Which NFL Contenders Can You Actually Trust This Season?

Some teams are who we thought they were — for good or bad — while others are a new mystery every week.

Drake Maye of the New England Patriots runs onto the field prior to the game against the Cleveland Browns at Gillette Stadium on October 26, 2025. (Kathryn Riley/Getty Images)

While we always like to think we know who’s good or not going in, every NFL season brings its share of surprises — teams who were supposed to win but don’t, others who overachieve out of nowhere, and plenty that are just plain confusing from week to week. (There’s a reason why the great Brian Burke once found that you could do roughly as well as — or sometimes better than — more sophisticated projection systems simply by regressing last year’s wins to the mean, or even flatly picking every team to go .500.)

But now that we’re about halfway into the 2025 regular season, we’re confronted with a new question: What, exactly, do we make of everything we’ve seen? We have about two months of relevant data on each team’s performance, and we also know how that squares with what we thought back in August. Should we change our opinions about teams who diverged in either direction? And then, what do we do with teams who never seem to play to the level we expect of them, no matter the opponent or circumstance?

Let’s use both of these dimensions to dissect which teams might be the most — and least — trustworthy in the NFL going forward.

First things first, let’s talk about those over- and underachievers. Here’s a plot of every team according to their schedule-adjusted¹ points-per-game margin — both their actual average on the season, and that which we would have expected before the season based on their preseason Elo rating: