The 2024 Midseason NFL Vibes Rankings: AFC Edition
No ball is known here, only vibes
Votes have been tallied and the decision was clear: subscribers have decided I will be writing about Facebook Marketplace oddities for my next assignment. I’m excited to dig into that weird pile of resale next week, but for now, I want to give you my rankings of every NFL team’s vibes a little past the midway point of the season.
These are not power rankings, which are designed to indicate which team the author thinks is best or most talented. They are also subject to wild interpretation; I have a team in the top 10 you could credibly put at the bottom of this list, though I won’t tell you which one it is. (No spoilers!)
Today, I’m giving you my Vibes Rankings for every team in the AFC. We’ll look at the NFC by the same metric in the next entry.
1. Baltimore Ravens (7-3): Derrick Henry already has more rushing yards through 10 games than any Raven has tallied in a season since 2019, and more than any Baltimore running back since 2014. Lamar Jackson’s making a case for this third MVP. Most crucially? I’m pretty sure Baltimore’s the only team in the AFC North where the fans don’t secretly want the coach to get fired even if things are going well.
2. Los Angeles Chargers (6-3): Everything feels just … normal? Justin Herbert has not strained a ligament heretofore unknown to medical science. Jim Harbaugh is only being football weird, and not “declaring that stucco is an exterior for men of weak will” weird. For another team, that lack of dramatics in either direction might be a signal of bad or decaying vibes, but the Chargers have spent so much of their existence entangled in cosmic booby traps that flying under the radar seems pretty pleasant.
3. Kansas City Chiefs (9-0): They’ve entered mid 2010s Alabama status, where the defense keeps them in basically every game and the Anointed Inevitable Winner (in this case Patrick Mahomes and not Nick Saban) completes his assignment without failure. The resulting vibe is something like meeting the world’s most efficient butcher. Whether you think that’s a bad thing or not is kind of up to you?
4. Pittsburgh Steelers (7-2): I don’t understand the intricacies of gymnastics scoring, but I do know that entering the season leaning on Justin Fields and Russell Wilson is a degree of difficulty that gets you an excellent score if you pull it off and a badly bruised tailbone if you don’t. That it has worked so far is impressive. That’s a testament to Mike Tomlin, the NFL’s Kirk Ferentz (it’s a compliment, I swear), but it feels coupled with a sense that the bottom has to fall out somewhere, even if it’s in the playoffs.
5. Buffalo Bills (8-2): Dominating the mostly trash division they belong to and a mostly trash division they don’t belong to (the AFC South) leaves room for a sense that this is all ephemeral. That sentiment was not helped by a 25-point loss to the Ravens, and hey look, here come the Chiefs next – cool cool cool! Still, I can’t drop a team with Josh Allen, Football Clifford the Big Red Dog, too far down this list.
6. Houston Texans (6-4): Getting shut out in the second half and blowing a 16-point lead against the Lions seems unpleasant, but it doesn’t change the fundamentals for Houston. C.J. Stroud’s numbers are a little worse than his rookie campaign but haven’t fallen off a cliff. The Texans are not the Colts or Jaguars or Titans. The Texans are also not the Dallas Cowboys. Be warned: this ranking feels a little tenuous and has room to swing pretty wildly in the next few weeks.
7. Denver Broncos (5-5): The dumbest and simplest explanation for the 5-5 Broncos is that they beat bad teams and lose to good ones. Bad teams can’t do that, which means the Broncos cannot be a bad team. Does that make them a good one? Listen, we don’t have to put labels on everything.
8. New England Patriots (3-7): Buoyed substantially by their game-winning drive to beat the Jets in Week 8. Drake Maye hasn’t had any truly terrible outings, and even if the Pats aren’t substantially better than they were last year, it feels different in Year 1 of Jerod Mayo’s tenure than as the funeral dirge capping Bill Belichick’s.
9. Cincinnati Bengals (4-6): “Best team below .500” is an unflattering superlative to receive, but it is responsible for one of the most delightful moments of sports debate television these eyes have seen in a while.
10. Las Vegas Raiders (2-7): An absolute “oh THAT’S where that guy ended up” of a coaching staff. Marvin Lewis is here as the assistant head coach. Joe Philbin and Rob Ryan work here, too, and they just hired a Norv Turner who, per his own bio, appears to have not held a football job since 2019.
11. Miami Dolphins (3-6): When Tua Tagovailoa is hurt, the public discussion turns to whether or not he should even play football for his own health and safety. When he’s not, it turns to whether Tua is any good at quarterback. Real nasty vibes combination.
12. Tennessee Titans (2-7): They’re being forced to watch Derrick Henry thrive with the Ravens (who, mercifully, the Titans don’t play this season). They’vemanaged to lose two different games where their opponent did not reach 70 yards passing. And they don’t just turn the ball over a lot, but manage to do so in ways that make you wonder if you've just witnessed the worst interception of the year, sometimes multiple times per game.
13. Jacksonville Jaguars (2-8): Somehow, the Jaguars have managed to backslide so badly that you can find people earnestly suggesting that they ruined Urban Meyer and not the other way around. Unless this is part of an incredibly long con to get the Titans to hire Meyer, it’s deeply upsetting.
14. Cleveland Browns (2-7): Most of the positives here are more about painful or dumb things coming to an end rather than actual accomplishments. The Browns are done giving draft picks to the Texans as a result of their bid to win the Google Search for “worst trade in NFL history,” and they are one year closer to no longer paying guaranteed money to Deshaun Watson, their prize in this terrible and gross transaction. Cleveland also grabbed some additional draft capital by trading Za'Darius Smith and Amari Cooper.
None of that masks the horrific stench around this team. Even with Watson out for the year, the Browns have made themselves one of the easiest franchises to root against, and they’re almost certain to end the year with a losing record.
That would extend an incredible statistic: Cleveland (who went 11-6 last season) has not finished above .500 in consecutive years since 1988 and 1989. And that’s the only reason why the Browns aren’t at the bottom of this list – the franchise has such lengthy experience with bad vibes that they’ve developed an insensitivity to them.
You know how a dorm room can smell terrible but the occupants don’t notice, and only visitors do? That’s the Browns.
15. Indianapolis Colts (4-6): The Anthony Richardson experience has gone south so quickly and strangely that it doesn’t just qualify as a likely draft bust. It’s now creating existential dread about the team’s ability to function. Did the Colts drastically overestimate Richardson’s potential, or did they fail to give him a path to develop? Are they wasting a chance to salvage something this year by sometimes playing Joe Flacco (who turns the ball over nearly as often but is also older than Wayne Rooney)? And do the Colts themselves even know the answers to any of these questions?
16. New York Jets (3-7): A trick I have embraced in recent years is to stop embracing New Year’s Day as an automatic promise that good things are coming. January 1 is just a day on a piece of paper, and life’s struggles and successes don’t care about the labels we put on Earth’s orbit.
Jets fans – and Jets fans in media, especially – cannot learn this. Every year, they find themselves convinced this is the year the Jets will eat more vegetables, read every night instead of scrolling Instagram, and play in the Super Bowl. Naturally, the Jets didn’t even make it to Week 6 before firing their head coach.