The beauty of Week 1 in the NFL is that everyone thinks they have things figured out before the opening kickoff of the season. Once the ball is in the air, though, there's so much that's going to change between then and the final whistle. We thought the Detroit Lions would be NFC North contenders alongside the Green Bay Packers, that the Baltimore Ravens were proving to be a cut above the Buffalo Bills, that the Miami Dolphins would be competitive still. It also looked like the Chicago Bears might embarrass J.J. McCarthy and the Vikings on Monday night.
And yet, none of that happened, and we're back to the drawing board with our NFL Power Rankings.
As much as you can think you know about the NFL, myself included, from offseason moves, the preseason, training camps, and so on, the truth comes out for every 60-minute game during the regular season. Now that we finally have that around the league, we can really start to evaluate what we saw out there, and what it could mean. That doesn't mean our opinions still can't change drastically, but Week 1 going into Week 2 always offers the highest chance for wild swings in something like power rankings.
With the dust settling on a sweaty and wild Week 1, though, it's time to start looking ahead with our NFL Power Rankings for Week 2.
Note: Previous week's rankings are in parentheses.
32. Miami Dolphins (24)
I said coming into the season that I was a bit pessimistic on the Miami Dolphins, thinking that they had gone past their peak and were now on the decline. That all turned out to be true, but what I didn’t expect was how immediate and drastically bad Mike McDaniel’s team would look in every facet of the game.
The defense had problems, but even then, getting torched by Daniel Jones is an unforgivable sin in the modern NFL. What’s worse, Miami’s offense behind Tua Tagovailoa, the quarterback included too, looked almost entirely inept. It was a brutal all-around performance, and the Dolphins truly have the look of the league’s worst with the bottom falling out.
31. New York Giants (27)
Brian Daboll and the New York Giants coaching staff should’ve only had to look at last season in Pittsburgh before making a quarterback decision. Instead, they rolled out Russell Wilson as QB1 and a demoralizing loss to Washington was their prize for doing so.
I’ll give the G-Men’s defense some credit as the strength of this team looks the part against a quality opponent, but it’s going to be next to impossible to win games until New York gets Mr. Unlimited out from under center, because he’s looking quite limited these days.
30. New Orleans Saints (32)
Hand up, I thought that the Arizona Cardinals were going to paint the turf in the Superdome with more gold with how badly they would beat the Saints. New Orleans held their own, but it certainly felt a lot of that was more self-inflicted than it was anything that Spencer Rattler and Co. were doing to make that be the case.
This team doesn’t appear to have a single answer at quarterback and the defense, while it made some plays, also isn’t up to the task to shoulder the load necessary to be in the postseason mix at all.