NFL 2026 Preview
Today, the Kansas City Chiefs & the Indianapolis Colts
For nearly a decade, we lived in a world where the Kansas City Chiefs were as inevitable as taxes, bad airport coffee, and Tom Brady finding a new way to stay relevant. They hosted AFC Championship games like it was a legal entitlement. They built a pristine, chrome-plated kingdom on the back of Patrick Mahomes doing things physics simply shouldn't allow.
And then, 2025 happened.
Everything that could possibly break, snap, or combust in Kansas City went up in smoke. A disastrous 6-11 campaign. No playoffs for the first time since the Obama administration. And, as the brutal exclamation point on a cursed winter, Mahomes tearing his ACL and LCL late in the year.
Suddenly, the loudest talking heads in sports were dancing on a grave they had prematurely dug. The dynasty is over, they screamed into their microphones. The window is slammed shut.
Which brings us right to the doorstep of the 2026 season. And if you think Andy Reid and this front office are just going to roll over and accept a permanent relocation to the middle of the pack, you haven't been paying attention.
The primary narrative of this 2026 team begins and ends with No. 15's left knee. The Chiefs have wisely taken a conservative approach through training camp and the preseason—handing early reps to newcomers like Justin Fields while Mahomes finishes his meticulous recovery. But make no mistake: the expectation in the building is that Mahomes will be under center when the lights turn on for a massive Week 1 Monday Night Football showdown against the rival Denver Broncos at Arrowhead.
Yet, the schedule makers certainly didn't do Kansas City any favors. This isn't some soft-lob path back to the top. The Chiefs face the fifth-toughest strength of schedule in the entire league, with nine games lined up against teams that made the postseason in 2025. They have a brutal stretch in late November and early December featuring back-to-back Thursday night road games against the Bills and Rams.
So, where does a re-tooled, pissed-off, and (hopefully) healthy Kansas City team land in a rugged AFC West?
The sportsbooks have set their win total right around 10.5, but let's look at the board realistically. The division isn't the easy layup it used to be, and early-season volatility is all but guaranteed as new pieces gel around a returning superstar quarterback.
They’ll drop a few tough ones on the road—maybe a slip-up in Miami or a late November slugfest in Buffalo. But write the obituary at your own peril. Andy Reid doesn't suffer through back-to-back lost seasons, and a motivated Mahomes with a point to prove is still the most terrifying sight in professional football.
Projected final record: 10-7.
Good enough to punch their ticket back to the postseason as an AFC Wild Card team, proving that 2025 was nothing more than a violent, multi-car pileup of a statistical anomaly.
For five long years, the good people of Indianapolis have lived in a very specific kind of football purgatory. It’s a place built entirely on polite optimism, an annual summer chorus of hopeful talk, and the quiet, crushing realization that the franchise has been spinning its wheels in neutral for far too long. They have hovered right around that maddening .500 mark—a team too talented to completely bottom out, yet too flawed to actually scare anyone in the AFC.
Now comes 2026, with the front office facing mounting pressure, Shane Steichen desperately needing to turn flashes of brilliance into a coherent product, and a roster undergoing its latest round of high-stakes tinkering.
If the Colts want to convince anyone that this year is different, they are going to have to earn it immediately. The schedule makers did them zero favors out of the gate. They open at home against a dangerous Baltimore Ravens squad, pack their bags for a prime-time Sunday night showdown at Arrowhead against the Chiefs, and take a trip across the pond to London to face the Commanders before the leaves even start turning. It is a lightning-fast stress test for an offense trying to find its footing.
While Jonathan Taylor is still capable of carrying an offense on his back and the defense features plenty of individual talent, the passing game still has to prove it can survive a grueling 17-game gauntlet without the wheels falling off. Expect them to scratch and claw their way through the schedule, but classic divisional split-decisions and late-game execution errors will keep them right where they always seem to end up.
Projected final record: 8-9.
Another year on the outside looking in, leaving fans with the familiar script of late-season drama and an agonizing offseason of asking what needs to be rebuilt.
Tomorrow, the Cincinnati Bengals & the Atlanta Falcons