The 245 Report: Opening Week, Solved

Let the record show I am aware this column is normally where I dismantle last week’s games with the benefit of hindsight, a task at which I am, I’ll remind you, undefeated. But there is no last week. There is only Wednesday, and Wednesday is not a suggestion — it is a banner-raising in Seattle, a Patriots team that traveled a long way to lose gracefully or win rudely, and the loudest opening statement the win-total market has made in years.

Ten teams at 10.5 projected wins or better. Ten. I have seen parity claimed before by people who cannot tell you why it’s happening, only that it is. I can tell you why: talent compression at the top plus one team — the Rams — who simply refused to stay compressed with it. Add Myles Garrett to a defense that already employed the reigning MVP and Defensive Player of the Year, and you haven’t found parity. You’ve found the one roster that opted out of it.

Seattle is the interesting case, and I say that as someone who finds most things interesting only briefly. A defending champion, ranked behind the team it hasn’t lost to since the only game that mattered, on the strength of an offseason that changed enough of the roster to make “defending champion” partly a formality. I don’t dispute the banner. I dispute the assumption that a banner is a guarantee of anything happening twice.

And New England — one of the two largest win-total jumps in the league — opens on the road, in the building where their season ended, against the team that ended it. If you think that’s a bad spot, you have the football IQ of a folding chair, and I mean that with the affection of a man who has met several folding chairs with better instincts than most professional prognosticators. Revenge narratives are usually nonsense. This is the rare one with a roster behind it.

For those who need it in writing rather than in my voice: pull the real 2025 efficiency numbers and New England graded out as the No. 1 offense in the entire league in EPA per play. Not top-five. First. The Rams’ offense finished second. I called both of those teams before the market caught up, and now the market has caught up, and somehow I’m still the one being asked to defend the take. Dallas, for what it’s worth, ran a top-five offense behind the league’s worst defense by that same measure — write that down, it will matter more than once this season.

My number for Wednesday: I have one, the scouts have five between them, and I’d encourage you to notice where we agree and where we don’t — disagreement, correctly sourced, is worth more than consensus. That’s not humility. That’s just the theorem.

— Newton