Twelve months ago, Kansas City was the top pick to decline. The Chiefs had gone 15-2 in the 2024 regular season and were 10-0 in games decided by seven points or fewer that year — an NFL record. The regression call looked smart when 2025 played out. Now the Chiefs headline the other list.
The annual column tracking teams most likely to improve has gone 35-8 (.813) since 2017 when measuring whether the picked teams beat their prior-season record. The average team has improved by 3.5 wins after adjusting for the 17-game schedule. The companion decline column put the combined accuracy at 69-17 (.802) against the simple win-or-lose standard, and 50-36 (.581) against preseason over-under totals logged on Pro-Football-Reference.com.
The 2025 NFL season was one of the most volatile in recent memory. Seven teams saw their records swing by at least six wins in either direction, the most in a single season since 2008. The New England Patriots led all of them, jumping from 4-13 in 2024 to 14-3 in 2025 — a 10-win swing that stands as the largest single-season improvement by any franchise since the 1999 Indianapolis Colts in Peyton Manning's second year.
New England's turnaround was built on three pillars. The Patriots hired Mike Vrabel, who had a strong coaching record with the Tennessee Titans before a front-office power struggle in Nashville. They leaned on free agency: 13 of New England's 25 most-used players on offense and defense were free-agent acquisitions from the prior two offseasons. The schedule helped enormously — the Patriots faced just two opponents that finished with a winning record all season, one of the easiest slates in league history.
The other six teams that swung by at least six wins in 2025 split between improvement successes and upcoming decline picks. Three of last year's improvement picks became big success stories. The Chicago Bears went 11-6 after finishing 5-11 in 2024, with the Ben Johnson effect on offense and a defense that piled up takeaways driving the turnaround. The San Francisco 49ers jumped from 6-11 to 12-5. The Jacksonville Jaguars made the sharpest climb of any team in last year's column, going from 4-13 to 13-4 in Liam Coen's first season as head coach. All three made the playoffs after finishing well below.500 the season before.
Not every pick worked. The Las Vegas Raiders declined by a game from the prior year. The New York Giants improved by just one win. The two misses came against a backdrop of 35 correct calls in nine years.
This year's five-team list focuses on franchises that either stumbled in 2025 or have been disappointing long enough that conditions for correction are in place. The Giants and Jets are both named, trying to bounce back from poor 2025 records. The Chiefs, Lions and Ravens round out the group as playoff-caliber teams looking to return after falling short.
The Chiefs' case is the headline angle. Kansas City went 10-0 in close games in 2024, both an NFL record and an unsustainable number. Regression to the mean in one-score results is the single most reliable phenomenon in NFL statistics. When the league's best roster stops going 10-0 in close games and reverts toward 50-50, the win total jumps back up — assuming Andy Reid's roster stays healthy and the talent base holds. Reid is still coaching, and the franchise has not signaled any structural overhaul.
The broader pattern over nine years is that improvement picks work roughly four times out of five. The 2025 class — Bears, 49ers, Jaguars — delivered three clean hits out of five picks. The 2026 class carries similar logic: teams with positive or near-positive underlying numbers that underperformed their talent in 2025. The Chiefs fit that profile more cleanly than any other team on the list given the documented record in close games two seasons ago and the known coaching stability in Kansas City.
