Novig dropped a graphic ranking every NFL team’s Week 1 win total since 2000, and buried in the noise is the actual headline: some of these franchises don’t have a Week 1 problem, they have a September personality disorder.

I’ve seen the chart. I don’t need the exact numbers on it to know which two teams are dragging the bottom.

https://twitter.com/Novig/status/2096969779680542888

The Cleveland Browns and the New York Jets have been auditioning for “worst season opener in football” so consistently, for so long, that I genuinely cannot remember the last time either team walked into Week 1 looking like a finished product. That’s not randomness. That’s a front office that spent March handing out coordinator jobs like Halloween candy, running a quarterback competition nobody actually wanted to win, and hoping continuity would just show up by kickoff. It never does. The graphic isn’t predicting anything — it’s just the first line item on a receipt that got written back in the offseason.

Novig picked a wild week to post this, because this week’s Week 1 slate is basically a lie detector test for these exact franchises.

Wednesday night, the defending champs host a grudge match. The Seahawks welcome the Patriots to Lumen Field for a literal rematch of Super Bowl LX, which Seattle won 29-13 back in February. Yahoo Sports has the full breakdown of that opener, and I’d bet my rent money (I would not actually bet my rent money, I have a system, and the system is “bet small”) that Foxborough isn’t feeling great about its Week 1 win total odds this time around either.

Then Thursday — Friday if you’re actually in Australia, which none of us are — the Rams and 49ers play the NFL’s first-ever regular season game at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, a sentence I never thought I’d type with a straight face. Yahoo Sports also has the logistics on that one, and yes, jet lag is now a real variable in your betting angle for a Week 1 game.

Look, I hate the Patriots on a cellular level, so take the diagnosis with whatever grain of salt that requires.

And yeah, I’ll grant the honest complication here: one bad week is one bad week. Injuries happen. New coordinators get exactly one game to install a system before the whole league has film on it, and plenty of franchises have opened flat before turning around and having a fine year anyway.

But twenty-plus years of the same two or three teams showing up unprepared isn’t a small sample. It’s a pattern with a receipt taped to the front of it.

Bet accordingly. Or don’t, honestly, my record speaks for itself.