One of the seemingly few successful outcomes early in this NFL season has been the Detroit Lions scoring at least 30 points. They started 4-1 with four straight wins and were in the conversation as Super Bowl contenders.
But the Lions have failed to surpass that total in each of their past three games, including Sunday’s 27-24 loss to Minnesota.
The Indianapolis Colts are off to a 7-1 start with the NFL’s best offense. And on Sunday, they turned the ball over six times, more than their previous eight games combined, in a brutal loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers.
And what about the Green Bay Packers, who have reasserted themselves as Super Bowl contenders with a 5-1-1 start? Unsurprisingly, they suffered their first loss of the season at home to the mid-major Carolina Panthers on Sunday.
What ties these three results together is the notion that at the midway point of the season, teams vary from week to week, switching between looking great and skating, and the Pigskin’s dominance league-wide appears to be lacking.
Entering this week, ESPN’s Football Power Index projected the Indianapolis Colts to finish with a league-high 12.2 total wins. How low is that? The last time they led the league with 12 wins was in 2014.
In another sign of the parity that many good teams don’t have a dominant leader, 12 teams entered Week 9 with positive Expected Points Ratings on both offense and defense. Up until the same point last year, there were nine such teams. Previous season, 7.
One potential factor is that “dynamic kickoff,” which was made permanent before this season, will be introduced in 2024. This rule change encourages kicking teams to kick playable balls. If the ball is kicked into the end zone, the offensive team is stationed at its own 35-yard line, a distance that gives the offense a significant head start on subsequent drives. Field goal range is only a few passes away.
The field is often shorter, with the offense averaging 328.9 yards per game in 2025, the lowest average in the league since 2008, but scoring 2.14 points per drive, the second-highest in NFL history.
In Green Bay’s case, Sunday’s loss, in which the Panthers came back from a 31-point deficit, was more than just a bad day. Star tight end Tucker Craft was sidelined with a so-called knee injury, but Packers coach Matt LaFleur said he was “not in good shape.”
In Detroit, the Lions gained more yards, completed all three fourth-down conversions, held the ball three minutes longer, but committed more turnovers and converted fewer red zone chances into points, resulting in a loss to the Vikings.
“This was probably one of the worst games we’ve played in a long time,” Lions coach Dan Campbell said.
But the most puzzling performance by a team that has been at or near the top of its conference was in Indianapolis. Quarterback Daniel Jones revived his Colts career by leading his team to the most points in eight games since 1964. The Colts only turned the ball over four times in eight games, and Jones himself only had three interceptions and two lost fumbles against the Steelers.
Their record thus far has been built primarily on wins over teams with losing records. So the second half of the season will be spent learning whether the Colts are the rare dominant team they’ve been around for two months, or just one of the few good teams.
