Pre-season expectations often don’t mean a lot. Granted, they often prove accurate, typically when you’re referring to bad teams staying bad, but there is so much that can happen during the course of a season that can see the trajectory of a team deviate greatly from what was anticipated before the on-field process began.
Both positively and negatively. I recall a great deal of excitement for the Pittsburgh Steelers in 2009, the year that they won their most recent Super Bowl, and whether or not they could be repeat champions. Repeats weren’t so rare. The New England Patriots did it earlier in the decade, and the Denver Broncos did it a decade earlier as John Elway rode off into the sunset with some hardware on each ring finger.