Does the NFL have any elite teams this season?
If you ask Nick Wright, he’ll tell you the answer is no. He does have the 49ers atop his Week 7 tiers, the Chiefs right behind them, and a history lesson Wright says should worry San Francisco.
“There’s no elite teams this year,” Wright said during Wednesday’s edition of First Things First. “It’s a weird year in the NFL.”
Someone still has to sit at the top, though. Wright put the San Francisco 49ers in his top tier, titled “We Know How This Ends,” followed by the Kansas City Chiefs in “Hiding In Plain Sight.” The Buffalo Bills and Minnesota Vikings came next as “Partial Juggernauts.”
Wright said the question for that third tier is how much a dominant side of the ball can cover for the other.
“The question for these teams is how much does being a true juggernaut on one side of the ball, not elite, but a juggernaut on one side of the ball, cover up for deficiencies on the other side of the ball,” Wright said.
“If you do have the best offense in football, which the Bills might, can you get away with having a bottom-10 defense? If you do have the best defense in football, which the Vikings might, can you get away with having a bottom-10 offense?
“I don’t know, but certainly thus far in the regular season, they’re a combined 11-1, it’s worked out.”
(Photo by David Eulitt/Getty Images)
Wright is higher on the Chiefs than their tier placement suggests. He thinks they will eventually grow into the kind of team he’s not willing to call elite yet.
“The team that’s been to five of the last seven Super Bowls, that hasn’t lost an AFC playoff game since, I don’t know, the first Trump presidency, that all of a sudden has the best running back in the league and a young defense, and one of the greatest quarterbacks we’ve ever seen, that’s also undefeated. I think they’re probably awesome. I think they’re probably only going to get better,” Wright said.
“I think they’re probably actually going to end up being an obvious juggernaut when the best quarterback in the league added a guy who’s on pace to run for 2,400 yards. However, they’re not top of the tiers right now.”
That spot belongs to the 49ers, and Wright doesn’t sound convinced it will last. He pointed to two earlier San Francisco teams that started strong and had championship hopes end in the Super Bowl.
“2019, the San Francisco 49ers started out not 6-0, 8-0, and oh my God, Kyle Shanahan is scheming it up and Jimmy Garoppolo looks like a league MVP, and they were the best team in the league,” Wright said.
“They were the one seed and they walked into the Super Bowl and got clipped. And then in 2023, the San Francisco 49ers started 5-0, the quarterback’s an MVP candidate, and they’re the one seed and they walked into the Super Bowl and they got clipped by the team right beneath them on the tiers, but right now they’re atop the tiers.”
