So much can go wrong over the course of a NFL season. Sometimes teams hope they can power through a perceived weakness, either filling holes with unproven talent or patching it with strength elsewhere. Other times, their best laid plans go awry and something that began the year as a strength emerges as the vulnerability opponents exploit en route to deflating defeats.
That leaves us with the benefit of hindsight. We can look back at the 2023 offseason, from coaching personnel decisions to free agency to the draft and say “well, if we’d known how the season was going to unfold, we would have done [insert quick fix here].”
And that’s what we’re gonna do. Welcome to this playoff push edition of the NFL Church of Regret, where we look at the one potentially fatal flaw each team wishes it had patched before the season began.
In the interest of limiting ourselves to the best parts of the final third of 2023, we’ll parse out the franchises that are effectively locked in to playoff spots and the others with nothing to play for but draft position. Using the New York Times’ playoff predictor, there are a dozen teams with a postseason probability ranging between desperate-but-feasible (at least 15 percent) and likely-but-not-locked in (65 percent or lower).
Let’s talk about what they wish they’d done differently last offseason — and how it’s come to bite them, deservedly or not, through 12 weeks of the regular season.
