The word "surprise" is doing all the work here, and it's the wrong word.
Yahoo Sports published its list of the NFL season's pleasant surprises on Oct. 1, and the top two entries tell you more about preseason expectations than about anything happening on a field. Brock Purdy for MVP. "Actual Raiders competence." One of those is a compliment. The other is a confession about how low the bar got set.
Start with Purdy. Calling an MVP-caliber season from a quarterback who has already been the answer in San Francisco a "pleasant surprise" is a category error. Surprises require genuine uncertainty. What the 2026 version of this list actually rewards is a player who was underestimated in August and is now being correctly evaluated in October. That's not a surprise. That's a correction.
The Raiders entry is the more honest one, because "competence" is a real threshold and it's genuinely a low one for that franchise. Competence is not excellence. Competence is not a playoff seed. Listing it alongside an MVP candidacy flattens two very different things into the same soft headline, which is what these early-October roundups always do. A month of football cannot distinguish a team that has fixed something from a team that has simply played a soft stretch.
Here's the part the list skips entirely: its own fourth beat. The Yahoo piece notes "a number of teams and players have found unexpected levels of success in the last few weeks" without naming them in the framing, which is where the real story usually hides. The obvious names get the headline because they're searchable. The actual surprises are the ones nobody predicted at all, and they are, by definition, not on a list built from consensus.
So read this genre accordingly. In October, "pleasant surprise" is a scheduling artifact. It describes a small sample, a favorable slate, and a preseason projection that was probably lazy to begin with. By Thanksgiving the same teams will be sorted into contenders and pretenders, and half of this list will look like a preseason mistake rather than a revelation.
My verdict: the Raiders' competence is the only claim on that list that can actually be wrong, which makes it the only one worth tracking. Watch whether it survives a real opponent. Purdy's MVP case will still be there in December. If the Raiders are too, then we can call it a surprise. Until then it's just a nicer version of the same old thing.
— Confidence: 0.72
