Overreaction or bad omen? Judging 9 narratives that developed in Week 1 of 2025 NFL season

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Week 1 of the NFL season is the biggest yarn spinner of the year. It fabricates fictions based on faulty sample sizes and feeds them to the masses as truth.

The narratives spawning this week aren’t driven by malice. There is no evil deceit at play. There are simply too few snaps, too few reps, too few decisions to aid in determining future outcomes.

In a world of instant gratification and dopamine chasing, we want the future laid out plain. That’s not how life works. It’s not how the NFL works.

The games that unfolded thus far are but one of 17 each club will tackle, with ever-new obstacles sprouting each week.

Do the results in such a relatively short season matter? Undoubtedly. Are there lessons to glean? Absolutely. But we must season everything with two tablespoons of salt before ingesting. We can’t get so caught up in the floodlights of one game that we lose the path to January.

Many of the narratives formed after 16 of 272 games are naturally of the negative variety. It’s far easier to see the sky falling than to believe one game means a Lombardi is on the way. Some contain nuggets of reality. Others are blatant fibs.

With smoke-and-mirrors week in the rearview, let’s take a look at some of the instant narratives and attempt to parse out which are early overreactions that will fade away and which could signal bad omens.

It was U-G-L-Y for Dan Campbell’s crew. It’s not just that they lost a road game to a division opponent. Detroit got smacked around, beaten up on both sides of the ball, treated like a piñata, and ripped apart.

The Lambeau Field beatdown was a culmination of every worry Lions fans had entering the year. The interior offensive line got bullied. Even with Micah Parsons not playing a full complement of snaps, the blocking was suspect. The offensive play calls were muted, unimpressive, predictable and lacked explosives. Jared Goff looked scatterbrained from all the pressure. The defense lacked punch up front, generating eight total QB pressures, including a team-high two from Aidan Hutchinson. The secondary got picked apart.

It was as dismal a performance as you could script for the back-to-back NFC North winners, starting a rugged 2025 schedule.

So, why is the narrative following the loss an overreaction and not a horrific omen?

In attempting to contextualize Week 1 losses, I went back and looked up every team that made the playoffs after suffering an opening-week defeat over the past decade. There have been 40 such instances. Most were close losses. Many to other future playoff teams. Some had rookie QBs just getting their feet wet before going on a run — Commanders with Jayden Daniels, Texans with C.J. Stroud.

Within that data, however, a few stood out. Most notable: The 2021 Packers got pounded by the Saints, 38-3. You’ll remember this as the game moved to Jacksonville due to Hurricane Ida. New Orleans demolished Aaron Rodgers, who threw two picks. Mr. R-E-L-A-X turned things around from that infamous start, and the Packers claimed the No. 1 seed in the NFC. In fact, both No. 1 seeds in 2021 (Titans) got walloped in Week 1. It can happen.

History isn’t a rerun, but it can be instructive. In this case, it can remind us that even as bad as Sunday looked for the Lions, that doesn’t outweigh the positives they had entering the season. It’s still an uber-talented roster with a head coach who has proven he can coax the most out of his players. The coordinators must be better. The players, particularly Goff, must display urgency. And the young guards must grow up in a hurry. But hitting the panic button after Week 1 with this roster is premature. We can re-evaluate in mid-October.

I don’t need to rehash most of the above section, but it applies similarly to John Harbaugh’s club. This is too talented a team to worry about one loss derailing them — the Ravens started 0-2 last season and still won the AFC North.

Losing a 15-point lead with under five minutes to go stings, and it could hurt the Ravens come January if they have to play in Buffalo again. But sometimes you must tip your cap to a generational talent like Josh Allen and plow ahead.

I know the choke artists narrative can be difficult to brush aside, though. Under Harbaugh, the Ravens have lost 17 games in which they held a 10-plus point lead in the second half (most of any head coach since 2000), per NFL Research. Of course, when you’re around for 18 seasons, the bad (and good) moments can add up.

The issue is the recent collapses:

Sunday night’s loss.

A 10-point boondoggle to the Las Vegas Raiders in Week 2 last year.

They blew a 15-point lead to Cleveland and a 10-point lead to Pittsburgh in 2023.

In 2022, they blew a 21-point lead in a defensive breakdown against Miami and had a 17-point crash against the Bills.

They still made the postseason after all of those flops.

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