Buy or Sell Their Offseasons: Playoff Hopefuls
The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL
The Athletic
4.6 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 14 May 2026
⏱️ 81 minutes
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Summary
OK, this is where the Buy or Sell Their Offseasons series gets really good. We've reached the portion of the proceedings where every team in an episode enters the 2026 season harboring real playoff hopes. The eight teams in this episode aren't the upper-crust Super Bowl contenders, but that doesn't mean that one of them can't punch through and put find themselves in Los Angeles next February. These teams, then, are what we're calling Playoff Fodder. As it stands in mid-May, they're teams that have every right to believe they'll be in the postseason, but remain a step or two away from the Lombardi Trophy. Those teams are the...Bears, Jaguars, Cowboys, Texans, Broncos, Lions, Packers and Eagles.
Host: Robert Mays
Co-Hosts: Derrik Klassen and Dave Helman
Executive Producer: Michael Beller
Senior Producer: Katy Duffy
Social Producer: Scott Krinch
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Athletic Football Show. |
| 0:01.8 | I'm Robert Mayes, continuing our buying or selling off-season series today with a group |
| 0:06.8 | we're calling the Playoff Hopefuls. |
| 0:08.8 | We did the rebuilding teams in week one, hit the middle-class teams last week. |
| 0:12.5 | Today, it's the teams that were either playoff teams last year or hope to be again, but are maybe |
| 0:16.8 | one notch down from that group of contenders that we'll talk about next week. |
| 0:20.9 | A lot of these conversations are about teams that didn't have a ton of wiggle room or a ton of |
| 0:25.4 | resources this off season. And that makes sense, right? When you're talking about teams at the |
| 0:28.6 | bottom of the barrel, they've got tons of money to throw around. They've often accumulated draft |
| 0:33.0 | capital. It's easy to see their move from point A to point B in a given off season. |
| 0:37.8 | It's harder with this group of teams. |
| 0:39.9 | And so that kind of was in the background, a lot of the discussions that we were having today. |
| 0:44.6 | How do we feel about what these teams did despite the fact that they didn't have a ton to work with? |
| 0:50.1 | Are they better now? |
| 0:51.2 | And what were the alternatives they could have sought out that they didn't? |
| 0:55.0 | So a really good set of discussions here with me, Dave and Derek about the playoff hopefuls. |
| 0:59.7 | Let's get to it right now. |
| 1:17.8 | We are back buying and selling some off seasons today, our next eight pack of teams on the docket. |
| 1:26.6 | We're calling this group the playoff hopefuls, the teams that I think have very realistic playoff expectations, even if they're one step down from contender status. |
| 1:30.3 | That already is probably going to be controversial. |
| 1:31.7 | I will say this right now. |
| 1:38.2 | We picked these eight teams based solely on where they sit in the Super Bowl odds. |
... |
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