It's time to hit an annual tradition and go out on a limb, using numbers and history to try to predict which NFL teams are most likely to improve in the upcoming season. (I'll get to the teams likely to decline next week.) This is the fourth year I've written a column picking teams like this, and over that time span, 15 of the 20 teams I've named have improved, doing so by an average of 2.9 wins in the process.
I went 3-1 a year ago, but it was more solid singles than home runs. The Bengals jumped by 2.5 wins (two wins and a tie) despite losing rookie No. 1 overall pick Joe Burrow for nearly half the season. The Chargers had Offensive Rookie of the Year Justin Herbert all season and rode an impressive second half (and even a tiny bit of luck) to jump by two wins. The Lions fired Matt Patricia and still improved by 1.5 games, but the Cowboys failed to make it back to 8-8. I could blame that in part on Dak Prescott missing most of the season, but given how bad their defense was even before Prescott suffered a serious ankle injury, I don't think they were making it to nine wins.
We're coming back with five candidates to improve in 2021, including three teams with new head coaches. As always, the movement in their win-loss record is one thing, but what's more interesting (hopefully) is understanding why these teams are likely to improve and seeing whether that actually comes true once the meaningful games start getting played. I wrote a primer on many of the numbers I'll mention here back in 2017. I'll try to contextualize these numbers and how they've historically driven team improvements in the sections below.
Naturally, it'll be a little easier than before for teams to exceed their win totals from 2020 this season, given that each team is adding an extra game to the slate. And when I write my column next week on the teams most likely to decline in 2021, those teams will have an extra opportunity to hold on to their win totals from the prior season with an extra contest.
Let's start with a textbook case for a team likely to improve based on how it performed in 2020, although its fans might be too shell-shocked to believe it before actually seeing it happen:
Jump to a team:
49ers | Broncos
Eagles | Falcons | Jaguars
Atlanta Falcons (4-12)
2020 point differential: minus-18
Pythagorean expectation: 7.6 wins
Record in games decided by seven points or fewer: 1-8
FPI projected strength of schedule: 10th toughest
Few teams have experienced the fourth-quarter trauma the Falcons felt in a series of disastrous losses last fall. I wrote last month about their inability to close out games; in short, they lost two games in which they held a win expectancy of 99%, four games with a win expectancy of 90% and six games in which they had a win expectancy at one point or another of 80%. That just doesn't happen. While it's easy to bring up the Super Bowl LI loss to the Patriots as proof that there's something rotten with Atlanta, the Falcons were just fine at closing out games between that heartbreaking loss and their brutal 2020.
On a snap-by-snap basis, they were generally pretty good last season! They were 14th in expected points added per play on offense and defense during the first three quarters of games, just ahead of the Cardinals and Chargers. In the fourth quarter and overtime ... they ranked 31st. Even including the final period, though, they finished the year 17th in DVOA, where they came in just ahead of the 11-5 Browns and 8-8 Raiders while facing the league's toughest schedule. Their much-maligned defense, which seemingly hasn't been right since Jessie Tuggle was roaming the middle of the field, finished 15th in DVOA despite a wildly disappointing season from free-agent addition Dante Fowler Jr.
Teams that get outscored by about a point per game, as the Falcons did a year ago, almost never finish with this sort of record. Since 1989, 107 teams have finished with a point differential between minus-32 and minus-1, meaning they lost their average game by two points or fewer. Those teams won an average of 7.5 games. One of them -- the 2011 Giants -- won the Super Bowl. The Falcons are the only one of those 107 teams to post that sort of point differential and finish with four wins or fewer.
That 3.6-win gap between Atlanta's Pythagorean-predicted win total and its actual win total is the largest one we've seen over the past 32 seasons. Teams that have this sort of gap between their expected and actual win totals in a given year almost always improve the following season. Take a look at the 15 largest differences before 2020 and you'll find that 14 of the 15 teams improved the following season:
These teams improved by an average of 4.2 wins. Their bad luck or inability to keep up with expectations mostly disappeared, as they went from underperforming Pythagoras by an average of 2.9 wins to coming within an average of 0.1 wins of their expected win total. The 2004 Buccaneers, 2007 Dolphins and 2016 Jaguars came out of relative anonymity to bust into the playoffs, and that came in an era in which there was one fewer playoff team in each conference. The only team that failed to improve was the 1990-91 Chargers, who made a change at quarterback to an overmatched John Friesz in his only season as a full-time starting quarterback.
The Falcons don't have those sort of concerns as long as Matt Ryan is under center. Even given the offseason trade of Julio Jones, Ryan has been an above-average or better quarterback for the vast majority of his 13-year career. With Arthur Smith taking over as Atlanta coach, Ryan is moving back into the Gary Kubiak-style scheme with which he won an MVP under Kyle Shanahan in 2016. A lot went right that season, namely with Ryan's offensive line staying healthy for all 16 games, but Ryan doesn't need to be the league's best player for the Falcons to improve. Dean Pees, whom Smith coaxed out of retirement to coordinate the defense, ran successful defenses with the Patriots, Ravens and Titans, the latter of which collapsed when Pees left after the 2019 season.
The Falcons' schedule will also be easier. After facing the league's toughest schedule by DVOA and its second toughest by FPI in 2020, they drop off this season to the league's 10th toughest by FPI or its 15th toughest by DVOA. In the NFC South, the arch-rival Saints have been greatly weakened by injuries, retirements and their own cap woes. The Buccaneers are coming off a Super Bowl LV win, of course, but their quarterback is 44 years old. In the interest of not being taken out of context and thrown in a video on Tom Brady's social media (again), the official stance of this column is that Brady will be his usual self in 2021, but these are uncharted waters. He has held off Father Time longer than any other quarterback, but that cliff is going to show up one day. If that day comes this season, the NFC South could be more wide open than it seems.
It's not all roses for the Falcons. The cap crunch forced them to trade away Jones, one of the best players in franchise history, for a draft pick and prevented them from adding much-needed talent on defense. No. 4 overall pick Kyle Pitts might be in line to take some of Jones' targets, but rookie tight ends almost always fail to impress in Year 1. Pitts might turn out to be the exception to that rule given his incredible talent, but this column generally bets on the rules holding up. Smith was a revelation as Tennessee's offensive coordinator, but we have only to think back to guys like Adam Gase and Pat Shurmur to find well-regarded offensive coordinators who were overmatched as head coaches.
Most crucially, though, the Falcons are the only team in the league with seven home games. With the league moving to a 17-game schedule, AFC teams will get nine home games each this season. NFC teams will get eight, but the Falcons sacrificed one to host the Jets in London. Home-field advantage might not be quite as important against a Jets team that is projected to finish with one of the league's worst records, but the last time the Falcons played in London, they lost one of the worst games I've ever seen.
The still-difficult schedule, cap constraints and missing home game might cap Atlanta's ceiling, but it should still be in line for a meaningful improvement this season. It would hardly be a surprise if the Falcons doubled their win total.
Jacksonville Jaguars (1-15)
2020 point differential: minus-186
Pythagorean expectation: 3.9 wins
Record in games decided by seven points or fewer: 1-5
FPI projected strength of schedule: Sixth easiest
Another team we frequently see on this list is the one that finishes with the league's worst record. That might seem like an easy choice, since it's hard to do worse than the record it takes to land the No. 1 overall pick in a typical season, but that misses the point. The worst team in football isn't good by any stretch of the imagination, but it is usually some combination of bad and unlucky during the season in which it bottomed out. Once the bad luck (or some of the bounces) dissipates, there's the chance that the team in question improves quicker than we expect.
That didn't really happen with the 2020 Bengals, who lost Joe Burrow to a serious knee injury in midseason, but even while starting Ryan Finley and Brandon Allen at quarterback for six games, they improved by 2.5 wins. A better example might be the 2017 Browns, who went from 0-16 to 7-8-1 in one season after adding Baker Mayfield and upgrading on coach Hue Jackson (even if it was with Freddie Kitchens). It doesn't even necessarily need to be a quarterback; the 2013 Texans went from 2-13-1 with Gary Kubiak and Wade Phillips to 9-7 in 2014 after hiring Bill O'Brien and drafting pass-rusher Jadeveon Clowney. That was the third season in a row in which the team with the NFL's worst record the prior year posted a winning record the following campaign, and it came from a team whose indicators suggested meaningful improvement was on the way.
The Jaguars are the latest team to join this list, and there are reasons to think that their 2021 season might look more like those of the aforementioned Browns and Texans teams than that of the 2020 Bengals. That starts under center, where they're making what could potentially be a seismic upgrade by replacing the trio of Gardner Minshew, Jake Luton and Mike Glennon with up to 17 games of Trevor Lawrence, who might be the best quarterback prospect since Andrew Luck. Luck, you might remember, drove a 2-14 Colts team to 11-5 in his rookie season in 2012.
Minshew's 2020 numbers are superficially solid, but his 51.7 QBR ranked 27th in the NFL among qualifying passers. Glennon and Luton each posted QBRs below 40. As a team, Jacksonville posted a 43.2 QBR, which ranked 31st in the league. Lawrence taking over as the starter helps, as does Minshew being available as the backup if Lawrence got injured. Being able to turn to a competent backup as opposed to a replacement-level option is worth more than you might think; it won an Eagles team which was featured in this very column at the time a Super Bowl in 2017.
Only Washington was worse at quarterback than the Jags last season, and Washington was able to make up for its problems throwing the ball by sporting the NFL's third-best defense by DVOA while facing the league's fifth-easiest schedule. Jacksonville had the second-worst defense and faced a league-average schedule by Football Outsiders' numbers. It would be a surprise if the Jacksonville defense made a similar sort of leap to where Washington was this season, but the Jags should be better.
They had the league's youngest defense in 2020, according to Football Outsiders' snap-weighted age metric, owing in part to an above-average injury rate. They made significant investments on that side of the ball this offseason, most notably by signing cornerback Shaquill Griffin. Jacksonville also has four former first-round picks on rookie deals on defense, although cornerback CJ Henderson, the No. 9 overall pick last year, was the subject of trade rumors this summer. Veteran linebacker Joe Schobert was also traded to the Steelers.
One way for the Jaguars to likely improve -- and win more games -- is by forcing more takeaways, which should help improve their turnover margin. They forced just 17 turnovers a year ago, which ranked 27th. That was partly due to bad luck. They forced 17 fumbles on defense and recovered only five. There's no track record of a team being particularly effective or ineffective at recovering fumbles as a skill year after year, and their 29.4% recovery rate was tied for the worst in football with the Lions. The two teams that were under 30% in 2019 were the Chargers and Dolphins, who then combined to pick up just over 51% of the fumbles in their respective games on defense in 2020.
As you might suspect, the Jags were not particularly good in close games. After launching a fourth-quarter comeback in Week 1 to upset the Colts, they went 0-5 in one-score games the rest of the way. Those games were against some pretty good teams! They were tied late in the fourth quarter against the Titans before losing to a Stephen Gostkowski field goal in Week 2, in part because their punter shanked a 35-yarder out of bounds. They led the Packers in the fourth quarter at Lambeau in Week 10 and lost. The Jaguars lost two games when they failed to convert what would have been a game-tying two-point conversion in the dying minutes of the fourth quarter, including one such game against the Browns in Week 12. They converted on a third two-point attempt to tie up against the Vikings in Week 13, only to lose in overtime when Glennon threw an interception.
FPI thinks Jacksonville's schedule will be easier in 2021, and that's with some uncertainty surrounding the AFC South. The Texans appear to be conducting a case study on how to alienate a fan base. The Colts are getting Carson Wentz and Quenton Nelson back in practice much earlier than expected, but there's no guarantees that their two key offensive players will be 100 percent healthy or avoid any further injuries this season. The Titans rebuilt their defense and lost talent on the offensive side of the ball, and while they added Julio Jones over the summer, the former Falcons star just missed half of the 2020 season with injuries. If the Titans slip and the Colts can't stay healthy, this division could suddenly become a race to nine wins.
An eight-win improvement for the Jags wouldn't be unprecedented, but it probably requires Urban Meyer to be one of the league's best coaches in his first season at the highest level. The early returns on Meyer have been underwhelming, but they've also involved decisions away from the football field. The former Ohio State and Florida coach has been flummoxed by tasks as simple as not picking a strength coach whose track record will antagonize a good chunk of his team, but perhaps Meyer will be more up to speed when the games actually begin.
We've also seen college coaches and/or football czars who would later be seen as disappointments succeed in the short term in their new jobs. In 2013, Chip Kelly took a 4-12 Eagles team to the playoffs in his first season as an NFL coach. Tom Coughlin joined the Jags in 2017 and Jacksonville went from years of doldrums to an AFC South title. I don't know about Meyer's long-term viability and won't make any predictions there, but even if things don't work out well in the long run, he could be a short-term boon to Jacksonville's chances of surprising.
There is a lot of "could" and "maybe" and "possibly" in this section, but that's trying to find a scenario in which the Jags stretch to nine or 10 wins and compete for a division title. A more realistic projection would be at 6.7 wins, which is where FPI has them now. Even that would represent Jacksonville's second-best season of the past decade.
San Francisco 49ers (6-10)
2020 point differential: minus-14
Pythagorean expectation: 7.7 wins
Record in games decided by seven points or fewer: 1-3
FPI projected strength of schedule: Third easiest
The last time the 49ers were featured in this space as one of the teams most likely to improve was in 2019, and it went pretty well. Coming off a 4-12 season, they took a leap forward on defense, coaxed a healthy season out of Jimmy Garoppolo and went 13-3 before losing in Super Bowl LIV. The 2018 Niners blew leads in the fourth quarter and intercepted an NFL record-low two passes all season. The 2019 Niners fixed those problems.
The 2020 Niners were waylaid by other issues, the biggest being injuries. Kyle Shanahan's team was the league's most injured team a year ago by adjusted games lost -- by a considerable margin. Just seven of San Francisco's 22 starters on offense and defense started all 16 games. In several cases, the 49ers lost not only their starters but the guys who were expected to replace that starter in the lineup. They finished the season with 17 players on injured reserve or the physically unable to perform list. Garoppolo suffered a high ankle sprain in Week 2 and was either hurt or ineffective for 13 of their final 14 games.
Counting on Garoppolo to stay healthy has become an increasingly more dubious strategy; he has made it out of September without suffering a serious injury just once in four tries as a starter. Shanahan and general manager John Lynch invested in what appears to be both an expensive backup plan and the long-term starter for the franchise this spring by trading three first-rounders for Trey Lance. Lance helps shore up the quarterback spot and gives the 49ers more upside if (or when) he plays, and with the rest of the team almost sure to be healthier across the board, the Niners return to Super Bowl contention. Is that the whole story here?
There's a bit more for us to work with. For one, despite all the injuries, they were better last season than you might have thought. They were also outscored by about a point per game despite all those injuries while facing what FPI calculated to be the league's fourth-toughest schedule. The 49ers did dial up some scoring drives in what amounted to garbage time to make some games look closer than they were, but there were also some genuine crushing defeats on their résumé. Ill-timed turnovers cost them dearly against the Eagles (Week 4) and Seahawks (Week 8), while a pair of defensive touchdowns did the Niners in against Washington (Week 14).
The turnovers are one of the first things to look for as the 49ers try to turn things around. Last season, they turned the ball over 31 times on offense, which was the second-highest total in the league. The defense didn't post any historically low totals on its side of the takeaway battle, but the team finished with a turnover margin of minus-11, which was third worst.
Teams with double-digit turnover margins almost always improve both their turnover ratios and their records the following year. Let's lump the 49ers in with teams that posted turnover margins between minus-10 and minus-15. There have been 103 of them since 1989. The following year, those teams improved their turnover margin by an average of 9.3 turnovers, and their record improved by 1.4 wins in the process.
One of the reasons the 49ers dealt with so many turnovers is that they weren't landing on the football when it was fumbled (same as the Jaguars). They recovered just six of their 20 fumbles on offense, producing a league-low rate of 30%. They recovered just 33.3% of fumbles when you include defensive fumbles, which was tied with the Lions for last in the league. Again, if we take teams in the 30% to 35% range for fumble recoveries and see what happened to them the following season, they recovered 53.3% of fumbles in their games the following season and improved by an average of 1.8 wins.
The hidden way the 49ers might improve in 2021, though, is simply by facing easier competition. FPI projects that the Niners will go from facing the league's fourth-toughest schedule to its third-easiest slate of opponents. Football Outsiders has the Niners going from the third-toughest schedule to the seventh-easiest slate. My own numbers had the Niners facing the toughest schedule in football last season. The rankings mean less than the general idea: San Francisco is going to go from a tough set of opponents to much less imposing opposition.
Is another run to the Super Bowl in the cards for the Niners? Probably not, no. They went through a significant brain drain on both sides of the ball this offseason, notably losing defensive coordinator Robert Saleh to the Jets. The vaunted defensive line from two years ago, even if healthy in 2021, won't be as good without DeForest Buckner, who was traded to the Colts last year. The cornerback situation for this team could charitably be described as perilous. Even if the schedule on the whole is much easier, the Niners will still be in arguably the league's most difficult division.
In a year in which so many things went right for them, the 49ers won the NFC West, a first-round bye and home-field advantage by a half-yard over the Seahawks. We can certainly count on them to be better, but it'll take a really healthy season -- or something spectacular from Lance as a rookie -- to get them back into the title game.
Philadelphia Eagles (4-11-1)
2020 point differential: minus-84
Pythagorean expectation: 5.9 wins
Record in games decided by seven points or fewer: 3-5-1
FPI projected strength of schedule: Eighth easiest
The Eagles can do the 49ers one better. The last time they were featured in this column was after the 2016 season, when a 7-9 Philadelphia team improved to 13-3 and ended up winning Super Bowl LII. That team saw a second-year quarterback take a huge leap forward while a bunch of veterans signed on the cheap solidified weak spots on the defensive side of the ball. Sounds a lot like the best-case scenario for the 2021 Eagles, no?
Well, it's not quite that easy of a comparison. The 2016 Eagles were a legitimately good team with a bad record; they finished sixth in the league in DVOA despite that 7-9 record. The 2020 Eagles were 28th in DVOA. They were a bad team with a worse record. And while that 2017 team was able to spend plenty of money over the offseason, general manager Howie Roseman spent this spring trying to balance the books while eating more than $30 million in dead money after trading Carson Wentz to Indianapolis.
While there weren't many people projecting Wentz to post MVP-caliber numbers in his second season, there are even fewer observers counting on Jalen Hurts to take that sort of leap. The former Alabama and Oklahoma star was understandably inconsistent as a rookie, when he wasn't expected to play and ended up starting four games behind a battered offensive line. He completed just 52% of his passes and posted a passer rating of 77.6.
QBR incorporates Hurts' impact as a runner but also throws in his nine fumbles; despite an impressive performance in his debut win over the Saints (Week 14), Hurts finished the season with a 41.0 QBR, which was 8.6 points behind the mark Wentz posted before being benched. Then again, Wentz posted a 46.7 QBR as a rookie before taking a dramatic step forward in his second season. Wentz was also in his second season under Doug Pederson, while Hurts will be starting fresh with a new coach in former Colts offensive coordinator Nick Sirianni.
The best argument for Hurts and the rest of the Eagles' offense improving in 2021 is one I laid out a couple of weeks ago. Roseman has built his teams around the line of scrimmage on both offense and defense, but the Philly offensive line was shredded by injuries in 2020. The Eagles' top six projected linemen ended up playing a total of 29 complete games combined. The line can't possibly be as injured this season, although it doesn't appear that 2019 first-rounder Andre Dillard is on a path toward panning out, as he was losing a battle to Jordan Mailata before suffering a knee injury.
On the whole, the Eagles were the league's second-most injured team, trailing only the 49ers. The only projected starter on their offense who played a full season was Jason Kelce. Some injury-prone players remain, but DeSean Jackson, Alshon Jeffery, Jason Peters and Wentz are all gone. They couldn't be counted on to stay healthy for all 17 games at this point of their respective careers, and Philly might be better off without them.
Like the Niners, in addition to getting healthy, the Eagles will count on turning the ball over less frequently. With Wentz and Hurts both struggling to protect the football, the Eagles turned the ball over 29 times despite recovering more than 70% of their offensive fumbles a year ago. (The league average was 53.7%.) They finished with a turnover margin of minus-10, which was just behind the 49ers for the fourth-worst mark. Philly's defense intercepted just eight passes all season, which ranked 29th. New defensive coordinator Jonathan Gannon will have to hope that a secondary anchored by Darius Slay and Anthony Harris will pick off more passes in 2021.
And to make one final comparison to the Niners, the Eagles should be hoping to ride an easier schedule to a better record. Despite playing in the national disaster that was the NFC East last season, FPI estimates that they faced the NFL's 11th-toughest schedule. Heading into 2021, FPI has them down for the eighth-easiest set of opponents.
Unlike the 49ers, you might wonder, the Eagles might not need to produce a great season to win their division. Washington won the East at 7-9 last season; the 49ers were in last place in the West but would have been a game back in the league's weakest division. San Francisco will probably need to make it to 11 or 12 wins to have a reasonable shot of winning the West, but Philly might need only eight wins to pick up the East. Right?
I'm not so sure. We overestimate how much we know about a division based on what we saw the prior season. The last time a team won a division without a winning record was 2011, when the Broncos won a three-way tie in the AFC West at 8-8. The rest of the division might have been aiming for nine wins the following season, but when Denver replaced Tim Tebow with Peyton Manning, it jumped to 13-3. Before that, the Seahawks won the NFC West at 7-9 in 2010, but while they repeated that record the following season, the 49ers hired Jim Harbaugh and improved to 13-3 in 2011.
Some team in the East is probably going to improve and hit double-digit victories. The Cowboys are getting back Dak Prescott for what should be a full season after an abbreviated stint in 2020. Washington added a competent quarterback in Ryan Fitzpatrick to supplement what was one of the league's best defenses. The Giants have a lot of weapons around third-year quarterback Daniel Jones and nearly won the division last season. The Eagles should be better, but their chances of making it to 10-plus wins rest with Hurts' development and the health of the offensive line.
Denver Broncos (5-11)
2020 point differential: minus-123
Pythagorean expectation: 5.1 wins
Record in games decided by seven points or fewer: 4-6
FPI projected strength of schedule: Easiest
There were four obvious candidates for this column. The fifth was tougher. The Texans would have been a lock if quarterback Deshaun Watson was expected to play, but he is facing allegations of sexual assault and inappropriate behavior in 22 active lawsuits, making his status unclear at best for the season. The Panthers underperformed their Pythagorean expectation by 1.7 wins in 2020 -- and Matt Rhule's college teams had an impressive track record of improving in their second season -- but the other factors hinting at a possible improvement aren't quite as strong, and I'm just not sure I have much faith in new quarterback Sam Darnold.
We're left with the Broncos, who don't fit the most common and predicative criteria for being identified as a team likely to improve. Denver went 5-11 and its point differential ... suggested it should have won 5.1 games. Vic Fangio's team finished 24th in the league in FPI and 29th by DVOA. It was 4-6 in one-score games, which included some games that probably shouldn't have been so close, like the Stephen Gostkowski nightmare game for the Titans in Week 1. The Broncos weren't really unlucky in 2020.
I think they'll be better in 2021 for a few reasons, though. Let's start with a factor we've brought up a couple of times in this column already: turnover margin. The Broncos led the league in both giveaways (32) and interceptions (23) last season. Drew Lock took about 80% of the snaps and was responsible for 15 of those picks, but the guys who played in his absence were major problems. Jeff Driskel, Brett Rypien and emergency quarterback Kendall Hinton threw eight picks across 113 pass attempts, which is good for an interception rate of 7.1%. That's not quite Nathan Peterman-level bad, as the former Bills backup is sitting with a career interception rate of 8.9%, but it's not far off.
Lock's interception rate likely isn't about to go on a Josh Allen-sized turnaround, but after he threw picks on 1.9% of his passes as a rookie, a jump to 3.4% was a little surprising. Football Outsiders tracks dropped interceptions and picks on tipped throws and Hail Mary attempts and found that Lock was relatively unlucky in 2020. Teddy Bridgewater, who is competing with Lock for the starting job, has a career interception rate of 2.2%. The chances that the Broncos will need to play a practice squad wide receiver at quarterback again in 2021 are slim.
While Fangio's defense did an excellent job in the red zone, it didn't create many takeaways, finishing the season with just 16, the fourth fewest in the league. As a result, Denver's minus-16 turnover margin ranked last. Teams with a turnover ratio between minus-20 and minus-15 improve their margin by an average of 17.5 turnovers the following year and win an average of 2.5 more games.
No team in the league is expected to undergo a larger schedule swing from 2020 to 2021 than the Broncos. FPI estimated that they faced the third-toughest slate of opponents last season. Heading into 2021, though, they are expected to go up against the easiest schedule in the league. Football Outsiders has the Broncos going from the league's fifth-toughest schedule to its sixth-easiest slate.
I wouldn't put much stock in predicting strength of schedule if we were using traditional win-loss record, but FPI is smarter than that. We have only three prior years of FPI schedule projection data available, but its preseason expectations have generally been accurate. In 2018, the model projected the Patriots to finish with the easiest schedule in football. The Pats ended up with the fourth easiest. In 2019, the Jets were projected to face the easiest schedule and finished with the second-easiest slate. Last season, the Colts were projected at 32 and finished there, too. The Broncos might not end up with the easiest schedule in the league, but they should finish somewhere close to the bottom in terms of difficulty. They'll also get an extra home game in 2021 in which they've drawn the Lions, who don't project to be a particularly good opponent.
The Broncos also finished as the league's seventh-most injured team if you count the absences they endured from players who were battling COVID-19. Star edge rusher Von Miller missed the entire season with a foot injury, while top wideout Courtland Sutton missed Week 1 with a shoulder injury before tearing his ACL in Week 2. Expensive free-agent addition Ja'Wuan James opted out of the 2020 season, and he then tore his Achilles before training camp this summer and was released by the organization. Denver shouldn't lose as many of its core contributors to serious injuries this upcoming season.
Of course, the Broncos' ceiling is seemingly capped by the juggernaut in Kansas City. I don't think they are about to top the Chiefs and win the AFC West, although stranger things have happened. Moving past 5-11 and competing for second place in the division is well within the range of possibilities. Lock is probably not going to lead them through a deep playoff run, but if the Broncos can just get a little better on offense and force more takeaways with Miller back on defense, they should be able to jump into the range of 8 or 9 wins and compete for a wild-card spot.