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The 2025 NFL season was a strange old campaign for the league’s biggest-name quarterbacks. Patrick Mahomes missed the playoffs for the first time as a starter in Kansas City, despite heading into the year off the back of three straight Super Bowl appearances. Both Joe Burrow and Lamar Jackson missed chunks of the season to injury woes, which ultimately conspired to ensure that they both missed the playoffs.
Jared Goff’s Lions stayed home as well, while Josh Allen found yet another gutting way to lose in the postseason. Nobody at the position was safe last year — not the MVPs, not the ring-holders.
So, this isn’t a ranking of who’ll play the best football in 2026. It’s three stories that matter regardless of the stat sheet: a man wondering if his ending is already written, a rookie whose tape talked a franchise into reshaping itself, and a legend trying to control the one thing this league rarely lets anyone control.
Deshaun Watson
Nobody in Cleveland talks about Deshaun Watson like a redemption story anymore. They talk about him like the weather — something to be managed, not fixed. And the early 2026 NFL odds prove that even managing the narrative will be a herculean task. The latest odds from 5 Gringos online sportsbook make the Browns a whopping +2200 outsider to win the AFC North next term, and considering Jackson’s Ravens and Burrow’s Bengals both lurk with intent, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised.
The Browns guaranteed Watson five years and $230 million back in 2022, a number that now gets cited in NFL circles the way you’d cite a cautionary statistic in a textbook. Since the trade, he’s actually played in 19 of a possible 51 games. Suspension ate one chunk. Shoulder surgery ate another. Then the Achilles went in Week 7 of 2024, and when it re-ruptured, a second surgery in January 2025 wiped out his entire season.
So, what does it actually feel like inside Huntington Bank Field, knowing you’re contractually married to an outcome you can’t control? Ask anyone in the front office, and you’ll get the company line — that Watson remains part of the plan for 2026, that Dillon Gabriel and Shedeur Sanders were only ever auditioning, not replacing. But strip away the diplomacy, and what’s left is something closer to a hostage situation than a quarterback competition. Cleveland can’t bench its way out of $99.8 million in dead cap. It can only wait and hope the version of Watson that shows up on that early-morning treadmill is closer to 2020 than 2025.
Is a 30-year-old who’s torn the same Achilles twice going to rediscover the mobility that made him worth $230 million in the first place? Best case, he does, and Cleveland gets to quietly rewrite the worst-contract-in-league-history narrative in real time. Worst case, another setback confirms what everyone already privately believes, and Sanders gets his chance to prove that he can truly hang with the best of the best in the cut-throat AFC North.
Jaxson Dart
In the Giants’ film room, new head coach John Harbaugh watches third-down tape of a rookie who wasn’t even the starter in Week 1. Jaxson Dart took the job by force in Week 4 after three straight losses with Russell Wilson under center, and by year’s end had thrown for 2,272 yards with 15 touchdowns against just five interceptions, added 487 rushing yards and nine rushing scores, and averaged 34.8 rushing yards a game doing it.
That alone is a solid rookie season. What made front-office types sit up was subtler: a +0.13 EPA per attempt on third down, tying Justin Herbert for the best rookie mark since 2020 — produced with Malik Nabers, his best receiver, sidelined by a torn ACL for most of it.
That number is why the Giants traded up to 25th overall for him 12 months ago, and why, by most accounts, Dart himself was part of the pitch that got Harbaugh to leave Baltimore. That’s not a normal sequence of events for a player who hadn’t finished his rookie season. A franchise doesn’t usually let a 22-year-old dictate its coaching search unless it already believes the tape.
Now the question is whether year two confirms that belief or complicates it. Nabers could be back for the opener, and Harbaugh brings the structure this rookie-heavy roster badly needed. Does a healthy Nabers unlock the version of Dart who matched Herbert on third down? Or does his scramble-first instinct — thrilling on Sundays, terrifying on film — get him hit hard enough to open the door to a real quarterback competition before the rebuild ever gets rolling?
Aaron Rodgers
Aaron Rodgers has said this before. Threatened retirement, walked it back, showed up in a new uniform anyway. This time feels different, and not because the words changed — because the body did.
He’s the league’s all-time leader in touchdown-to-interception ratio and passer rating, fourth all-time in passing touchdowns, and none of that stopped Houston from sacking him four times, forcing a pick and two lost fumbles in a 30-6 wild-card humiliation that ended a season built on 3,322 yards, 24 touchdowns and an AFC North title. His third-down sack rate — 10.7% — was the 10th-highest in football. The résumé says legend. The tape from January says something closer to a man running out of room.
He and Mike McCarthy are running it back on a one-year deal worth up to $25 million, and Rodgers has finally said the thing he’s danced around for two offseasons: 2026 is it. No more will-he-won’t-he. Just a stated ending and a body that may or may not cooperate with the script. Does the man who owns the sport’s best career touchdown-to-interception ratio get to write his own final chapter, or does a defense that’s already found him once in January find him again on a bigger stage?
