The Pulse Newsletter 📣 | This is The Athletic’s daily sports newsletter. Sign up here to receive The Pulse directly in your inbox.Good morning! Wear a hard hat today. Coming up:
Hello Again, Football: We’re calling it now*At this point, I’ve backed into a full week of football segues. We touched on some concrete preseason talk for college football yesterday. Today, we turn to the NFL, where training camp starts in a week. We’re going off a fresh list, published this morning, of the most underrated and overrated NFL teams heading into 2026. I’m going to give you two of each. Underrated:
Bengals
Falcons
Curious. I can see Cincinnati, if healthy, being great again. They have the weapons on offense and a functional defense of any sort makes this a playoff team. But injuries have hassled this core over the last few years. As for Atlanta, it’s an easy-ish sell. A team that finished 8-9 last year hired a well-respected offensive coach in Kevin Stefanski with a solid roster intact. I just can’t come around on Michael Penix Jr. or Tua Tagovailoa being the answer at QB. Overrated:
