Overreactions to Week 1 often regress back toward preseason expectations in Week 2. The NFL has a way of leveling itself out. But for a few teams, it is quickly becoming hard to ignore early-season results, for better or worse.
The Cincinnati Bengals are off to an ideal start, for instance, while the Los Angeles Chargers look far worse than anyone could have imagined. Their second games of the year only confirmed what they put on display in their respective season openers. Both teams had reasons to believe at the start of the season that they could make dark-horse pushes toward the Super Bowl.
The Bengals are two steps closer to that goal. The Chargers took two giant leaps in the wrong direction. Elsewhere across the league, a litany of quarterback injuries reshaped the early-season pecking order.
Here is a snapshot of the Super Bowl race heading into Week 3. For too much of the Joe Burrow era in Cincinnati, the story has been that a leaky defense caps the ceiling of a high-octane offense. The first two weeks of 2026 squashed that narrative.
The Bengals are now a complete team, and they look like a top-tier squad as a result. The additions of Dexter Lawrence, Jonathan Allen, Boye Mafe and Bryan Cook all paid dividends in the 2-0 start. Following a season opener in which the defense forced four turnovers, the unit held the Houston Texans out of the end zone and limited them to just 60 rushing yards.
The Bengals proved in their first two games that they can win in different ways, first with a high-scoring effort against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and later with a grind-it-out 20-6 win over a Super Bowl hopeful. None of this is at the expense of the offense, either. Ja'Marr Chase grabbed two touchdown catches against the Texans and hauled in an early contender for catch of the year.
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