Most National Football League teams will have stretches in their regular seasons where they have trouble and those that reap victories. Each year a handful of teams will break this pattern and win all year long, and a few lose the entire campaign.
There are a number of factors that contribute to this pattern. First, teams are always striving to get better, to win, and those that think some teams will tank a season to get a better draft choice have probably never been in a locker room. Sometimes, in this quest to get better, teams look to improve their long-term chances by inserting younger players that they hope will feed future success.
The Las Vegas Raiders are in that process right now.
Does that mean they have a better chance of winning down the stretch of this season? It has been horrible for Pete Carroll in his first year with the Silver and Black, and after winning on opening day over the New England Patriots, I understand there is a congressional hearing to figure out how that happened, the Raiders have won only one more time while losing ten games. Their win came over the dreadful Tennessee Titans.
While the Raiders are one of those few teams that don’t appear to have any good side of their season, the Indianapolis Colts fall right into the crosshairs of a team that may have already finished with their best part of the 2025 season. Indianapolis shot out of the gate with eight wins in their first ten games with their only two setbacks over the first half of the season suffered when turnovers played a key role in losses to the Los Angeles Rams and Pittsburgh Steelers.
The Colts success was driven by quarterback Daniel Jones; he was enjoying a Sam Darnold kind of season. That is, after years of mediocrity hitting stride and looking like a franchise QB. Last year, Darnold did it with the Vikings and led them to the playoffs with 14 regular season wins. This year, Jones was off to a similar success rate only to stumble the past couple weeks with losses to the Kansas City Chiefs and Houston Texans.