Bengals at Texans

Packers at Jets

Steelers at Patriots

Vikings at Bears

Eagles at Titans

Saints at Ravens

Browns at Buccaneers

Panthers at Falcons

Commanders at Cowboys

Jaguars at Broncos

Seahawks at Cardinals

Dolphins at 49ers

Raiders at Chargers

Colts at Chiefs (Sunday Night Football)

Giants at Rams (Monday Night Football)

A good defense can theoretically survive without a great success rate, if it excels at some combination of big play prevention, generating turnovers, and tightening up in the red zone. A good defense can also get by without great explosive play prevention if it excels at stopping opponents consistently on a down-by-down basis.

Unfortunately it’s just about impossible to have a good defense if opponents move the ball consistently and generate a high rate of big plays…and that brings us to the Bengals.

The Bengals struggled to stop both efficiency and explosiveness in 2025, and would have ranked even worse than 27th in points allowed per drive if not for the eighth-highest rate of takeaways per possession.

The chart above undersells the enticing strength-versus-strength matchup we’ll be treated to on this side of the ball, as Cincinnati’s full 2025 numbers are weighed down by starts from Joe Flacco and Jake Browning in Joe Burrow’s absence.

Houston actually held Buffalo to a below-average success rate in Week 1, but was thrashed by explosive plays.

The Jets offense got off to a nice start to the 2026 season, even after accounting for the less-than-challenging opposition. We’ll see if this can continue as the degree of difficulty ramps up.

Opportunities could be there for Breece Hall against a defense that was a pretty big run funnel in 2025 (though the Packers did clamp down on the Minnesota ground game in Week 1).

The Jets defense is probably not going to match up well with many offenses, but this seems to be an especially tough assignment. Big plays have routinely killed the Jets, and now they have to face an opponent that excelled in this area in 2025 and had seven 20-plus-yard pass plays in Week 1.

Will this finally be the week the New York defense gets an interception?

After struggling on the road against the vaunted Seahawks defense in Week 1, Drake Maye and the Patriots get an easier assignment at home against a Steelers unit that doesn’t appear to be anything special.

Its output was not impressive in Week 1, but the shape of the Pittsburgh passing game was vastly different to what we saw in 2025. Last season, Aaron Rodgers ranked 37th (out of 38 quarterbacks with at least 200 dropbacks²) in average depth of target (aDOT). The veteran’s average pass traveled just 6.1 yards past the line of scrimmage.

Against Atlanta in this year’s opener, Rodgers had an aDOT of 10.2 yards, which ranked eighth among all Week 1 passers. However, the deeper passes did not lead to better results; Pittsburgh had a 13th-percentile passing success rate and 15th-percentile EPA per dropback average.

Rodgers attempted nine passes that traveled at least 20 yards down the field and did not complete a single one.

It remains to be seen whether this is something that we’ll see more of from Pittsburgh, or if it was just a matchup-dependent blip, as the Falcons allowed the third-highest aDOT (8.7) in 2025.

The Bears offense put together one of the more impressive performances of Week 1, but we should expect the Vikings to put up considerably more resistance than the Panthers.

Chicago combined efficiency and explosiveness in its massacre of the Carolina defense, while Minnesota generally stopped opponents from doing either last season.

Few teams were better than the Vikings at forcing offenses to move the ball in small bites rather than large chunks, as they allowed the second-shortest aDOT in the league in 2025 (6.8, behind only Kansas City’s 6.7).

Minnesota’s suffocating pass defense and just okay rush defense contributed to the Vikings being arguably the league’s most pronounced run funnel. The Bears, who had one of the more run-heavy offenses and most efficient running games in 2025, will presumably be happy to oblige.

The Eagles needed late-down heroics from Jalen Hurts to get their Week 1 win, as they were held to a 9th-percentile offensive success rate against a poor Washington defense. A Titans team that struggled throughout 2025 and is coming off a 13-point home loss to the Jets offers an ideal chance for Philadelphia to get right.

It was not evident last week, but New Orleans was quietly one of the better defenses in the league last year, posting an above-average EPA per play, success rate, 20-plus-yard play rate and sack rate.

That said, the Saints have another challenging matchup on the road against a Ravens team that demolished the Colts in Indianapolis.

Baltimore will likely be without wide receiver Zay Flowers, who put together a strong game’s worth of production in less than two quarters of action against the Colts.³

Baltimore’s pass defense struggled in terms of big play prevention and rushing the passer in 2025, but started 2026 on the right foot in both areas. It held the Colts to just two 20-plus-yard pass plays on 35 dropbacks (a 6% rate that’s good for a 36th-percentile offensive performance), and also hit Daniel Jones nine times (this 26% quarterback hit rate marked a 4th-percentile performance for the Colts).

The Ravens head into their matchup Sunday ranked 11th in Pro-Football-Reference’s measure of pressure rate (26.5%) after finishing 28th (19.0%) last season.

I don’t think I was going out on a limb by any stretch last week when I said these charts are overestimating the Browns (since they don’t account for Myles Garrett’s departure), and I feel even more secure in this position after Cleveland surrendered 34 points and allowed 6.4 yards per play to the Jaguars in Week 1.

After getting run over by the Bears, the Panthers get a substantially easier Week 2 matchup in Cooper Rush and the Falcons.

Is Jalen Coker Bryce Young’s new top target? After he followed up his strong finish to last season with an eight-catch, 138-yard, two-touchdown performance in Week 1, it is certainly tempting to say yes. Coker led all wide receivers in fantasy points with 33.8⁴ in Week 1 and was 10th in expected fantasy points through the air.⁵ This marked the sixth time in Carolina’s last seven games that Coker outscored Tetairoa McMillan through the air (McMillan caught five passes for 75 yards and did not score against the Bears).

However, opportunity is everything in fantasy football, and even in real football, a player’s ability to earn targets is more consistent than their ability to convert targets into catches, yards, and touchdowns. For this reason, we might want to keep the door open for McMillan, as the volume and quality of his opportunities are much closer to Coker’s than the raw fantasy point totals suggest. Since Coker’s Week 13 ascension, he has edged McMillan in Weighted Opportunity Rating (WOPR)⁶ four times, while McMillan has been ahead on three occasions.

The duo also played six games together before Week 13 where McMillan had a clear edge in terms of opportunity, in addition to McMillan’s solid six-game stretch to start the season while Coker was injured. Plus, McMillan is a former first-round pick that has just entered his second NFL season (Coker is an undrafted free agent now in his third). For these reasons, as exciting as Coker’s recent production has been, I would still prefer McMillan.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a game with a worse collection of defenses: Dallas was last in the NFL in points allowed per drive in 2025 and began 2026 by allowing a 97th-percentile success rate to the Giants.

Washington was third from the bottom in points allowed per drive last year, but at least started this season in less embarrassing fashion. As mentioned above, the Commanders held the Philadelphia offense to a 9th-percentile success rate last Sunday. This included a 3rd-percentile success rate on early downs, but also a 70th-percentile mark on late downs, with the latter mark going a long way towards Washington taking the “L.”

Jayden Daniels’ accuracy fell off from his rookie season to last season, as his completion rate went from 69% to 61%, and his completion percentage over expectation (CPOE) went from 3.4 to minus-2.6. He also struggled in Week 1 (minus-3.5 CPOE), but the Cowboys offer a heck of an opportunity to get back on track.

Jacksonville’s pass defense got good results in 2025, as evidenced by their EPA per dropback that was more than a standard deviation better than average, but a huge part of this was due to turnovers. As we’ve covered when discussing the Bears last week, this is generally not a sustainable means for success.

There is another, more subtle reason Jacksonville’s defense might regress in 2026: ESPN’s Bill Barnwell notes that while the Jaguars finished the regular season 9-1, this stretch came against a parade of backup quarterbacks. As Barnwell notes, “over the final nine games, the Jaguars faced the opposing starter for a complete game only twice, with the Titans getting a full start from Cam Ward and the Broncos getting one from Bo Nix” (Justin Herbert did play into the fourth quarter of Jacksonville’s Week 11 victory but I’d say the broader point still stands).

For whatever it’s worth, in that game against the Broncos, Jacksonville won 34-20, and while Nix threw for 352 yards in the contest, he was also held to a 59.6% completion rate.

That December matchup between the two teams also stands out because Nix averaged 12.6 yards per completion and had five completions of at least 20 yards (hence the gaudy yardage total despite the lackluster completion rate). This was atypical of the Jaguars defense, as one of its other strengths aside from generating turnovers was preventing big plays through the air.

Jacksonville’s stout run defense and less-than-stellar pass defense presumably go a long way towards explaining why opponents were so pass happy against the Jaguars.

The strong Denver defense had its worst game of the 2025 season⁷ against the Jaguars in Week 16.

Sam Darnold will miss this game due to the injury he suffered in the season opener. Given the strength of the Seahawks defense and less-than-intimidating opposition, it’s not clear Seattle will miss him all that much.

The 49ers are fresh off a dominant win over the Rams in Australia; their 2026 North American debut comes with a significantly lower degree of difficulty.

I’ve written a couple of times already about a team that struggled in Week 1 getting a good chance to turn things around thanks to their Week 2 opponent. This game fits the bill as well as any of them.

Reminder that these numbers include the games last season not started by Patrick Mahomes.

As mentioned in the Week 1 recap, Mahomes looked a bit rusty in his return to action, as his completion percentage over expectation was the lowest in the league for the week, but Kenneth Walker was able to pick up the slack.

The Colts may turn out to be a textbook example of how pass coverage is a weak-link system, in that a secondary is only as good as its weakest players. Sauce Gardner and Charvarius Ward make up one of the league’s better corner duos, and on Sunday, the pair combined to allow three catches on seven targets, per initial PFF charting.⁸

The problem is all the other Colts defenders allowed Jackson to complete 14 out of his remaining 18 passes. Slot corner Justin Walley allowed completions on all four of his targets, while surrendering a 118.8 passer rating on those targets, and the Indianapolis safety duo was about as bad.⁹

The Colts offense was a bit below average in terms of efficiency (44th-percentile success rate) without really being close to average in the major facets of the game.

Kansas City’s defense is coming off a dominant effort, as it held Denver to a 16th-percentile success rate in Week 1.

The Giants and Rams head into the Battle of Media Markets on the heels of two very different Week 1 performances — New York upset Dallas at home while Los Angeles was beaten soundly in Australia by San Francisco — but this still has the hallmarks of a comfortable L.A. victory.

Things could get especially ugly on the ground, where the Rams were two standard deviations above the mean in rushing efficiency last year, while the Giants defense was two standard deviations below average in this department.

Jaxson Dart had a very solid season debut against the Cowboys, but he wasn’t the first quarterback to look solid against this iteration of the Dallas defense and he won’t be the last. The Rams offer a much tougher challenge, although like a few other defenses we’ve looked at today, at least some of their success last year may have been due to a turnover rate that seems unsustainably high.

Z-Score: The number of standard deviations from the mean a measure is.

EPA (Expected points added per play): An overall measure of offensive or defensive efficiency. See here for more.

Success (Success rate): The percentage of plays that produce positive EPA.

20+ play: The percentage of plays that gain at least 20 yards.

Turnover: The percentage of plays that end in a turnover.

Pass_OE (Pass rate over expected): The rate of called pass plays minus how often an average team would pass according to a model that takes into account the score differential, field position, down, distance and other factors.

Air Yards (aDOT): Average depth of target, or how far the average pass travels from the line of scrimmage.

Sack (Sack rate): Sacks divided by dropbacks.

QB_hit: Quarterback hits divided by dropbacks.