The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly Of The 2025 NFL Players Survey
Hand up. I'm a little bit late running the NFL Player's survey graph breakdown this season. I'll rate myself a D- in timeliness but still a solid A- in visualization as you can see above which team's did the best overall broken down by each category. Let's take a quick glance at every category to see how things are going.
Weight Room
New England and Arizona are at the bottom of both overall player satisfaction and weight room satisfaction. And not just at the bottom of the weight room class. We're talking tiers below the pack. They both got F scores while the next lowest score of any other team was a C+. There's a valuable lesson here for ownership. If you're going to start building a football franchise, you start in the weight room. Just like you assemble a team in the trenches, you also need the equipment for those in the trenches.
Training Staff / Training Room
Lumping these two together as most scores were pretty correlated per team on these. But if you think about how important a weight room is, then the people that help players get the most out of using the weight room is critical as well. That makes it a tough scene in Arizona when you compare how small the first three bars from left to right are together compared to any other team. Patriots not amazingly better themselves. Meanwhile, the teams who were most satisfied overall had the best scores in these first three categories combined.
Team Travel
The Bills F- seems out of left field. Not sure what the deal with that was. All I'll say on team travel is I hope no whistle blowers come out to speak on the airplanes specifically. Not worth it guys.
Strength Coaches
Nothing too interesting here. The Steelers had the lowest rating (C-) which makes that one Ravens guy that got fired a couple years ago when they were rated an F- all the more glaring.
Ownership
Maybe the most important thing to becoming an owner and starting a franchise isn't making sure there's a sweet weight room after all. Maybe it's being a good owner. What a thought. And that couldn't be more evident here. Just follow the yellow boxes from top to bottom and watch them pretty much all get smaller as you go down. The correlation is pretty uncanny.
All three of the A+ team ratings for ownership were top-three rated teams overall and 12/14 top rated teams overall had A- or higher ownership grades. There were zero A- or higher after that.
Locker Room
Calling out the Cincinnati Bengals on this one. They got an A+ here. Good, right? Well hang on a minute. You're telling me the same team that was rated an F in food and F- in treatment of families is somehow courteous enough to keep a nice clean locker room out of the goodness of their hearts?
I call BS. The cheap Bengals are clearly keeping up with the locker room because that's where the press goes to interview players. It's how the outside world perceives the facilities provided by ownership. Like some propaganda concentration camp photo. How about you actually give a crap about the team instead of pretending to, Bengals?
Nutritionist / Dietician
Another boring category. Everyone did…fine.
Head Coach
Is something up with Kevin Stefanski? The worst three coaches on this got a C. Two of them were fired (Eberflus and Pederson). Then there's Stefanski. I imagine this is all Deshaun Watson related, but that's not great company to be in. And where the hell do the Bears go off giving Eberflus a C??? The only explanation here is that half the team forgot to fill out the survey until the committee reminded them a week before the results came out and by that time the coach was Ben Johnson so all the F-------- got mixed in with the A++s. As for Jacksonville, I need to see all results post Liam Coen introductory press conference.
Food
F is for food. In Cincinnati. Players are better off asking reporters if they have any snacks on them after the game in their fancy propaganda locker rooms.
Family Treatment
F is for family. In Cincinnati. Sorry, F-, that is. Maybe instead of asking the reporters for snacks players should ask for wellness checks on their loved ones. Good thing the Bengals never drafted Phillip Rivers at least.
That's about it. Congrats to the Dolphins for being the happiest team in the NFL. Must be nice to play in the warm weather and never have to worry about cancelling a winter vacation in the Caribbean when those winter Miami temps drop into the low 80s.