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Sunday open thread: Who will be this year’s surprise NFL team?

As we enter the first Sunday of the 2018 NFL season, it’s time to look league-wide.

It seems every year a team comes from the shadows and makes a serious championship run. Last year, we actually got a couple: the Los Angeles Rams and the Jacksonville Jaguars. The Jaguars not only bumped up seven wins from their previous year, but was a play away from representing the AFC in the Super Bowl.

The Rams had seven more wins in 2017 than they did in 2016, and although they didn’t make much noise in the postseason, they gained a ton of respect for the way they steamrolled that entire division, and many expect them to repeat in 2018.