If you’re sure about anything in the NFL, just wait a few weeks. Heck, if you were sure about anything from Week 7‘s Giants-Broncos game, waiting a few minutes seemed to work just as well.

After six months of waiting for the NFL to return over the offseason, what we see in the first few weeks of action feels stickier and more meaningful than anything else, and we form opinions quickly.

Of course, we should know that what happens in September doesn’t always mean very much by the time we get to the postseason. Patrick Mahomes looking like a superstar in the first few weeks of the 2018 season? Important. The Eagles hitting their bye at 2-2 a year ago after losing to the Kirk Cousins-led Falcons and getting blown out by the Bucs? Nope. Philly casually went 16-1 the rest of the way, winning by an average of nearly two touchdowns per contest.

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Everyone has their opinions and feelings about what we saw over the first month of the 2025 season. How many of those thoughts actually ring true as we hit the middle of October? Some things that seemed obvious or significant have faded into the September void, while other opinions only feel like they’ve solidified.

Today, let’s run through four of those September thoughts and see how Week 7 impacted what we knew — or thought we knew — about some of the NFL’s most interesting teams.

Jump to a September take:
The Chiefs’ offense was broken
The Jaguars’ defense could support the offense
The Colts’ offense would regress
The Bills would have a clear path in the AFC

What we said in September: “This offense is broken.”

Well, it was. The Chiefs looked like a mess through their 0-2 start, and while they got their season back on track with a 22-9 victory over the Giants in Week 3, the offense still felt almost entirely dependent upon Mahomes scrambles and out-of-structure magic. We knew things were going to be at least a little better once Xavier Worthy and Rashee Rice returned to the fold, but the Chiefs looked like they were going to struggle to live up to even the 2023 and 2024 editions of their offense, let alone the halcyon days when Travis Kelce and Tyreek Hill were at their peaks.

Over the past four weeks? The Chiefs are fourth in EPA per play, a figure which rises to first when we remove garbage time (those plays in which one team’s chances of winning are below 10%) from the equation. They’re second in points scored per drive. And if we again remove garbage time drives, the Chiefs have scored touchdowns on 56% of their possessions since the start of Week 4. The league average is 26%.

With Rice returning to the lineup for the first time in over a year Sunday after a knee injury and six-game suspension, the Chiefs finally got to field the first-string offense they had been waiting to unveil since the start of 2024. Rice, Worthy and Hollywood Brown were in the lineup together for the first time. Outside of rookie left tackle Josh Simmons, who is away from the team dealing with a personal matter, the Chiefs had everyone on their offensive depth chart available against the Raiders.

The results were dramatic. Even while sitting Mahomes for the entire fourth quarter, the Chiefs scored 31 points and racked up 30 first downs. The Raiders ran only 30 plays, the second fewest by any team in a game since the 1970 merger. The Chiefs averaged 0.38 EPA per play with Mahomes on the field; that’s the best their offense has performed with Mahomes on the field in a regular-season game since Week 3 of the 2023 season. And this was the ninth-most-productive regular-season performance of the Mahomes era by that metric.

Suddenly, the Chiefs’ offense is thriving. And while it’s easy to chalk that up to the return of Rice or a hapless opponent (especially after the Raiders’ defense lost Maxx Crosby to an injury), this really started back in Week 4, when they beat the Ravens 37-20. The following week against the Jaguars, Mahomes threw a pick-six on the Jacksonville goal line, which swung that game toward the Jags (whom we’ll get to in a bit), but even in that loss, the Chiefs scored 28 points and had six drives of 50 yards or more against a very good defense. Then, they dropped 30 points on seven meaningful drives against the Lions, punting once all game.

What has changed? Less than you might think. The designed run game has been about as efficient as it was, if you account for garbage time. The Chiefs haven’t changed how often they throw in neutral game scripts (a lot, both before and after the Giants game). They’ve gotten better after the catch, though not significantly so; their raw yards after the catch are up quite a bit, but in looking at NFL Next Gen Stats’ yards after catch over expectation, the Chiefs were 28th through three weeks and won’t land much higher over the ensuing four games.

The two most notable differences, at least to start, come through the passing game and the work of the receivers. For one, the Chiefs’ pass catchers are doing a better job of bringing in Mahomes’ passes. They had a minus-6.7% catch rate over expectation through three games, the fourth-worst mark in the NFL. The only teams running a lower rate over that span were the Titans, who just fired their coach, and the Jaguars, who are still a mess.

Since Week 4, that has jumped to 0.8%, which is right around the middle of the pack. The Chiefs aren’t snatching balls out of thin air, but their receivers are holding their own and not letting their star quarterback down.

The bigger factor, though, is what has been missing around the Chiefs’ receivers: defenders. Through three games, just over 46% of Chiefs passes were thrown to open receivers. That figure was good for 22nd in the league. When we consider that the Chiefs were playing without their top two wideouts and had Mahomes trying to fit throws to guys like Brown and Tyquan Thornton in tight quarters, the underwhelming catch rate might not be too much of a surprise.

Over the past four games? That figure has risen to 62.8%, the best mark in the NFL.

The early-season difficulties in getting receivers open look like a historic outlier. Between 2018 and 2024, the Chiefs ranked no lower than fourth in the league in open target rate in any given season. Given how many receivers have come through Andy Reid’s offense in that span, and how the Chiefs have evolved stylistically to account for teams taking away big plays over the top, it’s hard not to give a significant portion of the credit for those improvements to Mahomes. He has an amazing ability to identify natural spaces with open pockets in coverages and then create explosives out of structure.

With receivers as open as the Chiefs have been over the past four weeks, Kansas City is running an astronomical expected completion rate. Per NFL Next Gen Stats’ model, an average group of receivers would be expected to turn 73.6% of Mahomes’ attempts into completions over the past month, also tops in the league. Offenses can run a high expected catch rate by throwing the ball short, as the Raiders are doing over that time span, with 5.1 air yards per attempt; but the Chiefs are averaging a respectable 6.7 per attempt.

And now, after the returns of Rice and Worthy, the Chiefs don’t have an average set of receivers. For the first time in years, Reid can really stretch the field and create impossible binds for opposing defenses. Rice got a 2-yard score on a tap pass, but the other touchdowns on Sunday were simply mismatches. Rice was isolated against oft-picked-on corner Kyu Blu Kelly for a back-shoulder TD in the second quarter. Later in the game, when the Raiders blitzed Mahomes and played Cover 0, the legendary blitz-defeating quarterback had no trouble finding Brown in the slot for a score. Those are just easy completions without much risk for Mahomes.

The tight ends also got in the mix Sunday. A blown coverage on a deep crosser led to a 44-yard catch-and-run for Kelce, while Noah Gray picked up 28 yards on a fake screen-and-wheel up the sideline. The Chiefs have struggled out of 12 personnel (1 RB, 2 TEs, 2 WRs) this season, but they had a 61% success rate with two or more tight ends against the Raiders, their best mark of the season.

And the pass protection problems that plagued Mahomes in 2024 haven’t been as present this season. Over the past month, Mahomes has dealt with quick pressures on just 6% of his dropbacks, comfortably the lowest rate in the league (average is about 15%). He’s doing that while holding the ball at a rate well above league average, so it isn’t simply a product of getting the ball out fast.

With Mahomes taking sacks on just 3% of his dropbacks over the past month and turning the ball over just once (on that aforementioned pick-six in the Jaguars game), the Chiefs are emulating the Bills and becoming a positive play factory. Last season, just under 47% of the Chiefs’ plays on first and second down were successful by EPA. That was ninth in the NFL.

Over the past four weeks, the Chiefs are second in success rate on early downs, trailing only the Bills. Last year’s team needed to thrive on third down to survive, and with few explosive plays and a huge blinking light of a problem at left tackle, too many Chiefs drives ended short of the end zone because they couldn’t count on Mahomes to make it through four or five third downs without having the play blown up from his blind side. Now, with both improved offensive line play and more success on first and second down, third-and-long hasn’t been as pressing of an issue. The Chiefs faced third down with more than 4 yards to go just three times while Mahomes was in the game Sunday.

Will all of this stick? Maybe not quite as intensely as it has over the past four games. The Chiefs have gone 12-for-14 scoring touchdowns in goal-to-go situations over that time after going 1-for-4 in those same spots over the first three weeks of the season. Mahomes has gotten away with a dropped interception or two, including a pick that should have been made by the Raiders in the second quarter on a drive that ended with Rice’s second touchdown of the game.

With Rice and Worthy in the mix and Mahomes playing spectacular football, though, this looks and feels like the Chiefs who have terrified the league on offense once again.

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What we said in September: “The defense can hold up a sloppy offense.”

For all the optimism and explosive plays coming out of Jacksonville’s 4-1 start to open the season, it was pretty clear to anyone paying close attention that Trevor Lawrence and the offense weren’t holding up their end of the bargain. That offense was producing the occasional big play or highlight-reel moment, but the operation simply wasn’t up to what should have been realistic expectations.

Even through that 4-1 start, the Jags led the league in procedural penalties, the sort of unforced errors that have little to do with what happens after the snap. They were plagued by illegal shifts and false starts. The offense took delay of game penalties, even in critical spots or from dead-ball moments. Lawrence threw an illegal forward pass after traveling beyond the line of scrimmage in Week 1 against the Panthers, then did it again in Week 5 against the Chiefs.

On top of that, the Jags were sloppy with the football. Lawrence lost what looked to be a critical fumble trying to leap over the pile for a fourth-and-short touchdown against the Chiefs, only to have the ball punched out of his hands. Brian Thomas Jr. struggled with drops, which has led to picks for Lawrence; the QB seemed to throw one brutal interception per game, which usually came in the second half.

The defense covered up those problems by forcing gobs of takeaways. Turnover regression toward the mean was one of the biggest reasons I included the Jags as one of my teams most likely to improve in 2025, but nobody saw Jacksonville forcing 15 takeaways through its first five games. One of those takeaways became a touchdown, as Devin Lloyd now-famously took Mahomes’ only turnover of the past month 99 yards the other way, dramatically flipping that game back in Jacksonville’s favor.

The other 14 turnovers helped create shorter fields for the Jags. Through those first five games, the Jaguars had 14 drives start on their own 40-yard line or closer to the opposition end zone. Those drives produced five touchdowns, four field goals and three failures via a missed field goal or fourth-down stuff. (The other two ended in kneel-downs to seal up victories.) The Lions and Colts were the only teams to start more often in what’s generally considered to be positive field position.

But over these past two losses? The Jaguars have had one short field, which came against the Rams on Sunday in London. It quickly evaporated after an illegal man downfield penalty and a 13-yard sack on a free rush where Lawrence didn’t have a hot answer and tried to scramble his way out of pressure. Instead, the Jags were knocked out of field goal range and had to punt down 21-0.

Not much has changed on the long drives. The Jaguars were 24th in points per possession on drives starting inside their own 40-yard line during the 4-1 start, and they’re 27th by that same metric on those same possessions over the past two weeks. The defense hasn’t been able to force any turnovers over that span, though, and that has put all of the pressure on the Jaguars’ offense to sustain long, successful drives.

That’s where the procedural penalties continue to bite. The Jags have added 10 more procedural penalties on offense to their ledger over the past two games, tying them for the league lead. That’s without considering penalties like offensive holding and illegal blocks above the waist — the sort of calls efficient offenses ideally avoid as much as possible.

The most unnecessary of those penalties came against the Seahawks in Week 6. As Thomas wrestled a 50-50 ball away from Seahawks cornerback Josh Jobe for a touchdown in the third quarter, a flag hit the other side of the field, with rookie hybrid player Travis Hunter getting flagged for being offside. The penalty didn’t matter a ton in the big picture, since the Jaguars continued the drive and eventually scored a touchdown anyway, but other less conspicuous calls do make a difference.

Drops, a problem plaguing the Jags seemingly since Lawrence arrived into town, continue to be a concern. Thomas came under scrutiny earlier in the season for shrinking in tight quarters and failing to make some tough catches. I’m not sure those complaints were completely warranted, but I did think that story was behind us now. Instead, this is still an issue.

Thomas had three potentially catchable balls fall to the ground Sunday, including a dig where the pass was knocked out of his hands by a big hit from Kamren Kinchens and an out that was nearly brought in by a leaping Thomas. And last week, Thomas didn’t do a good enough job of bringing in a dig thrown at his helmet, producing a three-and-out and punt in an eight-point game in the fourth quarter.

The Jags have the second worst catch rate over expectation of any offense in the NFL this season, ahead of only the Bears, per NFL Next Gen Stats. And while it’s easy to pick on Thomas given his stardom, everyone is to blame. Tim Patrick had a bad drop against the Chiefs that should have produced a pick, only for three different Kansas City defenders to exaggeratedly whiff on catching the ball. Dyami Brown dropped a would-be touchdown pass that hit him in the hands against the Bengals.

When teams commit too many penalties and don’t have short fields, they end up inevitably needing to convert third-and-long — often more than once on a drive — to score points. The Jags faced third-and-10 or more eight times Sunday, with Lawrence picking up one of those attempts. The Jags failed on third-and-short, too; they came up short on a third-and-2 when a Thomas flat route picked up only 1 yard, on a third-and-3 Thomas drop and on a third-and-2 throw from an empty set that Lawrence sailed while trying to hit backup tight end Johnny Mundt.

Liam Coen still seems to be finding the right places to fit his players on offense. Mundt is probably not the guy you want split out catching hitches on third down. I’m pretty sure I saw a Hunter Long choice route earlier this season. The Jags started the season with Thomas running plenty of in-breaking routes and struggling before modifying his route tree. Hunter’s role has seemed to fluctuate from week to week, though he did have his biggest game as a pro in London, turning 14 targets into eight catches for 101 yards and a score. And Travis Etienne Jr., who was drafted two coaching regimes ago for his relationship with Lawrence and ability as a pass catcher, has 14 catches for 80 yards.

There’s talent here, but the Jags make too many mistakes to reliably and consistently win games with their offense right now. The defense has proved its ability to lead the way, but it’s always going to be tough for teams in the modern NFL to force multiple takeaways every week. When the onus has fallen on the offense, the Jags have generally fallen apart this season. Until they clean things up, that’s not going to change.

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What we said in September: “They have a clear path to the top seed in the AFC.”

The Bills are on what became a well-timed bye this week, but after a disappointing loss to the Falcons on “Monday Night Football” last week, their sudden downshift is worth discussing here.

When Buffalo rolled off a dramatic comeback win over the rival Ravens in the opener, it looked like the Bills were in great position to make sure the conference bracket would ride through Buffalo. The Chiefs would land at 0-2, the Ravens would eventually fall all the way to 1-5, and the Bills had what appeared to be a very generous schedule. Having to face the Jets, Dolphins, Saints, Patriots and Falcons before the Week 7 bye, it looked like Buffalo might not have much trouble starting 7-0. Throw in a win against Carolina on extra rest in Week 8, and Bills fans could envision a world where they were 8-0 before hosting the Chiefs in early November.

Well, schedules can be a funny thing. The Bills did win their first four games over that span, although the Dolphins put up a fight in Western New York in Week 3, and the Saints got within two points during the fourth quarter before Josh Allen eventually pulled away. A little sloppy, perhaps, but the Bills were stacking wins, and that’s what mattered.

And then the stack fell over. The Bills couldn’t get into top gear against a feisty Patriots team, and when Drake Maye made a couple of big-time plays on the final drive to get the Pats into field goal range, a 52-yard kick by Andy Borregales handed the Bills their first loss of the season. A week later, the offense couldn’t get comfortable while facing a Falcons team that had been blown out by the Panthers earlier in the season, with the Bills mustering just two scores in a 24-14 defeat. Suddenly, 4-0 was 4-2, and the Bills were out of the top spot in the AFC.

What has gone wrong for the Bills? I’ll start with the simplest possible explanation: They’ve been able to lean on a formula that nobody else in the league has managed to match, and that formula has come undone, especially over the past two games. If anyone is capable of rounding back into that form, it’s the Bills, but what they were doing was mostly unprecedented in league history.

It’s the turnovers. The offense simply never gave away the football. Between their bye week in November last year and the win over the Dolphins, the Bills played 12 games. Their offense turned the ball over exactly one time. That has never happened before, and it has never even been approached. Nobody else in league history has a stretch of 12 games with fewer than four turnovers on offense, and the team that pulled that off was last season’s Eagles.

We live in an era where turnovers are at historic lows, but NFL teams aren’t supposed to be able to play three months of football and turn the ball over one time. That interception, which came last year against the Patriots, was a third-and-16 deep ball from Allen that was picked off in the end zone and amounted to an arm punt. The Bills essentially had not dealt with a meaningful turnover since their last regular-season game against the Chiefs.

Over the past three games, the Bills have six turnovers. Allen threw an interception against the Saints when he couldn’t step into a throw to get as much as he wanted on a hole shot, allowing Jonas Sanker to make a nice play for his first career INT. And once that happened, suddenly, the spell seemed to be broken. Allen made an awful decision to force a throw into double coverage in the red zone for another pick. Another compressed pocket led to an impacted throw and a pick at the end of the first half against the Falcons, while another Allen pass was tipped and picked in the final minute to seal the 10-point margin of defeat.

Beyond Allen, the Bills fumbled an exchange on a jet sweep and couldn’t fall on the football against Atlanta, while a Keon Coleman fumble inside the 10-yard line gave the Patriots a critical short field early in their road win. The Bills had another ball hit the turf against the Falcons on a third-and-1 jet sweep to Elijah Moore, and while he recovered the fumble, he was stopped behind the line for a loss.

Some of this is Allen throwing in unexpectedly negative game scripts. And some of it was their luck being bound to change; during that 12-game streak, the Bills recovered 11 of their own fumbles on the offensive side of the ball. Some of those are bad exchanges that are likelier to end up back with the offense than other fumbles in the open field, but the Bills couldn’t count on continuously falling on the ball.

With Allen taking sacks at historically low rates for most of last season and the early part of this season, and coordinator Joe Brady being very comfortable going for it on fourth down, the Bills were an even more intense version of the positive play machine I referred to earlier with the Chiefs. Over our 12-game span, Allen took sacks on just 3.1% of his dropbacks, which he more than made up for with his ability to extend plays and scramble for significant yardage.

In addition to the six turnovers over the past three weeks, Allen has taken eight sacks at a 9.2% rate that nearly triples what he had been doing over the prior three months. Again, game script matters here, but there’s a much different formula underpinning the Bills’ offense from the one that had led Allen to the MVP nod last season.

With Allen avoiding sacks and making so many out-of-structure plays, he was the rare quarterback who was better under pressure than he was working out of a clean pocket. Again looking at that span, Allen’s 87.6 QBR under pressure was nearly 15 points better than that of anybody else. Over the past three games, with sacks and takeaways becoming an issue? Allen’s QBR has dropped to 12.2 under pressure, 25th among quarterbacks. He has gone 8-of-21 for 90 yards, a touchdown throw and three picks over that span.

If your offense isn’t a relentless on-schedule machine that never gets off track, you need to create explosive plays on offense to survive. Allen’s obviously capable of doing that, but the game scripts and the added yardage needed for conversions leaned into Buffalo’s lack of playmakers in the passing game. James Cook III has been very good this season, and there have been concerns that the Bills aren’t getting him the ball often enough, but Brady has already leaned more heavily into the run. The Bills are 18th in neutral-script run rate on early downs, just narrowly off from 17th the year prior. Even during this rough patch, the Bills are second in the NFL in success rate on offense.

The Bills’ offense needs more explosives and fewer takeaways. But the Bills’ defense needs to go in the opposite direction. If anything, the defense has been more dependent on forcing turnovers in recent years to thrive. Earlier this year, I wrote about how it’s difficult to sustain turnover rates in the top five on defense, just given how much variance can swap takeaway figures.

Well, here are two important rankings for the Bills. The first one is how often they ended opposing drives with takeaways. The second is where they ranked in points allowed per possession on drives that didn’t end with a fumble or interception. You’ll notice a sudden drop-off:

This was an excellent defense between 2021 and 2023. In 2024? The Bills weren’t great at stopping opposing offenses, but they created more turnovers than any other team in the league on a per-drive basis, so the stops they did come up with were disproportionately valuable.

This year, though, the Bills have only five takeaways in six games. They’ve yet to have a multiturnover game on defense after producing 10 of them in the 2024 regular season, nine of which yielded Bills victories. They have lost the turnover battle in consecutive weeks after winning or tying it in every one of their regular-season and postseason games of last season.

Pressure hasn’t been a problem for the Bills, as a resurgent year from Joey Bosa has helped Buffalo sustain the league’s second-best pressure rate this season. Without pressure? The Bills have been putty. They’re 28th in opponent QBR allowed without any sort of pressure getting home, just ahead of the Commanders, Cowboys, Titans and Ravens — all of whom are going through their own crises in the secondary.

The Bills are going through one as well, even if coach Sean McDermott refuses to acknowledge as much. This simply has not been a unit up to their standards. Some of that has been injury-related; the Bills haven’t had first-round pick Maxwell Hairston, who has been out all season so far with a knee injury. And in turn, veteran Tre’Davious White — a cap casualty in Buffalo two years ago — has allowed a 100.6 passer rating, a figure that doesn’t include the pass interference penalty he took in the end zone against the Patriots to help set up a score at the end of the first half.

The safeties have been every bit as disappointing, and there isn’t the same injury excuse. Cole Bishop and Taylor Rapp were Buffalo’s two best safeties on paper, and they’ve been on the field all season. They’re just not able to make plays. Rapp couldn’t even get close enough to make tackle attempts at times on Derrick Henry in the opener, and Bishop has made both mental and tackling mistakes. Through two seasons, his career missed tackle rate is nearly 12%, an unsustainable amount for any safety. It’s one thing to take a difficult angle and miss a tackle on Bijan Robinson‘s 81-yard touchdown scamper, but Bishop whiffed on a tackle of Stefon Diggs in the fourth quarter of the Patriots game, turning what should have been a 6-yard gain on a third-and-5 into a 30-yard gain and a first-and-goal opportunity. The Patriots scored a touchdown to go up 10 and never trailed the rest of the way.

There are two ways to go from here. One is to get back on the old formula — dominate the turnover battle, eliminate the negative plays and win by making fewer mistakes than their opponents. The other is to find a new formula. The Bills can figure out other ways to win, but with a resurgent Chiefs team coming to town in two weeks, they need to find or redefine their identity and fast.

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What we said in September: “The Daniel Jones-led offense is a flash in the pan.”

Nope. After their 38-point shellacking of the Chargers on Sunday afternoon, I’m not sure how you can really poke many holes in what the Colts are doing on offense. They’re the best offense in the league, and it really isn’t particularly close. They’re scoring 3.5 points per possession, and by that metric, the second-placed Chiefs are closer to 13th than they are to the Colts in first.

The Colts also lead the league in EPA per play, ahead of the Cowboys, Chiefs, Packers and Lions. It might feel as if that’s going to fade, and there aren’t any guarantees that the Colts will be the best offense in football over the rest of the season, but we’ve now seen them dominate opposing defenses for 419 snaps in 2025. And while seven games isn’t even half of a season of data, it’s usually enough to know that a team isn’t about to suddenly collapse and fall to the bottom half of the league.

Going back through 2010, the league leader in EPA per play after seven weeks has generally continued to play well throughout the remainder of the season. They’ve, on average, been the league’s seventh-best offense from Week 8 onward. No EPA leader has been worse than 14th in EPA per play after Week 7 onward. That team, the 2012 Giants, finished the regular season ninth in EPA per play over the entire year. They’re the only leader through seven weeks since 2010 that didn’t finish the regular season in the top five.

Barring an injury to Jones, which would leave the Colts with rookie Riley Leonard under center, the Colts don’t have some sort of fatal flaw or underlying metric waiting to hint toward their collapse. They’ve recovered three of four fumbles on offense, but the signal there is fumbling only four times in seven games, which is impressive. They’re third in the league in third down conversion rate and seventh in red zone touchdown rate, which are on the high side but hardly out of whack for an offense that’s rolling on early downs and outside the red zone, too. Will the Colts go 17-for-17 in goal-to-go situations the rest of the year? Probably not, but they don’t need to do that to be a very good offense.

Some of the arguments that would have been fair to bring up about the Colts during their hot start in September don’t really apply now. Let’s run through them:

They’ve faced an easy schedule. It was certainly one thing when the Colts dropped 33 points on a hapless Dolphins defense in the opener. Even then, it was clear that Miami had punted on building an NFL-caliber secondary and were going to be a target for opposing offenses all season. The Browns, who have been an offensive mess all season, scored 24 points against the Dolphins on offense yesterday. The Panthers ran for 239 yards on Miami. Nobody should be launching their great offensive campaign on beating the Dolphins.

Well, in Week 2, the Colts scored 29 points and racked up 473 net yards on the Broncos, who have a great defense. While Indy has enjoyed some of the league’s easier defenses (Titans, Raiders) around a 20-point, three-turnover performance in a loss to the Rams, Sunday was another prove-it game against a Chargers defense that ranked 10th in EPA per play before facing the Colts. Indianapolis had what was arguably its best offensive performance of the season, scoring 38 points and topping 400 yards.

The Colts started the game with three touchdown drives, all of which went 70 yards or more, including a 17-play epic in the second quarter. After a punt, they kicked a field goal and drove downfield for two more touchdowns. After another punt, the Colts chewed up the final three-and-a-half minutes of clock to seal a two-TD victory.

It’s one thing to spike a couple of big plays or take advantage of a few short fields, but the Colts were consistently explosive and able to create big play opportunities throughout this game. Even facing a Chargers team that has a quarterback and a set of receivers known for their ability to create those big plays, the Colts were easily the more explosive team of the two.

After Justin Herbert and the L.A. offense struggled to piece together an 11-play, 76-yard drive to get within two scores in the third quarter, the Colts just hopped on the field and moved the ball with ease. Tyler Warren leaked into the flat, shrugged off a tackle from safety Derwin James Jr. and turned upfield for 29 yards. Michael Pittman Jr. picked up 11 yards. Alec Pierce went for 14. And with the Colts just entering field goal range, Jonathan Taylor made up for an earlier run for no gain on the drive by taking the ball 19 yards to the house. They moved 73 yards on five plays, simply overwhelming a very good Chargers defense along the way.

Jones isn’t going to keep making this many big plays. At his best in New York under Brian Daboll, Jones had evolved into a point guard and quick distributor. Daboll dialed up run-pass options, quick-game stuff and one-read concepts that allowed Jones to either get the ball out quickly or get to scrambling. That offense worked in 2022, even as Jones threw the shortest average pass of anybody in the league, but it was less effective in 2023 and 2024.

There are no such limitations this time around. Jones is averaging 8.4 air yards per throw, the seventh-highest figure for any quarterback in the NFL. He’s a relatively modest 12th in the league in yards per attempt on deep passes, but Jones doesn’t have to be early-career Mahomes or Philip Rivers in terms of picking teams apart downfield to thrive on offense. He just needs to be good enough to give opposing defenses pause, and Jones has more than met that prerequisite this season.

Shane Steichen has helped make life easier for Jones in working off play-action. Jones is taking a play-fake on 33.5% of his dropbacks this season, comfortably the highest rate in the league. (Second, coincidentally, is Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart.) Owing in part to how devastating the Colts’ run game has been, Jones is averaging 9.5 yards per dropback with play-action this season, the fifth-best rate in the league. On Sunday, Jones was 10-of-13 with play-action for 130 yards and a touchdown pass.

There’s no shame in saying that the Colts playmakers are helping fuel some of those big plays with what they do after the catch, too. Taylor has been the best back in football (alongside Bijan Robinson), while every one of Indy’s playmakers has leveled up and looks as if they’re a tier above where they were with Anthony Richardson Sr. at quarterback.

I’m not sure any offensive player has been more fun to watch from a film perspective this season than Warren, whose role in the offense might as well be Steichen’s Coach of the Year submission. Nobody plays more meaningful roles within the offense and gets the ball from a wider range of places, with Puka Nacua as the only potential competition for that title. Warren has picked up first downs running the triple option and running the famed Nacua Sail route out of the backfield through the offensive line. He has been a lead blocker and a Wildcat quarterback. And against the Cardinals, Warren lined up as the wing tight end and then took the handoff on a counter on third-and-5 for a 6-yard run, setting up his touchdown catch on the ensuing first-and-goal snap.

Jones will take too many sacks. The Broncos and Chargers don’t exactly have gentle pass rushes, and Jones has managed to survive. The same quarterback who ran an 8.5% sack rate in New York, including a 15.8% mark in a six-game sample in 2023, is taking sacks on just 2.6% of his dropbacks this season. That’s the best mark in the league, and it might be one of the single biggest improvements any player has made from season-to-season.

There has been a little bit of magic where players collide, and Jones somehow manages to avoid the fray and run forward for a first down, but he has legitimately been very good about finding the line between extending plays with the hopes of creating something explosive and giving up on a play at the right time. Jones has held onto the ball for five seconds or more just three times all season. For context, Caleb Williams and Cam Ward are tied for the league lead with 20 such plays.

Jones is also less involved in the run game than he has been in past years. Taking kneel-downs out of the equation, Jones has 22 carries for 86 yards through six games. Those numbers aren’t going to look good compared to what the 2019 first-round pick was able to do at his best with the Giants, but it’s also a safer way to live. Jones took hits on nearly 31% of his dropbacks between 2023 and 2024 in New York, a figure topped only by Justin Fields. That figure is down to just over 21% this season. Fewer hits mean fewer opportunities to get injured.

Injuries will be a problem. Nobody can predict injuries, but it’s fair to at least note that Jones has played just one full season of football in his pro career as the starter without missing time. That possibility is going to hang over the Colts, especially given that the untested Leonard is one bad Jones hit away from being their starting quarterback. At the same time, adding a veteran with a healthy résumé isn’t a guarantee, either; Kirk Cousins had been healthy for most of the prior decade before tearing an Achilles. And Indianapolis’ O-line has been excellent throughout the season. Outside of losing Taylor or something, the Colts and Jones should be fine.

They won’t be able to throw in negative game scripts. This might end up being true. The problem is that nobody is able to get out to a big enough lead to find out. Jones hasn’t taken a single snap trailing by more than one score all season. When they have fallen behind, Jones and Taylor have done a great job of getting the Colts immediately back into the game. And once they’ve gotten ahead, Jones and Taylor have typically done an excellent job of keeping them there.

At 6-1, the Colts are suddenly in first place in the entire AFC, let alone the South. Jones has been one of the players of the year so far. It’s quickly becoming more difficult to poke holes in his success with Steichen and Indianapolis. With another impressive win over one of the league’s more imposing defenses, Jones is firmly establishing himself as part of the quarterback reclamation class of 2025. He might even end up being valedictorian.