Hello football friends, and welcome to the Thursday edition of the Pick Six newsletter! The NFL season doesn't kick ff until next week, but for the San Francisco 49ers, it essentially started last night, because they have already gotten on a plane and hit the road for their Week 1 game against the Rams. The Niners took off at 11:45 p.m.
PT last night and by the time you read this, there's a good chance they will STILL BE IN THE AIR. Their flight is scheduled to last for nearly 15 hours and they won't be landing in Melbourne until 7:31 a.m. AEST on Friday morning (For those of you who don't like doing time zone math, that means they'll be touching down in Australia at 5:31 p.m.
The 49ers will be playing a Rams team that has no interest in visiting Australia. The Rams aren't leaving until next week and they're going to be spending less than 24 HOURS in Melbourne. I broke down why the Rams' travel strategy could end up revolutionizing how NFL teams travel for international games and you can check that out here.
In non-Australia news, we have a big newsletter today, so let's get to it. As always, here's your daily reminder to tell all your friends to . To get them signed up, all you have to do is click here.
Let's get to the rundown. During the regular season, Pete Prisco handles the Power Rankings around here, but since Pete won't start pumping out his rankings until next week, we had Carter Bahns step in to rank all 32 teams. However, there is a twist here: The teams are ranked in tiers based on their chances of winning the Super Bowl.
Carter came up with six tiers and I'm going to reveal one team from each tier: If you want to see which tier your favorite team ended up in, you'll have to check out Carter's full ranking here. If you're an NFL team that has a good quarterback, that's usually enough to make you a playoff contender, but if you have a good quarterback and a good head coach, that can vault you into the status of Super Bowl contender. With that in mind, Garrett Podell went through and ranked the top QB-coach combos in the NFL right now (And before we get to his ranking, I should point out that he has one big rule here and that's that any QB with a new coach did NOT qualify for this list.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
