NFL 2025: Three Teams Already in Full-Blown Crisis Mode After Just Five Weeks

Thu, Oct 9, 2025
by CapperTek

There are NFL seasons that start with a bang. There are those that begin with quiet, methodical shuffles of the deck, as contenders slowly reveal themselves. And then there’s 2025: a campaign so chaotic, so gleefully antagonistic to expectation, that we’re only five weeks deep and already rewriting what’s possible in professional football.

Shock Start to 2025

Scan the league standings, and any serious observer has to suppress a double-take. The mighty Kansas City Chiefs—the paragon and pace-setter for the modern era—sit at a jarringly mediocre 2-3 following a last gasp loss to the Jaguars in Duval. This is a team that has reached, at shortest odds, four Super Bowls in five campaigns. Now, Patrick Mahomes still looks like a magician, but Andy Reid plucks at the latest batch of misfiring receivers with a supporting cast that looks far weaker than in recent campaigns.

Meanwhile, textbook underachievers have flipped the script. Daniel Jones, left for dead after a fizzled ride in the Meadowlands, has remade the Indianapolis Colts in his own image, fusing grit and dynamism into a newfound contender. Out in Pittsburgh, Aaron Rodgers has traded tabloid drama for on-field execution, summoning something that passes, at times, for prime-era magic. The Steelers, so often the nearly-men of the AFC North, have seen sports betting sites slash odds drastically on them winning the division.

The latest online sports betting at Bovada odds currently list the Black and Yellow as a +125 second favorite to claim the AFC North title after five long years. Throughout the course of the preseason, one could get odds of +500 on the Steelers beating their divisional rivals to the crown. Those odds won't be returning anytime soon, and much of that is due to the plight of two of their Northern adversaries, who are now in full-blown crisis mode. And they aren't the only ones.

Baltimore Ravens

For years, Baltimore’s identity has been tattooed onto its defense—a laughing refusal to break, no matter the foe or the circumstance. That is, until now. Heading into the 2025 season, the Ravens were considered Lombardi favorites alongside the Buffalo Bills, but the last fortnight has delivered a humiliation few saw coming, culminating in a graphic parade of horror.

The Maryland outfit has now surrendered a gob-smacking 119 points in its last three outings. None more galling than the 44-10 obliteration at the hands of Houston, a game that laid bare every weakness. C.J. Stroud played surgeon, slicing through the secondary for 312 yards and four touchdowns, while missed tackles and missed assignments trickled across the stat sheet like wounds left untreated.

But Baltimore’s agony is hardly restricted to the defense. The absence of superstar two-time MVP Lamar Jackson—felled by a ruthless hamstring injury in the Week 4 loss to Kansas City—has left the offense both toothless and tentative. In his place, the journeyman Cooper Rush has looked like a deer in the headlights, doomed by three brutal interceptions against the Texans and zero imagination.

Now, a 1-4 record that no one saw coming has them sitting at the base of the AFC North and calls for urgent, even radical, change echo through Charm City. Insiders cite mounting disillusionment inside the locker room—a chemistry problem as stubborn as it is dangerous. Unless the Ravens can cauterize these wounds—shoring up a wobbly back end, devising a plan for life without Jackson—the campaign threatens to drift further into existential crisis.

Cincinnati Bengals

Of all the season’s sudden drop-offs, none has felt as inevitable as Cincinnati’s. The Bengals headed into the new season with genuine dark horse hopes of the Lombardi, providing they could sort out their sluggish starts to seasons. Well, they managed that, winning their first two games of the season for the first time since the Zac Taylor era. Then disaster struck.

The root? One name: Joe Burrow. A Grade 3 turf toe in the Week 2 victory over Jacksonville left the franchise quarterback parked on the shelf—likely until December—and tipped the season headfirst into chaos. Jake Browning, a backup blessed with courage but not protection, managed to complete that victory against the Jaguars, but has since been sacked 18 times in three starts, a sequence so violent it would concern even the sturdiest of linemen.

Offense? Nonexistent. Defense? Much improved, but still gassed, battered, and susceptible to every big play in the book due to the sheer lack of an offensive threat.

In Cincy's three most recent losses, the Bengals have collectively trailed at halftime by a margin of 69-9. Not once, not twice—three collapses, each more dispiriting than the other. The 28-3 primetime defeat to the Broncos was as embarrassing as it gets, while the 48-10 reverse at the Vikings the week prior was statistically the worst defeat in franchise history. Add to that a Week 5 demolition by Detroit—37-24, softened by a 24-3 post-break Bengals run when the game was already over—was less a game, more a public dissection.

Cincinnati’s last roll of the dice comes in the form of a trade for 40-year-old Joe Flacco, which screams of panic. The Paycor Stadium was dreaming of trades for the likes of Kirk Cousins or Jameis Winston, rather than for an aging gunslinger. With this weathered Hall of Famer now staring down defensive lines behind one of the NFL’s most porous O-lines, the specter of irrelevance looms.

Arizona Cardinals

On paper, the Cardinals shouldn’t be in the same breath as crisis mode—until you look at the numbers and the heartbreak woven through them. Arizona’s most recent wound: a franchise-low 23-20 loss to a Tennessee Titans side that had lost ten in a row before their trip to the Grand Canyon State, delivered on a last-second field goal that marked their third straight defeat on a time-expiring kick. The NFL has simply never recorded a streak as cruel.

The collapse was operatic. Leading 21-6 in the second half, Arizona imploded. Emari Demercado’s generational 71-yard burst through traffic should’ve gone viral for all the right reasons, but he fumbled at the goal line when already celebrating. Seconds later, a catastrophic pick-six handed all momentum to Tennessee. Kyler Murray’s 285 aerial yards tell only the surface story; in the fourth quarter, the Cardinals offense tomahawked its own season, letting yet another game slip away.

The mood in Phoenix is mutinous. “Fire everyone,” blared through social media and inside State Farm Stadium alike. With the Colts and Packers now circling on their schedule, the Cardinals risk spiraling deeper still.