Every year it feels like we hit the midpoint of the NFL season and say, “This is the wildest season we’ve seen.” Football has been blessed with incredible parity in recent years, leading to a scenario where the league can fully embrace the idea that anything can happen from week to week. This means stunning breakout performances, and also crushing disappointments.

It’s those disappointments we’re focusing on today. Events that shattered our previously held beliefs going into the 2027 season and now helping shape the narrative of this year in football. In truth, a lot of these probably come as shocks to the teams as well, with organizations scrambling to find answers before it’s too late. When the dust settles on the season these are the elements we’re likely to look back on and say that they defined the season.

Sitting at 5-4 the Rams are a middling football team. Nothing more, nothing less. What makes this so mind-boggling is how confident we all were that Sean McVay’s team would be a dominant force in football. Sure, we can point to Myles Garrett being hurt for the bulk of the first half of the season, but that doesn’t explain how we reach Week 9 and Los Angeles can only beat the hapless Commanders by one-score.

Everything got off on the wrong foot with McVay having a horrific miscalculation on how to approach the season opener in Australia against the 49ers. Now it’s as if the Rams have never really shaken that rust off. Matthew Stafford has taken a significant step back after an MVP-winning 2026 season. He has thrown nine interceptions already, on pace for 17 — which would be his highest total since the 2021 season. While slated to throw for 30 touchdowns this year, which would be 16 fewer than a year ago. We didn’t expect Stafford to match his 2026 totals, but there’s been a pronounced drop-off which has damaged the Rams’ offense.

Moreover, on the other side of the ball we were hyped for Los Angeles before the Myles Garrett addition because Trent McDuffie was such a fantastic addition to the secondary. McDuffie has been individually brilliant, but there hasn’t been much of a trickle-down effect on the rest of the defense. The Rams are only fractionally better in scoring defense than they were with a no-name secondary a year ago, allowing 20.1 points per game to 20.4 in 2026.

Los Angeles is just woefully inconsistent. One week they will beat the Bills, the next they’ll lose to the Cardinals. All while playing one of the softest schedules in the NFL right now. Now they’ll need to fight in the back-half of the season to find a wild card spot, so long as San Francisco keeps winning.

Staying in Los Angeles we can single out the most disappointing player of the year in Justin Herbert. It goes without saying that the 0-8 Chargers are the worst team in the NFL, but inside that we also have the most confusing regression we’ve ever seen from a quarterback, for seemingly no reason.

The core traits Herbert has displayed since entering the league in 2020 were his processing, decision-making, and ability to take care of the football. Until 2026, he threw a total of 58 interceptions in his career, averaging 9.6 per season. It’s week nine, and Herbert is already at 11 interceptions and on pace for 24 — which would be more than 2023, 2024, and 2025 combined. These aren’t 50/50 picks either, Herbert is making horrible reads, sailing the ball on deep passes into the arms of opponents, and just failing to read the defense all together.

It’s impossible to understand what has gone wrong, because it all feels so nonsensical. We could postulate that Herbert hasn’t been comfortable in the Mike McDaniel offense, or that he’s being asked to throw his way back into games far too often — but even those explanations don’t fully explain what has happened. One of the reasons the McDaniel hire looked like such a home run for Herbert and the Chargers is that he only ever asked Tua Tagovailoa to take care of the football, then schemed ways to get players open and take advantage of their accuracy. The same should have worked perfectly with Herbert, but instead he morphed into a pumpkin before Halloween.

Unquestionably the most disappointing single season from a player so far.

The Colts are in the midst of selling off their best players following a 2-7 start to the season. Head coach Shane Steichen will be gone after this year, and the team will be left as a hollow shell needing to be rebuilt — but without a 1st round draft pick, which is owed to the Jets as part of their trade for Sauce Gardner a year ago.

Indianapolis was one of the biggest surprises in the NFL this time last year. In the second week of November they were sitting at 8-2, seemed destined to win the AFC South, and everything was coming up roses. Instead it’s turned into an abject disaster, with none of the team’s moves paying off, Daniel Jones struggling, Sauce Gardner being one of the worst trades in recent memory, and everything falling apart. The only decent thing the Colts have is Jonathan Taylor, who could well be traded ahead of the deadline.

One move which isn’t being discussed enough was the Colts decision to let Michael Pittman Jr. walk in order to re-sign Alec Pierce to a huge contract. Indianapolis liked Pierce’s big play ability, and felt they could easily replace Pittman.

Pierce has been injured for much of the year, but even before that he was playing mediocre football. It’s not like Pittman has exploded for the Steelers, but it’s appearing as if the decision to pay Pierce big money is coming back to bite them.

This team went from one that should have been contending in the AFC South, to now being one of the worst teams in all of football.

I’m on the record for being extremely bullish on the Vikings this year, saying before the season began that they were being slept on more than any other team in the league. Minnesota is now sitting at 6-2 on the season, having only lost to two elite teams in Detroit and Buffalo — even then the only reason they struggled was because of bad quarterback play.

There was a time it seemed that adding Kyler Murray under center would be the injection this offense desperately needed, but that just hasn’t happened. Murray is playing scared, ineffective football — which has reached a point where he can’t do the one thing he was brought to Minnesota to achieve: Get Justin Jefferson the ball.

The Vikings have massive issues at quarterback because none of their bets have paid off. Murray is extremely disappointing, feeling like a high-tier backup than a former No. 1 pick at this point in his career. Meanwhile the decision to trade away J.J. McCarthy may have backfired as well, while he’s surging ahead with the Giants. This makes Murray a double-dose of disappointment where he’s played poorly, and he’s hurt the team structure because of the belief they placed in him.

Can the Texans please just find some dang consistency? We saw last season as one of the league’s best defenses was let down in the playoffs due to C.J. Stroud. Now the offense is playing phenomenally well, and the defense (which has really had no changes) is playing like garbage.

In every single area the Texans have taken a step back from 2025.

There’s just no consistency as every single player on defense has let this team down. Will Anderson and Azeez Al-Shaair are the only players upholding their ends of the bargain, and everyone else has been mediocre. Derek Stingley Jr. is allowing a 95.5 passer rating against this season, a staggering falloff from a year ago — and now it’s as if the Texans offense needs to win by shootouts because of their struggles.

The Eagles just suck. No way to sugarcoat it. While it’s true that Jalen Hurts’ injury really threw a wrench in things, the Eagles were mediocre before that happened. This was a team supposed to cruise to an easy NFC East championship, maybe have to contend with the Cowboys — and that was really it.

Instead, they stepped on rakes for so long it busted their face, leaving them utterly incapable of playing effectively this season. Rotten from the top down, the only question remaining is whether or not Philadelphia has the guts to make some of the difficult choices needed in the offseason to get this team back on the right track.