The 2025 NFL season produced unusually large swings in team performance. Seven franchises saw records change by at least six wins, the most in any season since 2008, and the New England Patriots posted a 10-game jump from 4-13 to 14-3 — the largest single-season improvement since the 1999 Colts, according to ESPN.
New England’s turnaround included several notable factors cited by ESPN: the hiring of coach Mike Vrabel, heavy use of free agency with 13 of the team’s 25 most-used offensive and defensive players acquired in the prior two offseasons, and an unusually light schedule that featured only two opponents with winning records.
There is precedent for large year-to-year swings translating into further improvement. The annual column that projects which teams will get better has gone 35-8 since 2017, a .813 success rate, and finds the average picked team improves by about 3½ games after adjusting for the 17-game schedule, according to ESPN. When combined with its selections for teams likely to decline, the back-to-back previews are 69-17 overall and 50-36 against preseason over-unders preserved at Pro-Football-Reference.com.
Examples from 2025 reinforce those results. The Chicago Bears rose from 5-11 in 2024 to 11-6 in 2025, the San Francisco 49ers improved from 6-11 to 12-5, and the Jacksonville Jaguars went from 4-13 to 13-4 in Liam Coen’s first season. All three teams reached the playoffs after finishing well below .500 the prior year, according to ESPN.
Among teams discussed as likeliest to rebound is the Kansas City Chiefs. Kansas City fell to 6-11 in 2025, going 1-9 in games decided by seven or fewer points, while posting a plus-34 point differential and a projected strength of schedule ranked 14th-easiest by ESPN’s Football Power Index. The Chiefs had been 15-2 the year before and were 10-0 in one-score games in 2024, a stretch that pushed Patrick Mahomes to 43-17 in such contests, per ESPN. Those swings make Kansas City one of the headliners under consideration for improvement in 2026.
