Week 3 is when the NFL stops grading on a curve. A knee brace in Minnesota, an undefeated Kansas City team walking into Miami, and a coaching carousel that never stopped spinning. Only one of those is really about football on the field, and it isn't the carousel.
Start in Minneapolis, where the answer is yes. Aaron Jones Sr. left the Vikings' Week 2 win over the Bears wearing a knee brace, and that put his availability for Sunday's game against Tampa Bay in question for most of the week. He's been cleared to start. The brace is the tell here, not the designation. A veteran back in his 30s whose knee needed bracing after a September game is a player a smart staff manages in increments rather than carries, and Minnesota has no reason to run him into the ground before Halloween. My call: Jones starts, gets the first series and the goal-line work, and cedes a chunk of the between-the-tackles snaps by the third quarter. He's a flex start with touchdown equity. Anyone treating him as a 20-touch lock is buying the version of him from a few seasons ago.
Kansas City is unbeaten and traveling to face a Miami defense young enough to still be learning what it doesn't know. That's the entire matchup in one line. Experience in the NFL shows up on the road against an inexperienced unit: motion, shifts, the same formation run four different ways, and a quarterback who has seen every pressure a coordinator can dial up. Young defenses win with speed and lose with rules.
The Dolphins will get an early stop or two, because that's what speed buys you in the first quarter. Then Kansas City will spend the second half converting third downs against a group that's guessing. Miami's September heat normally punishes the visitor late in games. It won't here, because the visitor is the older, more controlled roster. Chiefs win it in the fourth quarter.
Coaching is where the real story sits. Ten of 32 head-coaching jobs turned over after the 2025 season, which is nearly a third of the league, and more are expected to come open in January. That's not a hot seat anymore. That's a revolving door, and it changes how everyone in the building behaves. General managers hire with an exit plan already drafted. Coordinators coach for their next job rather than their current one. In-season firings, once an anomaly, have become a near-annual November event, and 10 vacancies in a single cycle tells you owners have stopped pretending a coaching hire is a five-year commitment.
My prediction: at least one of the 22 coaches who survived last winter won't be employed by the same team when the regular season ends. The patience threshold is now about 18 games, maybe fewer, and every staff in the league knows it.
The Historian's verdict: Jones's brace matters less than his snap count, the Chiefs still own the fourth quarter in September, and the coaching carousel has lapped the game itself. Ten jobs in one offseason isn't a trend. It's the new baseline.
