NFL Power Rankings: Final rankings before 2024 regular season
At long last, we're finally going to be able to start reacting to some actual games. The NFL preseason has officially come to an end, which means we're merely days away from the Kansas City Chiefs and Baltimore Ravens kicking off the 2024 regular season in an epic matchup of two MVP quarterbacks.
With everything that we've seen in the offseason and with the progression some teams may have shown in the preseason (if only glimpses), we're going to take one last crack at ranking all 32 NFL teams before the start of the season, if only to serve as a way to show us just how wrong we were at the end of the year.
The NFL is impossible but impossibly fun to predict. Let's take a look at our final NFL Power Rankings before the start of the 2024 season, ranking every team worst to best.
2024 NFL Power Rankings: Every team ranked worst to best after the preseason
32. Carolina Panthers
I’m not really buying what the Panthers are selling this offseason just yet. I love the Dave Canales hire for this franchise, especially after the disaster that Frank Reich and his staff ended up being. And is anyone still surprised by that?
All the talk last season was that the Panthers had built this super-staff under Reich, and now it’s been dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up.
The obvious key for the Panthers this season is quarterback Bryce Young, who among other things has been getting clowned this offseason for looking like a 7th-grader. Ultimately, Young is not going to be getting made fun of if he can return to his peak Alabama form. The Panthers moved heaven and earth to make Young their quarterback, and they desperately need him to come through for them this season.
31. Las Vegas Raiders
The primary reason the Raiders are near the bottom of this list is the fact that I believe they have the worst quarterback situation in the entire league. There was a good amount of hype for Aidan O’Connell this offseason, but O’Connell pick-sixed his way to the pine during the Raiders’ preseason. Gardner Minshew is such a fascinating player, though.
Minshew was a late-round pick by the Jaguars, and has just looked really solid in about every opportunity he’s gotten, including helping lead the Colts to a winning record last year. But he’s going to have to do more for the Raiders than he had to do with the Colts, and unless the Raiders are swinging the pendulum significantly in one-score games, I think this team is going to have one of the worst records in the league.