The biggest gamble every NFL team is making in 2026

At this point in the offseason, every NFL team has made their best bets for the 2026 season. They’ve hired the guys they wanted to hire, they’ve paid (or not paid) most of the guys they wanted to pay, and they’ve drafted the guys they wanted to draft. Every NFL team pushed its chips in somewhere. From risky draft picks and mondo-sized paychecks to coaches who were hired and fired, these are the riskiest moves every team made heading into the 2026 season. 

Arizona Cardinals

• Biggest gamble: Drafting Jeremiyah Love

Drafting a running back in the first round is something that you do when you have structure. The Cardinals don’t have that at all, but they still drafted one anyway. Maybe it pans out, but this sure feels like it’ll be a repeat of Ashton Jeanty’s rookie season, which was bad.

Instead of trading back to get more picks and/or drafting a high-end offensive line prospect, Monti Ossenfort made a massive bet by drafting a luxury player. That’s a problem because the rest of his team is mostly a value brand. 

On a human level, this makes sense for ol’ Monti: his seat is made of molten glass, and he’s not going to be around long enough for a potential offensive lineman to become a star. So getting a running back who has an infinitely higher chance of producing real numbers (which would potentially save his job) is rational. But that’s where the rationality ends. This was an irrational gamble for the franchise, and he’s just setting the next general manager back some more. 

Atlanta Falcons

• Biggest gamble: Handing Kevin Stefanski full control of the coaching staff

When the Falcons fired Raheem Morris, they had a pretty solid crop of coaches that they could’ve hired. They chose to go with Kevin Stefanski. People talk about him like he’s an offensive mastermind who will turn around a franchise that has a good quarterback. I don’t necessarily think he’s that kind of coach, but he is an above-average coach. 

However, it would’ve probably been smart for Matt Ryan or Ian Cunningham to hire him with the stipulation that they get some say in his coaching staff. They didn’t, and Stefanski brought a whole bunch of his guys with him.

Tommy Rees has been with Stefanski for a couple of years. He was the Browns' passing game coordinator in 2024 and offensive coordinator/play-caller in 2025. Now he’s Atlanta’s offensive coordinator. Alex Van Pelt was the Browns’ offensive coordinator from 2020 to 2023 (and was also the QB coach in 2023). Aside from the part of the 2023 season with Joe Flacco, you can’t say that offense consistently looked coordinated. Now, he’s Atlanta’s QB coach.

Bill Callahan is a little different because he’s been good, but he was the Browns’ offensive line coach from 2020 to 2023. In those years, his offensive lines had these pass block and run block win rates.

Now he’s Atlanta’s offensive line coach. It makes sense to bring a guy like him with you because good offensive line coaches are a hot commodity. But it’s still a little bit more Brownsy than you would like.

Baltimore Ravens

• Biggest gamble: Choosing Trey Hendrickson over Maxx Crosby

On March 7, the Ravens and the Raiders agreed to a trade: Baltimore would get Maxx Crosby, and Vegas would get a pair of first-round picks. On March 10, the Ravens backed out of the deal because they didn’t like Crosby’s medicals. On March 11, the Ravens announced that they were going to sign Trey Hendrickson.

If you’re going to say you don’t want a defensive end coming off of a surgery (Crosby), that’s totally fine. You should probably never agree to a massive trade for a guy coming off a surgery in the first place, but that’s semantics. 

However, if you say that you don’t want a defensive end coming off of a surgery (Crosby), and then sign a different defensive end who is also coming off a surgery (Hendrickson), we, as a public, are going to call you out on your cold feet and label you a liar and a manipulator.

Here’s the deal: Maxx Crosby is great at every part of his job. He gets after the quarterback, sets an edge, and stops the run. To make him even sweeter, he never misses a snap, and he plays every snap at full throttle. Hendrickson is a much better pass rusher than he is a run stopper. Calling him a liability against the run isn’t fair, but he absolutely is compared to Crosby.

The Ravens' defense was straight-up not physical enough last season, and that’s weird because it’s never really been an issue for them. Instead of getting a guy who would give that unit some stank and some attitude, they went with a defensive end who wears sleeves.

On top of that, Eric DeCosta (their GM) has shown that he’s not above shady tactics. That means teams could be a little gun-shy when it comes to trading with the Ravens. Not in a sense that teams just won’t do business with Baltimore, but now they might toss Baltimore a little bit further down the list of trade partners. The ‘Hendrickson over Crosby’ part is a gamble for this year, and the ‘backing out of a trade’ thing is a long-term one. 

Buffalo Bills

• Biggest gamble: Counting on D.J. Moore to become Josh Allen's No. 1 target

In 2017, the Bills went through a pretty huge overhaul. The two biggest pieces were hiring Brandon Beane as their GM and Sean McDermott as their head coach. Yada yada yada, Josh Allen rocks, yada yada yada, heartbreaking playoff loss after heartbreaking playoff loss, McDermott gets fired while Beane keeps his job, and Joe Brady gets promoted to head coach. 

During those nine years of the Beane/McDermott braintrust, the Bills relied heavily on Allen being the absolute man, and never really helped him by building a fully fledged group of pass catchers.

It really, really seems like their team-building identity is ‘Get Josh one pass catcher every year. Nothing more, and nothing less.’

In all fairness, that worked really well for a couple of years. When he was throwing the ball to Stefon Diggs from 2020 to 2023, that passing offense was great and explosive … Then, turned into a relative fart when Diggs left. 

Allen was the NFL MVP in 2024, but that was more because of efficiency and a lack of turnovers rather than the rocket arm throws and big plays. You can’t really blame him either. He went from having a certified stud as his WR1 to having Khalil Shakir, a rookie Keon Coleman, and a washed-up Amari Cooper.

Then comes the 2025 season, and they sign Joshua Palmer … which was bad, and the passing offense looked as stale as ever.

Back to this offseason: Beane had an opportunity to turn the page to show the world that McDermott was the one making the roster decisions and not getting Allen more help. Instead, he traded a second-round pick to the Bears for D.J. Moore … and that’s all that he’s done.

Don’t get me wrong, Moore’s a good ball player, but he’s not the dominant X receiver or mega-dynamic slot guy that Allen deserves. 

The Bills are betting that Joe Brady can get more out of Moore than the Bears did. That’s a hell of a gamble. 

Carolina Panthers

• Biggest gamble: Betting on Jaelan Phillips' health

The quarterback is the most important position in football (and professional sports). The second-most important position in football is the guy who has the easiest route to stopping the quarterback, and that’s the edge rusher. 

The highest-paid edge rusher in free agency was Jaelan Phillips. The Panthers gave him a contract that pays him a cool $30 million per year. That’s a whooooole lot of money. 

It seems like the reason that they sent that kind of money his way was less about him as a player (and he’s a really good player), and more about them not wanting to get burned like they did during free agency in 2025. 

If you don’t remember, they were about to sign Milton Williams to a deal that would give him $20+ million per year. Then, at the last minute, the Patriots came in and paid him $26 million per year, with $63 million in guarantees.

Predictably, the 2025 Panthers' defensive line was pretty weak. The gamble the Panthers are making on Phillips is that he’s had a pretty rough past with injuries. He’s been in the league for five years, and he’s had two season-ending injuries on his right leg. It was his Achilles in 2023 and his ACL in 2024. On top of that, UCLA made him medically retire in 2018 because he got three concussions.

Now, he did transfer to Miami and kept playing without any problems, and he has come back from the leg injuries and had a good 2025 season, but throwing fat stacks of cash at a guy with that history is a pretty big gamble … But if it pays off, then it’ll be huge for a team that desperately needed a pass rush.

Chicago Bears

• Biggest gamble: Entering the season without adding elite pass-rush help

In 2025, the Bears' defense was both amazing and the worst thing ever. They were bad against the pass, largely because they had no pass rush, but they also got the most turnovers, which allowed their offense to have all of those crazy fourth-quarter comebacks. 

For reference, they were in the bottom five in passing yards per play allowed (6.8 yards), the bottom five in pressure rate (31.6%), and had the slowest time to pressure (2.9 seconds). So they were slow and ineffective. That’s rough.

This offseason, they’ve revamped their safety group by adding Cobie Bryant in free agency and drafting Dillon Thieneman in the first round. They were kind of forced to do that since Jaquan Brisker, C.J. Gardner-Johnson and Kevin Byard all left in free agency. But a lot of teams will rely on guys in the building rather than going out and getting high-end guys, so that’s good.

The problem is that they didn’t get a premium pass rusher. And for a team that has the chance to compete for a championship, that doesn’t really make much sense … and that lack of sense gets emphasized when a similar team like the Rams goes out and trades for Myles Garrett. 

There’s still plenty of time for the Bears to trade for someone (like Maxx Crosby), but in a perfect world, they would’ve already tried to get their bases covered. Relying on a secondary to choke out a passing game and give the pass rush time is a totally fine game plan, but you really have to have the horses in the back to make that work. Are Jaylon Johnson, Tyrique Stevenson, Bryant, and Thieneman those horses? We’ll see about that. 

Cincinnati Bengals

• Biggest gamble: Expecting Dexter Lawrence to regain his All-Pro form

A whole lot of the Bengals’ 2026 season is relying on Dexter Lawrence not repeating his 2025 season. 

Cincinnati traded its 2026 first-round pick (10th overall) to the Giants for Lawrence a few days before the draft. That’s very much a ‘win now, or die a long, slow death’ kind of move … But it makes a little bit of sense.

The Bengals have been pretty bad at developing their first-round picks (aside from Joe Burrow and Ja’Marr Chase, who didn’t really need development) over the past decade and a half. So, if you know you’re bad at something, just completely avoid it, I guess? Whatever.

We’ve seen Lawrence be an amazing player. He was an All-Pro in 2022 and 2023. Then in 2024, he led all defensive tackles with nine sacks, even though he only played in 12 games.

That production dipped big-time in 2025. His snaps went up, and his pressure rate dropped from 9.6% to 5.9%, and he only had half of a sack all season. To be fair, a lot of that was due to him getting double-teamed on pass rushes at a crazy-high 70.35% rate (fifth highest, per PFF).

If the Bengals are looking to make sure Lawrence can be the player they traded for, Al Golden and Jerry Montgomery (their DC and defensive line coaches) are going to have to find a way to keep him clean. 

If they can, then there’s a good chance this pays off. If they can’t … Well, good luck. 

Cleveland Browns

• Biggest gamble: Moving on from Jim Schwartz

You could say trading Myles Garrett and still hoping that they have a good defense is the biggest gamble the Browns made this year. I would push back, though. 

In that trade, they got Jared Verse, who rocks. He’s not a five-time All-Pro and two-time Defensive Player of the year like Garrett, but he is five years younger than him and also very, very good. That was a move they made to get younger, and that’s exactly what you have to do as a rebuilding team.

The biggest gamble that they made this offseason was not keeping Jim Schwartz. He’s been their defensive coordinator since 2023, and all of his defenses in Cleveland have, at a minimum, been really awesome. 

When the Browns fired Kevin Stefanski, it really seemed like they were setting up Schwartz to be their new HC. Instead, they decided to go with Todd Monken as HC and Mike Rutenberg as a first-time DC …

That’s a whole lot of big changes all at once. It makes sense for a team like the Browns, but it’s one hell of a risk to get rid of the brains behind it all.

Dallas Cowboys

• Biggest gamble: Trusting Christian Parker to fix the defense

The 2025 Cowboys had a historically bad defense: they traded away Micah Parsons and their pass rush vanished, they had terrible linebacker play and their defensive backfield was a mess. It was a straight-up terrible group of 11 players. 

So this offseason, they mixed it up a little bit. To help with the pass rush, they traded for Rashan Gary, and they drafted Malachi Lawrence in the first round. The biggest move they made was drafting Caleb Downs with their other first-round pick. That’s the first time they’ve drafted a safety in the first round since Roy Williams in 2002.

Those are some good additions, and the defense will certainly be more talented than they were last year, but that’s a low bar to clear, so it’s not a big bet that they were making. The big gamble they made was hiring Christian Parker as their defensive coordinator. 

Parker is a Vic Fangio guy. He was the Eagles' defensive backs coach for the past two seasons, and he was the Broncos’ defensive backs coach in 2021. He developed Quinyon Mitchell, Cooper DeJean, and Patrick Surtain II, and turned all of them into All-Pro players in two years. You can’t argue that the dude is great at getting his young DBs to reach their potential …

But what about his ability to run an offense? Can he buck the trend of Fangio disciples?

Over the past 10 seasons, five guys on his different defensive staffs have gone on their own to be defensive coordinators: Brandon Staley, Sean Desai, Clint Hurtt, and Ed Donatell were with him in Chicago, and Anthony Companile was with him in Miami.

Here’s how all those guys’ defenses ranked in points, rushing yards, and passing yards allowed in their first season without ol’ Uncle Vic:

Obviously, all of those teams aren’t created equal, and those numbers don’t tell the whole story. But the 2020 Rams defense was awesome, and the 2022 Seahawks defense was a pile of trash. These guys were the ones in charge of those years.

I would argue that the 2026 Cowboys defensive roster is shaping up to be more like the 2022 Seahawks on that scale.

If the Cowboys are one of those ‘the defense just needs to be average for the team to be competitive’ types of teams, they’re really going to need Parker to break the mold of Fangio guys in year one.

Denver Broncos

• Biggest gamble: Believing Jaylen Waddle can transform the offense

The big move the Broncos made this offseason was trading for Jaylen Waddle. In a perfect world, he’ll be a dominant receiver for Bo Nix to throw to, and it’ll change that passing offense.

The gamble here is that Waddle’s best seasons have come when he’s not the only guy, and in Denver, he’s going to be the only guy. In those first two seasons with Tyreek Hill (2022 and 2023), Waddle was crazy efficient and hit over 1,000 yards on fewer than 80 catches.

Now he’s going to be playing with Courtland Sutton … He’s good, but he’s not going to draw anywhere close to the amount of attention that Hill drew. 

Essentially, this is like getting a defensive tackle who had a lot of production because he played next to a guy who ate double teams but hasn’t proved that he can eat double teams himself. 

Sometimes it works out, and sometimes it doesn’t. I’m sure Waddle will be good, but is he going to be season-changing good? We’ll see about that. 

Detroit Lions

• Biggest gamble: Entrusting the offense to Drew Petzing

Jared Goff is only as good as his offensive scheme, and the Lions are only as good as Jared Goff. When Ben Johnson was the Lions' offensive coordinator, he had an amazing scheme, Jared Goff dealt like a man possessed, and the Lions were awesome. 

Last year, John Morton took over as OC, the play calling was relatively stinky, the scheme was relatively stinky, Goff was relatively stinky, and the Lions offense was relatively stinky. During the season, Dan Campbell took over the playcaller, and nothing ever really vibed.

This offseason, they hired Drew Petzing as their offensive coordinator, who has spent the last three seasons as the OC in Arizona. That’s not exactly a confidence-building hire, especially when there were a handful of other candidates with better resumes. 

The gamble here is that we don’t really know what a quarterback like Goff is going to do in this offense, and we don’t actually know if it’s a good offense. 

Kyler Murray freelances, and he freelances a lot. He’s a smaller cat who made his money by being mobile and chunking long balls (which he used to be good at). 

Goff is totally different. He’s a huge dude who can be creative, but he’ll mostly just play in structure and do what the offense needs him to do at an incredibly high level.

The Cardinals had been terrible over the last three seasons. So it’s a little head-scratching that a franchise with as much potential as the Lions would hitch their wagon to this kind of guy … But maybe Petzing rocks, actually, and the reason his offense didn’t work was because of Murray playing out of structure. It’s a gamble, and the Lions are going to find out. 

Green Bay Packers

• Biggest gamble: Overhauling its defense

There was not a whole lot that the Packers could do this offseason. They didn’t have many picks, and they were in a tough (not a horrible) spot with the cap. 

On top of that, they lost a bunch of guys: they lost Elgton Jenkins (their do-it-all offensive lineman), Rasheed Walker (an above-average offensive tackle), Romeo Doubs, and Quay Walker. Then they traded away Rashan Gary but traded for Zaire Franklin.

It didn’t stop with the players; the defensive coaching staff also got ripped away when Jeff Hafley took a bunch of them with him to Miami. 

So the Packers hired Johnathan Gannon as their defensive coordinator. Aside from the 2022 season, when his defense in Philadelphia had 70 sacks in the regular season, he’s never really had a good defense … and you could argue those sacks were talent-based rather than scheme-based. 

Maybe Micah Parsons will come back from his ACL, maybe Javon Hargrave will channel his inner-2022 season, and maybe Zaire Franklin will solidify the spine of the defense, and maybe their new defensive coaches (from all around the league) will build something that works. But it seems like that’s a lot of changes all at once. Again, it’s not completely their fault that they got thrown into this situation, but they did, and this is the way they dealt with it. 

Houston Texans

• Biggest gamble: Rebuilding the offensive line ... again

It’s been a minute since we’ve seen it, but there was a time when C.J. Stroud was awesome. It was only three years ago, but there’s just been so much very recent badness from him that it makes it seem like his Offensive Rookie of the Year season in 2023 was 10 years ago … It was in 2023.

There are a couple of reasons that his play has gone downhill, but the biggest one is that his offensive line has been straight-up garbage. The good thing is that they’re tinkering with it. 

After everything was mostly terrible in 2024, they changed up the offensive line going into 2025 (and also during the season). That didn’t really work all that well, and they’re doing it again this year.

They brought in Braden Smith (RT), Wyatt Teller (G), and Evan Brown (C/G) in free agency, and they drafted Keylan Rutledge (G/C) in the first round… So they are doing a lot to try to get better without leveraging too much in one guy at one position, which is both good and smart.

With Aireontae Ersery at left tackle, that offensive line feels like it should be an upgrade over what they had the last couple of seasons.

If it is, there’s a good chance Stroud can get back to not freaking out and running for his life, and that running game might be able to get back on track. Even if they just get a good running game, the offense should be able to hold its weight and play complementary to that apocalypse-level defense.

Or once again, they crash and burn and look like a bunch of doofuses in the postseason. 

Indianapolis Colts

• Biggest gamble: Daniel Jones returning to form after injury

The Colts put their chips on the table when they traded a couple of first-round picks for Sauce Gardner last year. That took them out of the running for any of the upper-tier quarterbacks in the draft, and it meant that they were probably going to try to re-sign Daniel Jones. 

At the time, Jones was playing really well, so it wasn’t the worst idea in the world … But then they crashed into a ditch. 

Mr. Dimes was playing with a broken leg, and then on Dec. 7 (Week 14), he popped his Achilles. You never want an Achilles, but if you have to have one, you’d much rather have it be early in a season so you can recover and not miss time the next season. That clearly isn’t the case here.

Based on OTA reports, it sounds like his rehab is going well and that he’s gunning to be back by Week 1 … But being back and being back are two different things. Maybe he’ll end up getting there by the end of the season, but we just saw Aaron Rodgers and Kirk Cousins deal with this same thing, and they were very clearly not at the peak of their powers. Sure, they’re older than Jones, but a busted-up leg is a busted-up leg.

Indianapolis is really counting on this dude to be able to come back quickly and bash some teeth in like he did last year, and that’s a tough ask.

Jacksonville Jaguars

• Biggest gamble: Trusting internal improvement

The Jaguars haven’t done a whole lot this offseason. The headlines around their offseason have been more about Travis Etienne and Devin Lloyd leaving in free agency, rather than them getting Chris Rodriguez Jr. and the delightfully named Ruke Orhorhoro.

They also did some weird stuff in the draft. They didn’t have a first-round pick because of their draft day trade in 205 (to get Travis Hunter), and then they started drafting some guys way ahead of consensus. 

The bottom line is that the Jaguars are coming off a good season, and they’re going to be relying on their in-house guys to take them farther than they went last year, which was a loss in the wild-card round of the playoffs. It’s a gamble any time a good team wants to be a great team, but they only have the roster of a good team.

If Liam Coen and the gang are good at developing and can build on the late-season success they had last year, then it’ll be great … But if that late-season success was more because they finished the season playing a bunch of cupcake teams, then it’ll be rough. 

Kansas City Chiefs

• Biggest gamble: Rebuilding its secondary

Patrick Mahomes will come back from his torn ACL at some point this season (I’d bet that it’ll be after their Week 5 bye). He might not look like the primo Mahomes we’re used to, but he’ll still probably be awesome.

They haven’t added any pass catchers, which means they’re going to be running it back with Rashee Rice, Xavier Worthy, and Travis Kelce. That’s not exactly an awe-inspiring trio, but with Mahomes, I’m sure they’ll still be able to perform at an average or above-average level. 

They did re-hire Eric Bieniemy, and they signed Kenneth Walker III. That’ll definitely help Mahomes in a year where he’s sure to be ginger, and it’ll be an upgrade for the running game from what we’ve seen over the past three years … But it is 2026, and a gutting running game is only going to get you so far. If that’s the kind of offense you want to roll with, you’re going to need a defense to help back you up. The Chiefs don’t have a defensive backfield that looks like it’s able to do that. 

Trent McDuffie and Jaylen Watson have been their starting cornerbacks, and they’ve been really good. But they both went to the Rams this offseason. Bryan Cook had been their sure-tackling safety, but he went to the Bengals in free agency. That left them with just one starter: Chammari Conner.

Now, they did draft Mansoor Delane with one of their first-round picks, they re-signed L’Jarius Sneed at the beginning of June, and Steve Spagnuolo is still their defensive coordinator. If Delane is as good as he looks like he will be, Sneed can make everyone forget about his past two seasons in Tennessee, then Spags should be able to make this a functioning DB group.

It is a gamble to put the well-being on the shoulders of a rookie and a slipping veteran, though. 

Las Vegas Raiders

• Biggest gamble: Counting on Kirk Cousins to stay healthy

Fernando Mendoza should not start an NFL game in his rookie season. If everything goes perfectly, Kirk Cousins will be on the field for every non-garbage time and non-meaningless snap in 2026. That way, Mendoza can sit back and soak up as much as he can.

However, Cousins hasn’t played a full season in the past three years. Some of that is due to injury, and some of that is due to performance. 

In some sports, you can throw a stinky guy on the field to get through the season, and it’ll be fine. But in the NFL, guys are putting their careers on the line with every snap they play (that might be sensationalizing a little bit, but it’s more or less true).

If the guys on the team are seeing Cousins struggle during games and Mendoza tearing it up during practice, there are going to be issues in the locker room, and people will want Mendoza to start before he should.

All that to say, a 37-year-old Cousins doesn’t need to just be healthy for a whole season, but he also has to not be terrible. That seems like something that should be easy, but this is a guy who the Falcons thought was worse than Michael Penix for the past two seasons ... It’s not an absolute given.

To sensationalize a little more: the future of the Raiders as a franchise depends on Kirk Cousins effectively completing passes to Tre Tucker, Jalen Nailor, Jack Bech, and Brock Bowers. That’s a gamble in the year 2026. 

Los Angeles Chargers

• Biggest gamble: Relying on a healthier offensive line

The Chargers' 2025 season was derailed before it even started. On July 25, 2025, they gave Rashawn Slater a big-boy contract. On July 7, 2025, he tore his patellar tendon and was out for the year.

Then they had to move around a few guys, Joe Alt got hurt, and Mekhi Becton wasn’t the guard that they thought he would be. Yada yada yada, they had the worst offensive line in the NFL, and Justin Herbert got assaulted on every single dropback. 

The gamble that they’re making this year is that Slater can come back from his injury, which is far from a guarantee. That Alt can come back from his high ankle injury, which is more likely than not. That Tyler Biadasz, Cole Strange, and Jake Slaughter (their offseason additions) can all come in and give Herbert a real chance to play in a pocket.

Biadasz is going to be a good center. We have no idea about Slaughter because he’s never really been a guard, and Strange is a little stinky.

They’re really spreading their chips around on that line. If the injuries aren’t a problem and only one of Strange or Slaughter is a weak spot, they’ll be fine ... But this is the Chargers that we’re talking about. Nothing ever works right for them.

Los Angeles Rams

• Biggest gamble: Betting on health after going all-in

The Rams are in the most win-now situation that any team has ever been in. Matthew Stafford is the reigning NFL MVP, but getting older. Puka Nacua is entering his football prime. Their starting offensive line is nails. They traded away their future for Myles Garrett. They got both of the Chiefs’ cornerbacks …

Everything that they did this offseason has shown that they’re going all-in on winning a Super Bowl this year … Except for the part where they used their first-round pick on a backup quarterback.

Maybe Ty Simpson will be their guy down the line, and maybe he won’t be. This is more about the guys that the Rams didn’t draft with that 13th overall pick. Specifically, a wide receiver or an offensive lineman. 

From left to right, that offensive line is Alaric Jackson, Steve Avila, Coleman Shelton, Kevin Dotson, and Warren McClendon ... And even that is up in the air with Alaric Jackson going through some rough legal stuff right now. 

Regardless, they don’t have any real depth behind them. After they picked Simpson at 13, six more offensive linemen were picked in the first round. Then you look at that receiver group: Aside from Nacua and Davante Adams, it’s Jordan Whittington and their sixth-round rookie C.J. Daniels (and then all of their tight ends). 

With Nacua’s wildly destructive playstyle (and personality) and Adams’ being older and more fragile, it’s not a far stretch to think that they’re going to miss some time.

Again, after they picked Simpson, three wide receivers were drafted in the first round.

If they have guys missing time at either of those groups, it’s going to be tough for them to go out and trade for someone because they don’t have many future draft picks. They traded away their 2027-first for Myles Garrett and their 2027-third as part of the Trent McDuffie trade. 

That leaves them with a second, a fourth, a fifth, and a sixth-round pick. You can get guys with those, but probably not someone who is going to truly backfill whoever they lose. 

They made a big gamble this year. If it pays off, they get a Super Bowl. If it doesn’t? Woof …

Miami Dolphins

• Biggest gamble: Evaluating Malik Willis after trading Jaylen Waddle

It’s tough to call anything that the Dolphins are doing ‘a gamble’ because they have nothing to lose, and it actually benefits them to lose games. 

So this might be a stretch, but their biggest gamble is trading away Jaylen Waddle. Not in the sense that they have to hope their passing offense can function without him, but in the sense that they’re going to have to find a way to evaluate Malik Willis’ ability as a passer without him. 

This offseason, they decided to rip everything down to the studs and start a rebuild, but instead of trying to get a retread veteran, they signed Willis to a three-year deal for $67.5 million ($45 million guaranteed). That’s kind of a lot for a team that should be spending a minimal amount of money. 

This means that they’re locked in with him for a couple of seasons. You would think that they would try to have at least one good pass catcher for him; instead, they just have Tutu Atwell, Malik Washington, and Jalen Tolbert. 

Maybe that offense is going to benefit from a committee approach, but this really feels like they set Willis up for failure. It seems weird to pay a guy $22.5 million to fail … but hey, what do I know?

Minnesota Vikings

• Biggest gamble: Navigating a front-office transition

This is less of a gamble that the Vikings are making this year, and it’s more of a gamble that they already made: The Vikings fired their general manager, Kwesi Adofo-Mensah, on Jan. 30, 2026, and they didn’t hire Nolan Teasley to replace him until June 1. That means they went through free agency and the draft without a brain, and it kind of shows. 

Free agency was just fine for them; they didn’t overpay anyone or anything like that … but the draft was a different story. 

In the first round, they drafted Caleb Banks, the massive defensive tackle from Florida … with a pretty recent string of foot problems. Big guys like that definitely can get healthy, but this really seemed like a pick that a disjointed/headless front office would make.

And then the next day, they traded Jonathan Greenard to the Eagles for a couple of third-round picks. Here’s the deal: if you’re not a general manager or if you’re not unbelievably confident in your ability to negotiate, you should not pick up the phone during the draft when the number has a 215 area code. That’s going to be Howie Roseman, and he’s going to fleece you.

Greenard’s an awesome football player, but he was coming off a bad year, and the Vikings weren’t going to pay him the money that he wanted. That means Minnesota had minuscule amounts of leverage, and it really seems like Greenard (even when the Eagles had to pay him) is worth more than a couple of third-rounders. 

It’s a gamble to go into the part of the offseason where the front office is super important when your front office doesn’t have a bona fide leader. Teasley could end up being an absolute stud, but they probably should have had a contingency plan in place when they fired Adofo-Mensah. Yeesh.

New England Patriots

• Biggest gamble: Relying on Alijah Vera-Tucker to stay healthy

The Patriots' offensive line was a huge problem for them in the postseason, leading to Drake Maye being sacked 21 times in the postseason. That’s a record, and it’s seemingly unbreakable.

One of the first moves that they made in free agency was signing Alijah Vera-Tucker, the Jets’ 2021 first-round pick. He was awesome as New York's left guard his rookie season … and then the injuries happened. 

He tore his triceps in 2022, popped his Achilles in 2023, was healthy/good in 2024, and tore his triceps on his other arm in 2025. That’s three season-ending injuries in his first five years in the NFL. Not good. 

If AVT can be healthy for the Patriots, they’re going to be in a very good spot. If he can’t, then they’re going to have to get into shuffle mode. They’ve got a bunch of versatile guys on that offensive line, which is good … but it’s a slippery slope. 

If guys start to play worse at certain spots, then they might shuffle even more. You blink, and all of a sudden it’s December, and the Pats are on their 10th different offensive line combination. Teams that do that kind of stuff are typically not the teams that make postseason runs.

New Orleans Saints

• Biggest gamble: Reviving the running game

The Saints straight-up did not have a running game last year. They were ranked 31st in rushing yards per play, EPA per rush, rushing touchdowns, and rushes for 10 or more yards. You can’t be a real team and not be able to run the ball. 

So this offseason, they made some changes. On the offensive line, they signed David Edwards, the Bills' starting left guard for the past three seasons (and the Rams’ for the four years before that). That’s definitely an upgrade over Dillon Radunz from last season. 

They’ll also be getting their center, Erik McCoy, back from injury (again). When he’s healthy, he’s one of the better centers in the NFL.

The biggest player they signed this year was Travis Etienne. He’s shown that he can be one of the better running backs in the league … but we can’t forget about that 2024 season where he lost a bunch of work to Tank Bigsby.

Etienne has been better when he shares the backfield with another running back, but he’s shown that he can be the go-to guy. If you’re the Saints, you’re probably hoping for an RB2 by committee, with Alvin Kamara and Devin Neal splitting those snaps. 

It seems like the Saints have made the right moves here, and it’ll certainly be better than what they had going on last year … But that’s a low bar to clear. Etienne can be good, but there’s a very real chance that he alone doesn’t add enough to make that run game consistent.

New York Giants

• Biggest gamble: Putting their offense in Matt Nagy's hands

Depending on who you asked, the vibes were either very high or astronomically high when the Giants hired John Harbaugh at the beginning of the offseason. He’s going to significantly raise the floor of a franchise that has found new ways to bottom out year after year …

And then he hired Matt Nagy as his offensive coordinator. That's probably the most boring, lazy, and uninspirational offensive coordinator that he could get. 

Nagy has been with the Chiefs since 2022, and he took over as their offense coordinator in 2023. So he was with them during an unbelievably explosive 2022 season, but he was also part of the braintrust that made them very boring in 2024 and 2025.

In a football world where young minds are getting hired to revitalize offenses left and right, the Giants settled on the most retread OC that they possibly could have. Sure, there is championship-caliber offense as a potential … but that seems like a loooooong shot. 

New York Jets

• Biggest gamble: Trusting Geno Smith to develop young playmakers

When the 2025 NFL season ended, it really looked like the Jets would be drafting Dante Moore, Oregon’s quarterback, with the second-overall pick. A week later, Moore said that he wasn’t going to enter the 2026 draft. 

That stopped the Jets from knowing they could draft their next quarterback of the future, and it forced them to think. In free agency, they traded a sixth-round pick to the Raiders for Geno Smith and a seventh-round pick. 

In the first round of the draft, they ended up getting a stud edge rusher in David Bailey, a freak of nature tight end in Kenyon Sadiq, and a very solid wide receiver prospect in Omar Cooper Jr.

Now, they get to spend this year developing those guys. For Bailey, it’s relatively easy: just have him play … But for the offensive guys? Not so much. They need a quarterback who’s going to be able to operate that offense and get them used to playing against NFL defenses.

And they chose Smith to be that guy. On one hand, that’s great because he’s costing them next to nothing ($3.3 million), and we’ve seen him do exactly what they want him to do … On the other hand, yikes. He’s bad, and the more recent version of Geno Smith is an absolute liability to himself, the team, and the young guys he’s working with. 

Philadelphia Eagles

• Biggest gamble: Handing the offense to Sean Mannion

The Eagles' offense over the past four seasons has been based purely on taking the matchups that have been given to you and winning. It worked out really well in two of those seasons, and one ended in a Super Bowl win. The wheels fell off, and everything was stale with Brian Johnson as the offensive coordinator in 2023, and nothing worked at all with Kevin Patullo in 2025. 

So this offseason, the Eagles were set to hire yet another offensive coordinator. Would they go after Mike McDaniel? Would they go after Brian Daboll? Surely it had to be someone with playcalling experience, right?

Wrong. They ended up hiring Sean Mannion, the 34-year-old former quarterback who spent the last two seasons as an offensive assistant and quarterbacks coach in Green Bay. 

Based on what the players and coaches said this spring, Mannion is an incredibly smart guy who runs a creative Shanahan-style outside zone running game and a scheme-lord type of passing game. That’s just about as far away from what the Eagles have been doing as you can get in the modern NFL. 

But he’s been a great teacher for everyone, and he’s got a strong buy-in. That’s all huge, because you can come in with a scheme in mind, but if you can’t get your players to understand it, then it means nothing. 

So, as far as spring workouts go, the vibes are incredibly high in Philadelphia …

But the playcalling part is what we’re waiting on now. Being in the quarterback’s ear is an art, and being able to sequence plays that build off of each other is a necessity. We simply do not know if that is in Mannion’s bag.

Maybe he’s a natural; maybe we get to Week 1, and he channels his inner quarterback and crushes it … But there’s a very good chance that he doesn’t.

You can imagine that there’s going to be a little bit of an acclimation period for this offense, and they might look a little disjointed until some time in October. That’s only going to be emphasized if Mannion doesn’t mind his Ps and Qs when he’s calling plays. 

Then you run the risk of Nick Sirianni getting impatient with how his team is looking and making a change at OC. Obviously, that part is a ways down the slippery slope, but it’s not out of the question. 

Pittsburgh Steelers

• Aaron Rodgers, again

You could argue that the Steelers’ biggest gamble would be letting Mike Tomlin go, but it was his choice to leave, and I won’t count it. You could also argue that hiring Mike McCarthy as their new head coach is a gamble, but I think it’ll be super easy for them to move off from him when a better/younger coach becomes available, so that one doesn’t fit either. 

That means their gamble is them doing the whole Aaron Rodgers thing again. 

We know who the 2026 version of Aaron Rodgers is, and we know what this version of him can and can’t do. He has to run an offense that is almost primarily quick and short passes. It’s gross, not fun to watch, and I’d bet that it’s not fun to root for. 

There were other quarterbacks available for them, too. Kyler Murray was cheap, but he essentially got to decide on where he wanted to go, and that was Minnesota. Tanner McKee is across the state in Philadelphia, but his asking price must have been too high for Pittsburgh. Hell, Tua was in the same situation as Kyler, and he chose Atlanta. 

It really seemed like this offseason was going to be a good opportunity for Pittsburgh to hit the reset button. Instead, they just went with the safe option. 

Maybe it’ll work out. Maybe McCarthy can get one last bit of magic out of Rodgers, and the offense will be able to complement a talented defense … But that doesn’t seem like it’s going to be the case.

San Francisco 49ers

• Mike Evans’ year 13

I get that the 49ers wanted a pass catcher for Brock Purdy to throw the ball to. I get that… but did they really have to go all the way in on being a caricature of themselves by signing the oldest wide receiver they could?

Mike Evans has been amazing for as long as he’s been in the NFL, and for the first 11 seasons of his career, he’s had over 1,000 receiving yards. That’s not news to anyone, and his weirdly elite level of consistency should be appreciated.

But after the 2024 season, when it took until a Week 18 game where Evans got targeted 14 times for him to get to 1,000 yards, I told myself that I’m going to ride the Mike Evans train until the wheels fall off.

Then, in 2025, he missed time with a hamstring injury, a concussion, and a broken collarbone. If that’s not falling off, I don’t know what is. 

So now he’s in San Francisco, and George Kittle is recovering from his Achilles that popped in the postseason. That means the pass catchers on the field with Evans are Ricky Pearsall, Christian Kirk, and Christian McCaffrey. 

In other words, Mike Evans is going to get fed the football. He’s shown that he can be elite at that, but this is year 13 for him, and he just had a really, really rough season. It’s risky to think that he’s going to be able to hold up and keep that passing game alive … and as a fan of football, it’s a bummer to think that. 

Seattle Seahawks

• Brian Fleury x Sam Darnold

We all know that Sam Darnold went from being terrible with the Jets to being awesome with the Vikings in 2024 to being a Super Bowl champion with the Seahawks in 2025. 

Was that high-level of play in him the whole time? It kind of seems like it was … But he needed a good offensive mind and play caller to get it out of him. In Minnesota, that was Kevin O’Connell, and last year in Seattle, that was Klint Kubiak.

Kubiak took the head coaching job in Las Vegas, which meant the Seahawks really needed to nail their offensive coordinator hire to make sure Darnold stays on the right track.

So they hired Brian Fleury, a guy who’s spent a lot of time with Kyle Shanahan and his offense, but he’s never run an offense or called plays.

This is the defending Super Bowl Champions. There’s a Super Champion every year, but there is only one team that has the opportunity to run it back. The expectations for the Seahawks are very high, and getting a guy with very little experience teaching, running, and calling an offense at this high a level is a gamble … especially when there’s a correlation between Darnold being bad and his OC being a dud.

Tampa Bay Buccaneers

• Todd Bowles again

The Buccaneers seem like a lost team right now. They’re letting Baker Mayfield enter the last year of his contract, they hired Zac Robinson as their new offensive coordinator, and they’re going to roll with Todd Bowles as their head coach for another year. 

Mayfield has been a good quarterback and the soul of that team for the past three years. Robinson is coming from Atlanta, where he ran an offense that succeeded on talent rather than scheme. Bowles is mostly a nothing-burger. It all feels like the offseason happened, and they just shrugged and said, ‘Eh. We’ll figure it out.’

That’s weird because that team absolutely collapsed in the second half of last season. They looked like the class of the NFL until Week 7, hit their Week 9 bye, and laid a bunch of turds. 

It was more than just scheme, quarterbacking, and coaching that went into that collapse… But it is Todd Bowles' team, and that ultimately falls on him.

Instead of firing him, which they certainly could’ve done, they did the thing where they fired a bunch of coaches instead. 

People who are bad at their job should be fired. When it comes to head coaches in the NFL, a pretty good way to tell if they are good is if their team wins football games. Since the Buccaneers hired Todd Bowles in 2022, they have a 35-33 regular season record and a 1-3 postseason record. That’s definitely not good, but it’s not bad … 

We’ve seen the ‘get rid of everyone else but keep the coach’ thing work. The Eagles came back from their hellish 2023 season, fired Sean Desai and Brian Johnson, hired Kellen Moore and Vic Fangio, and won a Super Bowl.

What the Buccaneers are doing with the brains of the operation can work, but it’s a risky move. 

Tennessee Titans

• New York 2.0

The Titans nuked their coaching staff and rebuilt it. One of the benefits of doing something like that is that sometimes those coaches will go out and try to get some of the players that they like

That’s a cool thing if the teams that those guys are coming from have had a semblance of success. The Titans hired Robert Saleh as their head coach and Brian Daboll as their offensive coordinator. 

In a perfect world, those guys would get players from their respective stops in San Fran and Buffalo … instead, they brought a bunch of guys from the Jets and the Giants.

On offense, they signed Daboll’s former Giants: Wan’Dale Robinson, Austin Schlottmann, and Daniel Bellinger. On defense, they signed Saleh’s former Jets: John Franklin-Myers, Jermaine Johnson, Solomon Thomas, and Tony Adams. 

Some of those guys are good, they’ll probably be good this year, and there’s value in getting guys who can help translate for the coach … But if you're a team trying to rebuild, do you want your two most important coaches bringing in guys from the loser franchises that they coached at in the past? I don’t think I do; let the past be the past.

Washington Commanders

• David Blough?

21 of the 31 teams in the NFL hired offensive coordinators this offseason. The Commanders were the first team to make a move when they promoted David Blough to OC on January 10. 

That’s weird. He’s been Washington’s quarterbacks coach for the past three seasons, and that’s the only NFL coaching job that he’s had. That’s jarring and risky by itself, but because they made the first move, it meant they took themselves out of the running for everyone else.

Mike McDaniel was the biggest name available this year. If you’re the Commanders and you want Jayden Daniels to get back to playing at the level he did in his Offensive Rookie of the Year-caliber season, getting a guy like that would be perfect.

Also, it wasn’t hard to connect the dots from the Commanders to McDaniel. He and Dan Quinn were with the Falcons in 2016, and Quinn was a huge part of McDaniel’s journey to sobriety. So it’s not just that he’d be great for the team and the quarterback, but he’d also mesh well with the staff. 

But again, the Commanders hired Blough. It was so close to the end of their season that it’s hard to think they really did a thorough search. 

Maybe he’ll be a wunderkind, and that offense turns into a juggernaut … but that seems like a reeeeeeach.

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