5 NFL teams who might be regression candidates for 2020 season

You may not like it, but several teams won’t live up to lofty expectations this fall in the NFL. Here are five regression candidates for the 2020 season.

For someone to be better, somebody else has to be worse. In a league of parity, the NFL does as great of a job of this as any professional sports league in the world. Competitive life cycles are never as long as you think, as Super Bowl windows are only briefly open before they are slammed shut. Every season is different and nobody has any clue for what’s about to happen.

You can look at last year’s standings and conclude there’s no way a division champion is going to fall on hard times. Conversely, a pitiful team from yesteryear could become a nightmare for the rest of the league overnight. The only constant here is change.

So what we’re going to do today is look at five teams who are regression candidates in 2020. No, this doesn’t mean these playoff teams from last year are going to fall off a cliff. It just means they may not achieve all that they did on the gridiron last season this fall. This could mean a worse regular-season record or a worse finish in the NFL playoffs.

Here are five regression candidates for the upcoming 2020 campaign.

The Kansas City Chiefs reached the NFL summit for the first time in 50 years last season. They have the best player in the league in quarterback Patrick Mahomes. As long as Andy Reid is his head coach, the Chiefs’ Super Bowl window will stay open. However, it’s will be so incredibly hard for Kansas City to repeat as Super Bowl champions. It doesn’t happen all that often in the NFL.

In fact, the last team to win back-to-back Super Bowls was the New England Patriots in 2003 and 2004. No, it does not matter where you end the season because it has no bearings whatsoever on where you begin the next one. Like all 31 other teams in the league, the Chiefs will have to climb the mountain from the base in 2020. There are no shortcuts and they’ll have to put in the work.

In terms of competition, the Chiefs should be getting plenty of that in the AFC West. The Denver Broncos have the feel of a playoff team, the Las Vegas Raiders should be respectable and last season won’t go as horribly wrong as it did for the Los Angeles Chargers. Though they’ll win the AFC West, the Chiefs aren’t going to clean sweep their division next fall. It’s too tough of a quartet.

As for external pressure outside of the AFC West, the Baltimore Ravens should be excellent and who knows who good the Buffalo Bills can be in the new AFC East? Even if the Chiefs get back to the Super Bowl, they’ll get a formidable challenger out of the NFC.

If you want to pick the Chiefs over the field to win Super Bowl LV, that’s fine, but realize how painfully difficult it is to repeat.