2026 NFL Preview: AFC North
Three of these four teams have a new head coach. John Harbaugh is gone after 18 years in Baltimore. Mike Tomlin is gone after 19 in Pittsburgh and is now on your TV on Sunday nights. Kevin Stefanski is gone in Cleveland. The only guy still standing is Zac Taylor, which nobody saw coming in January.
This division was also, statistically, kind of a disaster. The Steelers won it at 10-7, the Ravens finished 8-9, the Bengals 6-11, the Browns 5-12. Then everybody blew it up.
1 – Baltimore Ravens
2025: 8-9 (2nd in AFC North)
Let me revisit some of my greatest hits. Week 2, after they LOST, I wrote "how can I put a team that lost week 1 in the top 3? Because the Ravens are just that good." By Week 3 I was asking who Devontez Walker was. By Week 11 I was celebrating that they'd finally stopped deserving Tradon's "worst team in the league" title. That's a full season of me being confused by one football team.
They finished 8-9 and lost the division on the final play of Week 18, when Tyler Loop missed a field goal in Pittsburgh. That's it. That's the whole season. A missed kick and John Harbaugh's 18-year run is over. Six Pro Bowlers on an 8-9 team — Flowers, Hamilton, Roquan Smith, Patrick Ricard, punter Jordan Stout and center Tyler Linderbaum, who has since left for Las Vegas.
In comes Jesse Minter, a rookie head coach and a product of the Harbaugh coaching tree, which is either a smart continuity hire or a fresh start that isn't actually very fresh. Lamar Jackson also gets a new coordinator in Declan Doyle, who is 30 years old — less than a year older than Lamar — and who spent last season learning under Ben Johnson in Chicago without ever holding the play sheet. Now he holds it. That's a lot of new voices for a team whose expectation is still Super Bowl or bust.
The thing everyone missed about last season is that the defense, not Lamar, was the problem. Nnamdi Madubuike had neck surgery and the whole front collapsed behind him. What was left was Kyle Hamilton playing superhero every week, which he did well enough to make first-team All-Pro, but you can't build a season on one safety being incredible. Unless, of course, Eric Hodgin is coaching your team.
So Baltimore went and signed Trey Hendrickson away from Cincinnati, which is both a real upgrade and a genuinely funny thing to do to a division rival. Calais Campbell is back for depth, and Madubuike could return this year. If that front is even average, this defense gets scary again fast.
The offense returns Derrick Henry, Mark Andrews, Zay Flowers and Rashod Bateman. They lost Isaiah Likely and need someone to replace him. In Week 12 I complained that Lamar had four carries for ten yards against the Browns and asked what happened to his rushing. Doyle needs to answer that. And I'd like the Derrick Henry from Week 1 back — the one who helped put up 238 rushing yards in Buffalo — not the one who gave me 23 yards a week later and ruined my fantasy week.
They're the clear division favorite around -109 to -115, one of only two odds-on division favorites in the entire NFL, with +1000 Super Bowl odds.
2 – Cincinnati Bengals
2025: 6-11 (3rd in AFC North)
Week 2 of last season I wrote that Joe Burrow throwing for 113 yards "just can't happen" with the playmakers this team has, and that the offensive line wasn't holding up. Then Burrow needed toe surgery, missed nine games, and Cincinnati traded for Joe Flacco in a panic. By December, in the middle of a third straight season without a playoff appearance, Burrow was openly questioning his football future. That's how bad it got.
Here's the case for them anyway. The Bengals finished 1.4 wins below expected and went 3-5 in one-possession games. That's variance, not talent. And they can still score — back in Week 8 I wrote that Mike Tomlin didn't want Cleveland trading Joe Flacco to Cincinnati, and then Flacco and Ja'Marr Chase went out and torched the Steelers for 33. Even the emergency version of this offense was dangerous.
Unlike most teams that say they're going to fix the defense, Cincinnati actually did it — with money. They signed Jonathan Allen, Boye Mafe, Bryan Cook and Kyle Dugger in free agency, and then traded the No. 10 overall pick to the Giants for Dexter Lawrence. Dexter Lawrence! They gave up a top-ten pick for a defensive tackle and I think it was the right call.
They did lose Trey Hendrickson to Baltimore, which hurts, and they're now leaning on some older defensive linemen to hold up for 17 games. But this is the first Bengals defense in years where the depth chart doesn't make you laugh.
Everything else is Burrow's availability. When he plays, this offense with Ja'Marr Chase is a legitimate contender. When he doesn't, they're one of the worst teams in football. That's not an exaggeration, it's just what the last three seasons say. Toe surgery in 2025, a season-ending wrist injury that cost him seven games in 2023. He has to play seventeen.
The other subplot is Zac Taylor, who is the only head coach in this division who survived the offseason, and honestly probably shouldn't have. He's out of excuses now. The defense got fixed. The weapons are there. If Cincinnati doesn't win big, that's on him, and there won't be a fourth act.
Watch tight end Erick All as a breakout candidate and Shemar Stewart trying to put a rough rookie year behind him. Dexter Lawrence has said he's taking a boxer's mentality into camp, which is a fun quote and also exactly the energy this defense has been missing for about four years. They also play the third-easiest schedule in the NFL by win totals and face only three non-division opponents with a win total of 9.5 or higher.
They're +210 to +225 and, per DraftKings, the most bet-on division winner in the entire league by handle this offseason. Everybody sees the same thing. It all comes down to one guy's toe — and to that offensive line I was complaining about in Week 2 actually keeping him upright this time.
3 – Pittsburgh Steelers
2025: 10-7 (1st in AFC North, lost Wild Card)
The defending division champs at three, and I want to be clear that I spent most of last season writing their obituary. Week 8: "Has Father Time finally caught up to the Steelers' defensive dominance?" Week 9, after Jordan Love threw for 360 without being sacked once, I said he had so much time he could have made a turkey club and eaten it untouched. Week 11, after Rodgers' worst game of the year, I said he looked every bit of 41, almost 42.
Then they won the division on a missed kick and got run out of their own stadium 30-6 by Houston in the wild card round.
Now everything is different. Mike Tomlin is gone — to NBC, not to another sideline — and the streak of never finishing below .500 goes with him. Mike McCarthy comes home to Pittsburgh, and the word around the league is that hiring him was partly a play to get Aaron Rodgers back for a 22nd season. It worked. Rodgers signed a one-year deal and has said he'll retire after 2026, with his final regular season game scheduled at Baltimore, which is a heck of a way to go out.
McCarthy's whole reputation is explosive offense, which is exactly what this franchise hasn't had. Rodgers still threw 24 touchdowns last season and remains ruthlessly efficient inside the twenty even if the deep ball is mostly gone — in Week 7 I said being a New York Jet kills careers and that getting out of there made him look like Aaron Rodgers again, and I stand by it, kinda. McCarthy also brought in Michael Pittman Jr. and drafted Arizona State tackle Max Iheanachor in the first round. Rico Dowdle arrives to pair with Jaylen Warren, and if you don't remember Dowdle, ask the Packers — I wrote about him running for 130 on them in Week 10. Kaleb Johnson still needs to prove he's anything after averaging 2.5 yards a carry as a rookie. Jonnu Smith and Connor Heyward are both gone from a team that leaned heavily on tight end sets.
The scary part is the depth chart behind Rodgers: Mason Rudolph, Will Howard and rookie Drew Allar. If Rodgers goes down at 42, this season ends immediately.
Patrick Graham takes over a defense that finished 26th in total defense last year, and his track record is... fine? His units have hovered around league average at his last three stops. He'll have more talent here with T.J. Watt, Cameron Heyward and Jalen Ramsey, and McCarthy thinks Ramsey can be a Charles Woodson-type presence. Left tackle Broderick Jones' future is uncertain after neck surgery, and Joey Porter Jr. wants a big extension.
They're +500 to +520 as the third choice, which for a team that hasn't had a losing season in nearly two decades is a number worth a small ticket. I just don't trust the whole thing to hold together.
4 – Cleveland Browns
2025: 5-12 (4th in AFC North)
I barely wrote about the Browns last year, and looking back through my notes, every mention is somebody else beating them. Baltimore 41-17. Pittsburgh 23-9, holding them under 250 total yards. Baltimore again 23-16 in an ugly one where I complained the Ravens shouldn't have needed a trick play to beat a two-win team. That was the whole Browns season from where I sat.
Kevin Stefanski is out after six years, which is a genuinely debatable firing — he won two Coach of the Year awards and delivered the only playoff win this franchise has had since coming back in 1999. Meanwhile Jimmy Haslam kept GM Andrew Berry, the man who traded three first-round picks and handed out a fully guaranteed $230 million contract for Deshaun Watson. I'm not going to pretend I understand the logic there.
Todd Monken takes over as head coach with Travis Switzer as a first-time coordinator, and by all accounts he's already injected some life into a young roster. Monken also compared first-round pick KC Concepcion to Zay Flowers, which is a very Monken thing to say given where he just came from.
The quarterback situation is the season. Deshaun Watson is healthy after two Achilles surgeries that wiped out his 2025, and Cleveland appears to be setting him up to reclaim the job. He's played 19 games since 2022 between suspension and injury, and struggled in most of them. Behind him is Shedeur Sanders, a 2025 fifth-rounder who started seven games as a rookie and has reportedly impressed coaches with his command of the offense. Monken wanted a starter named before camp and couldn't do it, and the competition is now running well into August.
And then the defense. Myles Garrett set the NFL single-season sack record with 23 and Berry traded him to the Rams for Jared Verse, a 2027 first-rounder and a pile of picks. Forward-thinking? Sure. But that's 23 sacks and the one thing every opposing coordinator had to plan around, gone. Jim Schwartz left too. What's left is still good — Defensive Rookie of the Year Carson Schwesinger, Denzel Ward, Mason Graham, Verse, and Grant Delpit on a new three-year, $48 million deal — for a unit that finished top four in yards allowed. Cleveland is also expected to join the growing pile of teams playing three safeties at once, which with Delpit makes some sense.
Here's the one stat that makes me think twice about burying them: Cleveland has the easiest schedule in the league at a .429 opponent win percentage, and the AFC team with the easiest schedule has finished with a winning record eight straight years. Berry has also drafted about as well as anybody over the last two years, Quinshon Judkins has his explosiveness back, and Concepcion is a real weapon.
They're the longest price in the division and haven't won it since 1989. But if Watson is even league-average, that schedule makes them annoying.