Remember when Dak Prescott coerced Jalen Carter to spit in his face? That was the first play of the 2025 NFL season, and it feels like it happened a year ago. We’ve seen some absolutely bonkers things happen through the first seven weeks, things that have immediately upended everything we thought we knew about the landscape of the league.
We’ve also seen some things happen that aren’t too surprising. Teams made moves in the offseason they thought would work out, when in reality, everyone knew that they were going to blow up. This is a ranking of everything from predictably bad quarterback play to juggernauts who turned into a dog in a wheelchair .... and then comparing them to real-life examples that relate to everyone.
Ranking NFL surprises from ‘we all saw that coming’ to ‘getting blindsided by a truck’
We have to start with the worst team in football, and how they absolutely botched their offseason choice of quarterback.
Shocked Pikachu: Justin Fields still stinks
You never use a Shocked Pikachu to show that you’re actually shocked, and you’re not actually shocked that Justin Fields still stinks.
For some reason, the Jets signed him to a two-year, $40 million deal (with $30 million guaranteed) in free agency because they thought that he was going to be able to get them through this season.
If there is a surprise here, it's that it took until Week 7 for Aaron Glenn to bench him for their backup, Tyrod Taylor. Whatever the case, this whole thing makes entirely too much sense and was incredibly predictable from the jump.
Motion-activated Halloween decoration: The Colts are good, good
You’ll just be walking through your neighborhood, and then all of a sudden, there’ll be some three-foot-long spider in someone’s front yard that starts making screeching noises and jerking everywhere. It’ll scare your dogs, and it’ll make you do one of those farts that might be a little more than a fart. That’s definitely happened to everyone, and not just me.
The only people who like motion-activated Halloween decorations are the people who own them. For everyone else, they’re the bane of existence from about mid-September through the end of October.
That’s exactly what’s going on with the Colts. At the beginning of September, we saw the guy down the street put the spider in his front yard. It made you think, "Whoa, that’s pretty big." That was when the Colts stomped the Dolphins out in Week 1. Then, you walked by it the first time, and you didn’t realize that it actually moves. That’s when the Colts beat the Broncos in Week 2.
Over the next couple of weeks, you got complacent; you knew the thing was going to move, so you walked on the other side of the street when you passed that house. That’s when the Colts beat the Titans and lost to the Rams.
One day, you forgot that the spider existed. You got distracted by your phone when you walked by the house, and bam, that thing got you again. That was when the Colts beat the Raiders 40-6 on the back of three Jonathan Taylor rushing touchdowns.
Now it’s a little under two weeks until Halloween, and every time you see someone walk by your house, you look out the window just to watch them get knocked off their feet by the spider. That’s been the past two weeks with the Colts beating the Cardinals and the Chargers.
At this point, you’re ready for this nightmare to be over, but you have to respect that house for the fear it’s struck in the heart of the neighborhood. They've established themselves as the alpha, and everyone else is nothing but a pathetic loser. Even after Halloween is over, you know that these people are going to be out there, and they have the upper hand on you every time you see them.
That’s the Colts; they’ve been the best team in football for the past two months, and even if they slip up in November (which they probably won’t), you know what they’re capable of, and they’ll beat you into the ground if you show any weakness.
Unexpected snake sighting: The Eagles' running game is awful
No one is ever prepared to see a snake. If you’re walking through a swamp for some reason, you know there's a chance that a snake is in there somewhere, but you’re still going to jump when you see it.
In 2024, Saquon Barkley had the best all-around season of any running back ever (he set the record for the most rushing yards in a regular season and postseason). The dude rocks, and something would have to go horribly, horribly wrong for him not to continue to rock.
It seemed like the only non-injury thing that could derail this train is the Eagles’ offensive line suddenly taking a massive step back. But under position coach Jeff Stoutland, a healthy Eagles offensive line has never stunk, and there’s simply no reason to think a stinky o-line year was coming.
Well, here we are, and the Eagles' offensive line stinks.
But then you think about it: They’re coming off a season in which they had to block on over 750 running plays, so they’re worn down; they’re coming off an offseason in which the starting left guard and center both underwent surgery; they’re also coming off an offseason that was a month shorter than almost everyone else's.
If there was a season for the Eagles’ offensive line to slump, it’d be this one. If there’s a place where you’re going to see a snake, it’d be in a swamp. It’s still jarring that the Eagles’ big guys are playing poorly, and it’s still jarring when you see a swamp snake.
Biting into a cream-filled donut, but you thought it was custard-filled: Geno Smith stinks
This is fat guy talk: Sometimes when you go to the store to grab donuts, you’re in a hurry and you don’t pay attention to which donuts you're grabbing because you’re super excited for donuts.
Then you get in the car and you take a bite of your bonus donut because you don’t have any self-respect or self-restraint. Suddenly, you get an unexpected, unwanted and much fluffier taste of cream in your mouth instead of the creamy taste of custard. You were surprised, but it’s because you were dumb and you have no one to blame but yourself.
That’s exactly what the Raiders found out when they signed Geno Smith in free agency.
They knew they needed to get a quarterback in free agency, so they went and they grabbed a quarterback who was good where he was for the past five seasons. Then they got into this season, and he started sloppy, but they still beat the Patriots in Week 1.
Since then, though, he’s pretty much been exclusively terrible. He’s getting sacked and throwing interceptions at an insane rate, and the Raiders are realizing the guy they paid for is getting sacked and throwing interceptions at an insanely high rate (19 sacks and 10 interceptions).
So yeah, it’s been surprising that Geno Smith is this terrible this season, but it’s on Las Vegas for just getting Pete Carroll the quarterback that he was comfortable with rather than setting him up the same way he was set up in Seattle in his heyday. (And hey: If the donut thing doesn’t click for you, substitute cream and custard donuts for iceberg and romaine lettuce or something like that. I don’t know; I don’t eat vegetables.)
Watching The Sixth Sense for the second time: CMC is the best RB in fantasy
When you watched The Sixth Sense (or any M. Night Shyamalan movie, for that matter), you knew going to go in that there was going to be a big twist. The second time you watched it, you tried to see if there was anything that you missed. Sure enough, there was: Haley Joel Osment’s character was the only person who ever talked to Bruce Willis the whole time. It was actually pretty heavy-handed, and you should’ve seen it coming.
We all should’ve seen Christian McCaffrey’s 2025 season coming. He was coming off a 2024 season where he only touched the ball 65 times, so on one hand, you didn’t want to use a top-five draft pick to get a guy who is coming off an injury. That's especially true because the 49ers are a cursed franchise that can’t get away from the injury bug.
On the other hand, he’s recovered from injuries before and been a stud. In 2021, he only played six games because of a handful of leg injuries. In 2022, he came back and scored the second-highest number of fantasy points for a running back.
We’ve seen this movie before. It turns out that picking Saquon Barkley with the fifth overall pick and letting CMC fall to the tenth pick was very dumb … and we have no one to blame but ourselves for not seeing this coming.