Welcome back to our familiar exercise this time of year—trying to guess, in some cases more than four months in advance, who will win each game of the NFL season. I’m told this is always one of The MMQB’s most popular posts of the summer. No pressure.
Looking at all 272 games from a wide lens, as single chapters in a long storybook, can help us envision some of the familiar vacillations of a season. Breaking things down this way helps us see that, for example, the Cardinals’ schedule is brutal. Even if you like the forward momentum of their offseason, it would be difficult to run through this exercise and imagine them traversing their slate to reach the playoffs.