Predicting NFL teams most likely to improve in 2025 season - ESPN

It's time to get better. Every offseason, I run through various NFL minutiae and collect all the data I can to try to figure out what's going to happen in the season to come. While much of that depends on the decisions teams made and the people organizations did (or did not) add during the spring, you can learn a lot about what might happen in 2025 by taking a closer look at what was happening under the radar in 2024.

It's my annual look at the teams that are likely to improve in the upcoming season. This is the ninth year I've run this column at ESPN, and the results over the past eight seasons have been pretty solid. Over that stretch, the teams mentioned in this column have improved 31 out of 38 times, with the average jump coming by 3.4 wins per 17 games.

Subscribe: 'The Bill Barnwell Show'
More: Predicting teams that will lose more games

Last year's column went 4-1, with the Patriots sticking at 4-13 as the only holdout. (I was an Anthony Richardson 2-point conversion away from going 5-0.) The Cardinals jumped from 4-13 to 8-9, and the Chiefs rode their luck as they improved from 11-6 to 15-2, but the real exciting mentions came in two unexpected playoff teams. The Chargers improved from 5-12 to 11-6, and there was an even bigger step forward in Washington, where the Commanders went from 4-13 to 12-5, advancing to the NFC Championship Game in the process.

Expecting any of these teams to make it to their conference title game is a bit of a stretch, but there's room for solid improvement and the potential for an unexpected playoff team or two in the mix. While the Chargers were the clear team that stuck out as an obvious candidate to improve a year ago, no team stood out to me as the surefire pick in this year's mix.