This week has been the ultimate football season teaser in Kansas City. Temperatures in the mornings have started out with some bite in the air in the 60s before topping out in the mid-70s to low-80s. The false-fall climate has induced that football feeling without question.
The Chiefs trimmed their roster down to 53 players earlier this week and rounded out their practice squad, the Rashee Rice suspension mystery shroud was removed, and Travis Kelce put a ring on one of the most famous fingers in the world. It's early September, and we're already in midseason form here in the Kingdom.
Players, coaches, and fans have almost made it through the long, dark offseason. It is truly the best time of the year. Days are getting a touch shorter, and temps are cooling down as the anticipation of a new NFL season heats up. There is extra fuel on the fire this year for the Kansas City Chiefs, coming off a lopsided Super Bowl loss in 2024 that we don't need to rehash, but there will inevitably be surprises along the way for the Chiefs as well as every other team in the NFL.
Each year, some things come up that make you pause and say, "What in the hell is going on there?" Did anyone see the Washington Commanders making a run at the NFC Championship Game last year? What about the juggernaut 49ers having the worst injury luck in the NFL and missing the playoffs altogether? In the AFC in 2024, did anyone have the Aaron Rodgers-led Jets going 5-12 while the Bo Nix Broncos went 10-7, making the playoffs for the first time since Peyton Manning retired?
Easy season has its own set of shocking twists and turns, and 2025 will be no different. When predicting these things, there's a roughly 75 percent chance you'll be wrong. As someone who is used to this level of predictive inaccuracy in most facets of my life, I'm willing to take on that risk in order to provide you with four bold predictions for the 2025 NFL season.
Seeing as this is a Chiefs-centric site, two of the bold predictions will be just that—Chiefs-centric—and two will be from the league-wide tea leaves that this blogger is reading heading into the NFL's new campaign.
1. Kelce will return to his 1,000 yard, 10 TD self in his final season
This is twofold. Before I get into how this is going to happen, I want to get into why I think this is going to happen.
No one in the world is hotter than Travis Kelce right now, not even his pop culture icon fiancée. Think about the offseason this guy has had. He announced he wasn't done in February, vowing to come back for another shot at bringing home the Lombardi Trophy to Chiefs Kingdom, returning some rabid nature to a fan base that had been neutered by the Eagles in Super Bowl 59.
Kelce lit the internet on fire by having then-girlfriend Taylor Swift on his podcast New Heights with his brother Jason. That same week, he was on the cover of GQ. Then, this past week, he straight-up broke Instagram when Taylor announced that she and Travis were engaged. The same day, it was announced that his TruKolors brand was collaborating on a clothing line with American Eagle. All of this happened while he maintained his trademark Travis Kelce-ness, and you know exactly what I mean by that.
The man has become one of the most recognizable athletes on the planet by proxy, but he hasn't changed at all. The irony of Taylor Swift, by all counts an elegant megastar, having to tag the Instagram handle "KillaTrav" in her engagement post shows that you can both be yourself and be front and center on the world stage without having to compromise your galootish, goofball persona.
Back to the field. Kelce has an opportunity to return to his Hall of Fame form this year for multiple reasons. First, Kelce appears to be in the best shape he's been in for a couple of years coming into camp. He's visibly slimmer, appears strong, and in the preseason looked to have some of his signature wiggle back in limited action for the Chiefs.
Kelce also could be the primary beneficiary of the early-season absence of Rashee Rice, as well as a down year of his own in 2024. Kelce is not likely to see the same attention from opposing defenses early on as he has in years past, based on last year's lack of production, and that will be something he could feast on.
I expect a hot start in the first six games from Kelce to carry over into his typical late-season steadiness in what should be another deep run into the playoffs for the Chiefs in 2025. If everything plays out the way that I think it will (as I will elaborate on further in a few paragraphs), then this will likely be the last dance for Kelce in KC.
2. The Detroit Lions will be below .500 after the first half
The Lions’ renaissance is not dead, but it will get a slow start in 2025. Detroit was exceptional in 2024 on the offensive side of the ball and the same on defense before injuries ultimately derailed them by the time they met Washington in the NFC Divisional Round. Aidan Hutchinson is back, and the Lions’ defense will have several other key pieces returning, but they are coming into a season where they are losing both coordinators and doing a major OL retool after losing longtime starting center Frank Ragnow to retirement in the offseason.
Take the factors above and combine them with how the Lions’ schedule opens, and you have an almost certain recipe for a slow start. Not only does Detroit play outdoors seven times in 2025 compared to four in 2024, they open the season with this stretch:
- Week 1 at Green Bay
- Week 2 vs. Chicago
- Week 3 at Baltimore
- Week 4 vs. Cleveland
- Week 5 at Cincinnati
- Week 6 at Kansas City
- Week 7 vs. Tampa Bay
- Week 8: Bye
- Week 9 vs. Minnesota
- Week 10 at Washingto
- Week 11 at Philadelphia
It is very feasible to find the Lions at 3-4 heading into their bye week, and 4-6 after 10 games in 2025. Will this happen? I don’t know for sure, but I am predicting that things will come far closer to this outcome than the 15-2 finish the Lions had in 2024.
3. A surprise retirement at QB for a contender
There is a lot of buzz surrounding the Los Angeles Rams as favorites in the NFC West heading into 2025, with some even predicting they are dark-horse Super Bowl contenders in the NFC. Give Les Snead and Sean McVay credit: they have done the NFC version of what Brett Veach has done in Kansas City by completely rebuilding a young defensive core through the draft and maintaining solid weapons around Stafford in the franchise’s most competitive stretch since the late ’90s and early 2000s.
But one thing should be extremely concerning to Rams fans heading into 2025. The franchise QB, who the team traded for in 2021 and with whom they have since won a Super Bowl, is 37 years old heading into this season. He is one of the few guys left in the league who graduated high school in the 2000s, which to me is an insult as an “old indicator,” but in NFL terms it’s very realistic.
Stafford spent almost all of camp utilizing a futuristic “Ammortal Table” to manage back pain and an aggravated disc injury that he’s been dealing with. He underwent red and near-infrared light therapy, pulsed electromagnetic fields, hydrogen therapy, and vibroacoustic therapy.
Listen, I have no clue what any of those things are, but they all sound quite witch-doctory to me. And if there’s one thing that I know, it’s that the more junk science an athlete starts throwing at his body, the closer he or she is to being at the end of the line.
I hope Stafford comes out guns blazing and the Rams are a contender in the NFC, but I have a feeling that with the nature of his maladies, we will see the de facto end of his career in 2025, with the end of the season serving as a formal “goodbye” to football for Clayton Kershaw’s high school catcher.
4. The Chiefs will return to the NFL's mountaintop and win Super Bowl 60
There has been a slow burn in Kansas City since February. How could last season, where we saw the Chiefs go 15-2 and barrel through the Bills again in the AFC title game, end the way that it did? It’s not fair. We should be talking about a four-peat.
The Chiefs have been through this before, after losing Super Bowl 55 to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. If there is one thing we know about these Mahomes-era Chiefs, it’s that they not only learn from their shortcomings, but they keep the sour taste it leaves in their mouths as motivation. There is a Michael Jordan-level of pettiness and competitiveness that lives inside of Mahomes’ soul, and when it is accessed, it makes him the most dangerous quarterback ever to step on an NFL field.
Plus, in the spirit of the engagement heard ’round the world earlier this week, let’s channel our inner Swifties for a moment. Easter eggs are telling you the Chiefs will win Super Bowl 60 everywhere. First of all, it's clear Taylor herself will be the halftime performer, as I’ve seen numerous decoded messages involving sourdough bread and the numbers 47 (how long Jason Kelce’s introduction of Swift was on her New Heights episode) and 13 (Taylor’s favorite number, duh), equaling 60. What Super Bowl is this? You’re surely following by now.
Add to this that the Super Bowl is in Santa Clara this year, the home of the 49ers—whom the Chiefs have thoroughly declared Super Bowl ownership over—and you have yourself some cosmic signs that this is happening. It is real. But the actual foundation behind the Chiefs reclaiming the NFL’s mountaintop is simple: the team is built on a foundation of leadership and experience.
From Andy Reid to Mahomes, Kelce, and Chris Jones, the most important people in the building are also the best leaders in the building. The young players have tasted success, the rookie class appears talented and ready to contribute, and the hunger is there. If the Chiefs get even a few things to break their way in 2025, they will find themselves back at the game’s highest perch.