The only year-to-year constant in the NFL—besides the seeming inevitability of the Chiefs and Patrick Mahomes—is that you should be prepared for parity and never cling to your preseason priors for too long. This parity comes from the league’s hard salary cap, draft positioning, strength-of-schedule differences, and short peaks for players at most positions.

As a result, there’s almost always at least one team that goes from last place in its division to first the ensuing year. At least one team has gone from worst to first in 19 of the 21 seasons since the NFL went to its current alignment of eight divisions with four teams each in 2002.

The 1999 Rams, 2001 Patriots, and 2009 Saints went from last in their respective divisions to Super Bowl champions the ensuing season. Last season, the Texans rode the emergence of rookie quarterback C.J. Stroud to claim the AFC South title. A year before, the Jaguars rebounded from the 3-14 Urban Meyer year to become division champ—they even won a playoff game with a historic comeback against the Chargers. Other recent worst-to-first runs included Joe Burrow leading the Bengals to an AFC North title (and the Super Bowl) a season after tearing his ACL, and the Commanders’ surprising run to an NFC East title with quarterback Taylor Heinecke during the COVID-impacted 2020 season.

All of those teams felt like they came out of nowhere, but history tells us it’ll happen again, so I’ve ranked each of the eight teams eligible to go from worst to first this season.

All odds referenced in this piece are courtesy of FanDuel Sportsbook.

8. New England Patriots (+2600)

The Patriots still haven’t named a Week 1 starting quarterback, but whoever that is will not be well set up for success. Jacoby Brissett might have been the better quarterback in August, but it’s a matter of when, not if, rookie Drake Maye will ultimately be thrown into the fire to start for New England. The Patriots rank dead last in my personal offensive power ratings, and it’s hard to even imagine making a case for their upside, given the weakness along the offensive line and the lack of talent at the skill-position spots.

The Patriots indeed had some bad luck and wound up losing a bunch of close games last season, so maybe they weren’t quite as bad as their 4-13 record would indicate. But now they are set to field a team that includes a bottom-five offensive line per PFF. The lack of depth is an issue, as the offensive line injuries keep piling up in camp.

Whatever you think of Bill Belichick as an all-around head coach, he still maintained an ability to scheme up a defense that would over-perform its talent level. We can’t give Jerod Mayo the same benefit of the doubt, and the Matthew Judon trade leaves them with a below-average roster. New England has shown throughout training camp and the preseason that it isn’t playing for 2024, but for 2025 and beyond.

7. Washington Commanders (+1100)

There’s some real love in the media and the betting markets for Jayden Daniels and the Commanders that I don’t really agree with. I still think their offensive line is well below average, and they traded Jahan Dotson, their second-most productive wide receiver, to Philadelphia after he slid down the Commanders’ wide receiver depth chart.

The defense can’t possibly be worse than last season, when it fully bottomed out and finished last in expected points added per play allowed. With the hiring of a defensive-minded head coach in Dan Quinn, it’s fair to expect them to induce more havoc and force more turnovers—those were traits of Quinn defenses in Dallas and Seattle.

My concern about Washington’s ability to win this division is the pairing of Daniels with offensive coordinator Kliff Kingsbury. Kingsbury’s offenses when he was the head coach in Arizona never ranked higher than 12th in offensive DVOA, and in his final season there, the Cardinals ranked near the bottom of the league, at 27th. Combine that inconsistency with the fact that Daniels’s pressure-to-sack rate was north of 20 percent in college, and I’m raising a red flag. The reality is we don’t really know most of the time which rookie quarterbacks will pan out, but Daniels consistently took too many sacks and is now playing behind an offensive line that was ranked 27th in PFF’s preseason ratings. And in a division with two offenses I am confident will be top-10 units (Dallas and Philadelphia), the upside isn’t there for this Washington team to go from worst to first.

6. Tennessee Titans (+950)

What you think of Tennessee’s upside is largely dependent on your assessment of Will Levis.

For me, Levis is far too inconsistent as a passer and, more importantly, too slow as a decision-maker to be the type of quarterback who leads a worst-to-first turnaround. Like Daniels, Levis had alarming pressure-to-sack rates in college (nearly 27 percent in his final season at Kentucky), and that carried over to the NFL last season. Sure, he was playing behind the league’s worst offensive line. But sacks are primarily a quarterback stat, and his attempts to force the ball down the field led to a lot of boom or bust for the Titans offense. He’ll need to dramatically improve from his 5.73 net yards per attempt last season to give the Titans starter-level play.

But there’s also reason to be wary of the Titans defense. They had the best red zone defense in the NFL last year, and that is extremely hard to sustain year over year—exponentially more so after the Titans’ coaching change. Tennessee has more work to do than people realize, and I’m lower than the market on the true quality of Tennessee. Combine that with a potential bounce-back season for the Jaguars and the Texans’ ascension into seemingly everyone’s favorite Super Bowl contender, and you have a much better AFC South than in years past.

5. Arizona Cardinals (+1300)

A healthy Kyler Murray gives Arizona a chance to be a legitimately good offense, so I see a bigger upside for the Cardinals than the teams below them on this list. The Cardinals ranked ninth in offensive EPA per play last season after Week 10, when Murray returned from an injury. Arizona appeared to hit on rookie Paris Johnson Jr. last year, and he’ll be moving to left tackle this year. This year’s first-round pick Marvin Harrison Jr. is the most immediately NFL-ready wide receiver I can remember, and Trey McBride exploded onto the scene in the second half of the 2023 season.

The concern here is that the defense projects to be one of the three worst in the NFL yet again, and that will probably doom them in this division, which has some potent offenses. As my Ringer colleague Sheil Kapadia pointed out, the upside case for the Cardinals is that no team faced a more difficult schedule of opposing offenses last year or a higher percentage of snaps against starting quarterbacks. Still, the Cardinals were last in EPA per play allowed (tied with the Commanders).

There isn’t enough talent for a good defense, but even a mediocre defense could be enough if the offense reaches its top-10 ceiling.

If you throw in the potential for the 49ers to have a Super Bowl hangover and for the Rams to field a poor defense, Arizona is the first team on this list that if you squint, you can make the case for a division title contender.

4. Los Angeles Chargers (+390)

Jim Harbaugh is one of the few coaches on earth who has proven success at both the college and NFL levels. Justin Herbert is clearly the second-best quarterback playing on this list of eight teams, and now he’s playing behind what could be the best Chargers offensive line in a decade. And in most divisions, the Chargers could really challenge for a title. However, the AFC championship game has essentially become the Chiefs Invitational, and the AFC West has been the Chiefs’ training ground each year for nearly a decade. Even with a handful of disastrous (by their standards) offensive performances, there was no real threat to Kansas City’s division dominance last year. As long as Mahomes is healthy, it’s reasonable to just pencil in Kansas City annually as the division champion.

With the departures of Austin Ekeler and Keenan Allen, Herbert has no reliable returning targets. Former first-round pick Quentin Johnston is buried on the depth chart, which includes D.J. Chark, Ladd McConkey, and Joshua Palmer. Read those four names again. Harbaugh brought Michigan defensive coordinator Jesse Minter with him to help revitalize a defense that finished 24th in EPA per play last year.

The arrows are all pointing up from a narrative perspective on the Chargers’ total, but if anything, the market sentiment is too high given that they’re not that far along in the rebuilding process. The Herbert and Harbaugh combination gives them a pretty high floor to be competitive, especially if the Chargers truly are improved in both trenches, but I’m not seeing the ceiling to challenge Kansas City.

3. Chicago Bears (+340)

It’s not often you see the no. 1 pick in the draft land in as favorable a situation as Caleb Williams has with the Bears. With the explosive DJ Moore, first-round pick Rome Odunze, and reliable veteran Keenan Allen, the Bears have an excellent mix of wide receivers to help Williams develop. While everyone has been captivated by Williams’s highlight-reel throws and scrambles in the preseason, I’ve been studying the Chicago defense to see what is and isn’t real for this unit and what that means for the Bears’ hopes of pulling off an upset in the division.

I’ve been a fan of high-floor, low-ceiling defensive signal-caller Matt Eberflus dating back to his time in Indianapolis, and his group showed major improvement over the course of last season. From Week 5 to the end of the season, Chicago ranked top five in EPA per play allowed. If you remove highly variable turnovers from that sample of plays, the defense drops to eighth.

If Williams is simply league average and the defense doesn’t take another step forward, then Chicago will probably finish third—at best—in an increasingly competitive NFC North. But the upside of finally having a franchise quarterback—and the potential that last year’s defensive improvements will stick—means that Chicago is one of the better bets on the board, even if it’s not one of my two favorites.

2. Carolina Panthers (+1100)

Carolina’s placement this high on this list is almost entirely because I’m betting on the draft pedigree of Bryce Young, the track record of new head coach Dave Canales as an offensive mind, and the mediocrity of this division. Could eight wins be enough to claim the NFC South title on tiebreakers? I think so. The likelihood that Young will turn into an elite quarterback is slim when you consider just how bad his rookie campaign was from an efficiency standpoint. However, could Canales help elevate Young into a league-average quarterback in year two? Canales helped guide Geno Smith to a career year as the Seahawks’ quarterbacks coach in 2022 and then did the same for Baker Mayfield as the Buccaneers’ offensive coordinator last season.

The Panthers invested resources to improve the offensive line, especially on the interior, where they were particularly weak last season. I won’t make the case for Carolina to be a good defense in 2024, but it’s important to note that it finished 19th in success rate allowed and 17th in EPA per play allowed if you remove turnovers. The overall numbers were among the league’s worst, but on a play-to-play basis, once removing outlier plays, the Carolina defense wasn’t nearly as bad as the conventional wisdom would suggest. They also had terrible injury and depth issues that further decimated them last year.

It sounds wild to project the worst team in the NFL last year to win its division, but remember that Jacksonville did this two years ago following Trevor Lawrence’s disastrous rookie year.

1. Cincinnati Bengals (+165)

The Bengals are my pick to win the AFC North, and while I understand there are concerns about Joe Burrow as he returns from the unusual wrist injury that forced him to miss much of last season, Burrow has had the most normal offseason and preseason of his NFL career. His previous training camps have been disrupted by COVID-19, recovery from a torn ACL, appendicitis, and a calf injury, and he’s typically struggled in September as a result. The Bengals are 7-8-1 (.469 win percentage) in the first four weeks of the season in the Burrow era and 22-14 (.611) in his 36 starts beyond that point. The Bengals open this season with the Patriots, Chiefs, Commanders, and Panthers.

But beyond Burrow’s health, there are other reasons to believe in Cincinnati, starting with a revamped secondary, which, combined with a much friendlier fourth-place schedule, will help stabilize a defense that struggled last year. Safety Vonn Bell is back in the fold, and Geno Stone moved over from Baltimore to help improve a safety group that gave up explosive plays far too frequently last year.

The Bengals have already been a worst-to-first team, rebounding from a last-place finish in Burrow’s rookie year to win the AFC North in 2021. Even without Burrow for much of last year, they were the league’s best division loser, still managing to win nine games. Now I think the Bengals are poised to reclaim the division title and should be a slight favorite over Baltimore to do so.