be tripped up by various vulnerabilities that weren’t fully sorted out in the preseason. And while some teams end up shaking off the initial narratives that surround them and their slow starts, others end up engulfed by them.

With the new season kicking off Thursday, here are five NFL teams that could stumble out of the gates this season:

Cincinnati Bengals

No contender in recent history has embodied September struggles quite like Zac Taylor’s crew, which is just 7-14-1 in the month since the coach took the reins in 2019. Only once in that span – during the team’s 2021 Super Bowl run – has the franchise avoided an 0-2 start.

But Cincinnati has at least some reason to believe it can break out of the pattern that has dogged it for the better part of a decade. For once, Joe Burrow was granted a sense of normalcy not afforded to him in previous training camps, during which he was either battling an ailment or on the comeback trail. Last summer might have been relatively smooth for the quarterback if not for All-Pro receiver Ja’Marr Chase missing all of camp and preseason amid a contract standoff. An 0-3 start ensued, and the hole proved to be too deep for the team to climb out of, with the Bengals missing the postseason for the second consecutive season despite winning their final five contests.

With Burrow healthy and Chase signed to a massive extension, Cincinnati surely hopes its all-important passing attack skews closer to the form in which it finished last season rather than the manner in which it opened 2024, when it faceplanted in a stunning home loss to the New England Patriots. But the effort to give starters more preseason run yielded mixed results, with Burrow and Taylor calling out the sloppiness that spoiled the opener. Cohesion could prove problematic along the offensive line, where two new guards join a starting lineup that’s seldom granted Burrow any semblance of comfort, and throughout the defense, which is counting on new coordinator Al Golden to develop a host of underperforming young players.

The schedule should provide a bit of relief – at least initially. With the opener at home against the Cleveland Browns followed by a tilt with the Jacksonville Jaguars, the Bengals have a solid shot at their first 2-0 start since Andy Dalton’s penultimate season with the organization. But an intensely difficult five-game stretch afterward – at the Minnesota Vikings, at the Denver Broncos, vs. the Detroit Lions, at the Green Bay Packers and vs. the Pittsburgh Steelers – threatens to put the team at another serious deficit in the standings approaching midseason.

Chicago Bears

In building a reputation as one of the NFL’s offensive masterminds, Ben Johnson has repeatedly hammered the importance of precision. So far, it’s clear the new head coach in Chicago isn’t seeing much of that.

After a preseason finale in which his starters gained just 22 yards on their two first-quarter drives and the offense committed several miscues thereafter, Johnson made clear the showing left him with a bad feeling.

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‘This is our first time on the road, and we were going to find out what kind of road team we were going to be,’ Johnson said. ‘If the first quarter was any indication, it was not good enough. We have to get better in a hurry.’

Johnson represents a sea change for the Bears, as a long listless franchise finally appears to be energized. But growing pains are inevitable given the immense scope of the shift. Johnson acknowledged that even exponential growth for Caleb Williams likely entails an initial lag, and operating within structure and better sensing danger might not come easily to the 2024 No. 1 pick after he took a league-high 68 sacks last season. And while the overhauled interior offensive line looks much improved, there’s no guarantee the front will coalesce early, especially with the question at left tackle remaining open. With a slate that opens against the Vikings and Lions and includes October trips to face the Washington Commanders and Baltimore Ravens, Chicago might require a bit of a recalibration on the feel-good vibes.

Houston Texans

Equipping C.J. Stroud with more responsibility seems bound to produce better results than the ones Houston saw in 2024, when the signal-caller ranked second in both quarterback hits (109) and sacks taken (52). But how much can first-year coordinator Nick Caley’s new scheme do to cover for a front that still looks to be on shaky ground? Meanwhile, the receiving corps lacks a reliable running mate for Nico Collins, and Joe Mixon’s uncertain injury outlook leaves an already suspect ground game in a dangerous spot.

There’s plenty for a first-time play-caller to compensate for, leaving lots of reasons to believe that this unit might not find its footing until much later into the fall or winter. The schedule also does little to assuage any acclimation concerns. Houston opens up on the road against the Los Angeles Rams, a team that has famously tripped itself up at the start of each of the last two seasons but now has enviable continuity. Two other matchups against 2024 division winners – vs. the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and at the Baltimore Ravens – loom before the Week 6 bye.

Kansas City Chiefs

Maybe it’s foolhardy to doubt the NFL’s model of consistent excellence, with Kansas City having won at least four of its first five games in each of the last three seasons. But despite all the advantages readily accessible to any team with Patrick Mahomes at the helm, the Chiefs are facing a slate that easily could ignite a Super Bowl hangover discourse. Six teams that won at least 11 games last season await in the first nine games, though only the opener against the Los Angeles Chargers in Brazil and the pre-bye tilt with the Buffalo Bills will be played away from Arrowhead Stadium.

With Rashee Rice’s suspension in place for the first six weeks, the renewed commitment to reviving the downfield passing game might be forced to go on hold for a bit. And if the reshuffled left side of the offensive line doesn’t provide Mahomes with sufficient protection, Kansas City might fully revert to scraping by with its aerial attack in the short term. Don’t expect a full-blown crisis, but a mere regression to the mean in one-score games for a historic outlier could produce an uncharacteristic run of early setbacks.

Detroit Lions

If Dan Campbell’s crew really does feel the effects of substantial attrition, it should be apparent in short order. While new coordinators John Morton and Kelvin Sheppard can stand firm on the foundation put in place by their predecessors, replacing eight assistant coaches in total is bound to yield some instability. An offensive line that ranked as one of the league’s elite once looked perfectly capable of ironing out imperfections elsewhere, but the loss of Kevin Zeitler and Frank Ragnow, the latter serving as the mainstay in the middle, leaves a lot for rookie Tate Ratledge and second-year blocker Christian Mahogany to take on in starting roles.

The biggest issue for Detroit, however, is its unrelenting schedule. Road matchups against the Packers, Bengals, Ravens and Chiefs will keep the Lions on their toes in the first six weeks, and a brutal four-game stretch that features the Buccaneers, Vikings, Commanders and Eagles follows.

After a historic 15-win campaign in 2024, success can and should be measured differently for Detroit moving forward. That’s good for all involved, because matching the regular-season output amid so much change will be a nearly impossible task for a still-formidable group.