I guess I was looking at the power rankings [ESPN] this morning out of curiosity (I know they don’t matter) assuming they’d still have us in the mid-teens. I was surprised to find they actually have us at number 9. At first it seems kind of “generous” until I looked at the teams immediately below us and realized for all the talk of how “stacked” the AFC is, there really aren’t that many “good” teams and literally no team that are “un-beatable”. Even the teams that are ahead of us in the conference are all incredibly flawed. KC’s offense is a shell of it’s self, Miami’s defense is “ehh” at best (23rd in scoring), Jax got us with no Minkah and still hand-cuffed to a MC led offense, and we’ve had Lamar figured out for a number of years now. Absent any other major injuries, I can totally see us going on another run to end this season (possibly even winning out) while Baltimore still has games against Miami, SF, and JAX. I don’t see them winning all 3 of those (in fact, I really don’t see them beating either MIA or SF) and if they drop 2 and we keep winning, there’s a chance that game against them in week 18 doesn’t even matter. The division is very much still in play and I guess what I’m saying is: why can’t we go to the superbowl this year? Now that Canada is gone, I feel like no one actually knows what this team’s ceiling really is. I get that this past Sunday was one game and admittedly against a pretty bad defense, but it was also only the first week operating under a completely different work regimen. I think people are sort of taking for granted that the team improved as opposed to regressing given they only had one week to adjust to a new coaching paradigm. My guess is, they’re probably only going to improve from here. 16 points isn’t really anything to hang your hat on, but anyone watching that game saw that we easily could’ve hung 30+ on that team if they just clean up the details. I’m legitimately excited again for this season and I feel like there’s nothing really stopping this team from making it to the “big game”.

PS: All that said, I don’t really see us winning a superbowl if it’s either SF or PHI, but it’d be cool to see an all PA superbowl.