Nobody's a Lock

There used to be teams you could pencil in before Labor Day. Peyton Manning's Colts won 12 or more games in seven of nine seasons from 2003 to 2009. Tom Brady and Bill Belichick's Patriots then went one better: eight straight seasons of 12-plus wins from 2010 through 2017, still an NFL record. Patrick Mahomes' Chiefs have hit 12 wins in six of their seven seasons since 2018. Even Aaron Rodgers, whose Packers years were streakier than people remember, still managed three straight 13-plus-win seasons from 2019 through 2021, on top of the 15-1 monster year in 2011. None of those stretches were mysteries while they were happening. You knew, going in, that team was probably winning 13 games. The only real question was what happened in January.
That kind of certainty is getting harder to find, and it's not new to this season. Last year, the five teams that opened as the league's biggest Super Bowl favorites had combined to go 16-14 by Week 7, the worst record for a group like that since 2010. The favorite to win it all by mid-October carried the longest odds a favorite had held that late into a season in fifteen years. This isn't one team having a bad month. It's the shape the league has been taking for a while now, and this season is just the latest version of it.
So who would you actually pencil in for 13 wins right now? The Rams entered as the shortest-odds Super Bowl favorite in the league and got run off the field in Week 1, losing 27-7 to the 49ers. The Colts, the same franchise that once tied its watch to nine straight 10-win seasons, are 0-2. Buffalo has an offense good enough to write down, Josh Allen playing some of the best football of his career, but the defense has allowed 31 points in each of its first two games, ranked in the bottom third of the league in yards allowed, with a secondary that's visibly still learning a new scheme. Philadelphia is 2-0, but got there by needing a two-minute touchdown drive with a little over a minute left just to beat Tennessee, one of the league's weaker rosters, after Jalen Hurts threw two interceptions, both underthrown deep balls, in the same game. That's not the profile of a team anyone's writing down for 13 wins in September. That's a team people are still arguing about in Philadelphia.
That's the actual shift, and it's the same shape this newsletter has pointed at twice already this season. The Rams carried the shortest odds in the league into Week 1, and the shortest-odds favorite hasn't won a Super Bowl in thirty years. None of that is one team having a bad month or one coach making a bad call. It's what happens when the league spends two decades building rules, salary cap discipline, free agency churn, a schedule that specifically punishes whoever won last, designed to stop exactly what Manning's Colts and Brady's Patriots and Mahomes' Chiefs did for years at a time. It's working. Nobody's pulling away anymore, not by Week 1, and on this evidence, probably not by Week 13 either.
So if you're looking for the team you can already write down for 13 wins this season, the honest answer is that there isn't one yet, and there might not be one at all. That used to be knowable in September. Now it's the one thing about this league that genuinely isn't.