The Patriots will go undefeated. The Cowboys are going to the Super Bowl. The Browns will miss the playoffs. And the Dolphins will be the worst team in NFL history.
Those are just some of the overreactions that have emerged after the opening week of the National Football League season.
It’s the same every year, in fact, every week in the NFL. It is just the nature of the beast.
The NFL — unlike Major League Baseball, the NBA and the NHL — plays its games once a week so a ton of analysis, criticism and accolades accompany each contest.
If a team has a bad outing — like Miami’s epic 59-10 loss against Baltimore or Cleveland’s 43-13 hairball versus Tennessee — the naysayers come out of the woodwork to tear down their chances of success in the weeks to come.
The opposite is true of those teams that perform well, much like New England’s 33-3 plastering of Pittsburgh and Dallas’s 35-17 beat down of the New York Giants in their respective season-opening games.
The NFL’s season is extremely short (16 games) among the big four North American sports (MLB 162 games, NHL and NBA 82) so a win here or a loss there greatly impacts a team’s chances of making the playoffs.
Sure, every team wants to come flying out of the gate with a victory but only half the team’s in the league are able to start 1-0.
There is a lot of parity in the National Football League, and winning or losing — or how teams win or lose — in Week 1 doesn’t necessarily pave the way for how the remainder of the season is going to play out.
Comments