Culture

Book Review: ‘Scattergood,’ by H.M. Bouwman

Published

5 hours ago

January 17, 2025

SCATTERGOOD, by H.M. Bouwman

Narrated by 13-year-old Peggy Mott, part of a loving, tight-knit farm community, H.M. Bouwman’s new middle grade novel brims from the get-go with engaging details — the particulars of milking cows, snooping on telephone party lines, bathing without indoor plumbing — that pull us easily into the frugal yet comfortable world of West Branch, Iowa, in 1941.

But Peggy’s world is about to change.

In the same week that a dreamy 16-year-old German boy named Gunther arrives at Scattergood (a local Quaker school turned hostel for refugees fleeing the Nazis), she learns that her 14-year-old best friend and cousin, Delia, has been diagnosed with leukemia. In short order, Peggy’s interest in Gunther leads her to another man at the hostel, a Dutch professor whose family, like Gunther’s, is “disappeared.” (“Even I knew what disappeared meant,” Peggy notes ruefully. “Hitler. The war.”)

Just as “the Professor” (with a capital P) refuses to give up the search for his wife and children, Peggy decides she will find a way to save Delia, who’s back in the hospital. Never mind that when she goes in search of a treatment for her friend’s disease she discovers pretty quickly that there isn’t one.

As Peggy scours the local library and the nearby college town of Iowa City for a cure, and then turns briefly to prayer, life continues in West Branch. Social dynamics shift and teen affections are rebuffed. People quarrel while pumpkins grow round on thick green vines.

Meanwhile, Delia grows sicker as Peggy and the Professor play chess and unpack their respective pain.

This mingling of tragic plotlines might sound a little heavy for middle grade readers, but in fact these intersections are the greatest strength of the book.

On its surface, “Scattergood” is both a cancer novel and a Holocaust narrative, but rather than weigh each other down these threads create a sort of shared logic — because while cancer and the Holocaust signal looming devastation, Peggy and the Professor continue to search, if not for a happy ending then for meaning and comfort within their pain. There’s a symmetry to that.

As Peggy exhausts the usefulness of science and prayer, she struggles to help her sick friend.

She writes Delia a note each day, which keeps her connected and forces her to see her own world more clearly: “Birds are the most beautiful animals, don’t you think, Dee? (Except chickens.) … Come home soon, strong and healthy, so you can watch them with me in the field behind your house.”

But letters can’t stop cancer, so when Delia leaves the hospital she asks Peggy for a different kind of help: “Find out something that can make me feel better. More — more ready.”

This is where “Scattergood” truly shines, because on some level it investigates not only whether we can survive great loss, but also how.

When Peggy turns to the Professor for guidance, he offers no satisfying answers, only Hasidic tales he himself doesn’t seem to believe. Then, in a sudden twist, Peggy’s first kiss sends her running once more to him, just as he has received terrible news from home. Swallowed by grief, he fails her, and what results is a sort of unleashing, as Peggy reels and acts out, setting off a chain of shocking and disastrous events.

Honestly, I was unprepared for this plot turn — blindsided. But then I stopped to think: Isn’t that precisely what happens in moments of tragedy? We falter in ways we couldn’t have anticipated, and emotions spiral beyond our control.

What is the proper response to a child’s pain at a time when she is growing into herself, seeking both care and independence? “I wondered,” Peggy tells us, “if there was any comfort that could last and that could be enough and that could work perfectly, without ruining everything around it.”

But that isn’t the end of the book! As we all must do in the aftermath of disaster, Peggy wakes the next day, picks up the threads of her story and continues. There is still tragedy to face, only now she faces it with a little more wisdom. The fact that she can’t fix everything doesn’t mean she can’t fix anything. As the Professor has explained it, “Free will versus providence. The age-old paradox … something that seems like a contradiction — but might not be.”

In this spirit of paradox, the end of “Scattergood” feels more like a beginning. Peggy has only just begun to understand herself, her power, her responsibility to others, and the journey ahead. The novel closes not with a prayer but with “a picture of a prayer, the kind of prayer you might make if you hoped, against your better judgment, that someone was listening.”

“Scattergood” is a brave, beautiful book, wise enough to reach for something beyond certainty.

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Culture

On the banks of the Nile in Uganda, a Pirates prospect’s major-league dream begins

Published

13 hours ago

January 17, 2025

Press Room

On the banks of the Nile in Uganda, a Pirates prospect’s major-league dream begins

JINJA, Uganda – For the past six months, Armstrong Muhoozi has been putting in work. He lugs his baseball equipment about a mile uphill from his ramshackle home to a rutted, bumpy field at the Masese Co-Education Primary School. Sometimes, the 17-year-old makes this dusty trek twice per day, committed to perfecting his backhand on ground balls, creating separation between his upper and lower half on swings off the tee, and strengthening his already laser-like arm through a regimen of regular drills. He hoofs it to a local gym where, for the equivalent of $1.35 per session, he rotates through a set of explosive medicine ball throws, dynamic shoulder exercises, and increasingly heavy squats, even when he can’t afford full meals.

At night, he lays on a mattress on the floor of a room he shares with his family—his mother, and five siblings and cousins— with the glow of his phone on his face as he scours the internet for video breakdowns of the swing of his idol, Mike Trout.

On Wednesday, when teenagers from across the globe joined MLB organizations on the first day of the international signing period, those family members – as well as uncles, aunts, more cousins, his grandmother, and teammates – gathered in a completely different setting.

A celebratory boat cruise on the Nile River.

An hour later, the family crowded around an L-shaped table at a restaurant in his hometown of Jinja, a city of 93,000 located 60 miles east of Kampala, Uganda’s capital city. Wearing a crisp, white jersey while sitting in front of a banner featuring the black and gold logos of his new club and the black, red, and gold flag of his home nation, Muhoozi meticulously printed his name on a contract with the Pittsburgh Pirates. His signing bonus of $45,000 is almost 70 times the median annual income of his fellow Ugandans.

Just the fifth player from this East African nation to sign with an MLB organization and the second position player, inking this seven-year minor league deal is the first step in what Muhoozi hopes will be a baseball journey that takes him from a makeshift field overlooking the Nile halfway around the world to the banks of the Allegheny.

At a hair under 5-foot-10, Muhoozi is not a hulking, can’t-miss specimen. Living in Uganda—where baseball remains largely unknown, fields and equipment remain scarce, and leagues and teams are haphazard and irregular—he hasn’t faced the gauntlet of high-level pitching that American players in travel leagues have been battling through their teens. It’s not obvious at first glance why he’ll soon be boarding a plane for the Pirates’ Dominican complex league facility. But he quickly makes it clear.

The kid’s got a cannon: Long tossing the length of a football field before crow-hopping at a pitcher’s screen, uncorking balls that register over 95 mph on handheld radar guns. He sprints past corn stalks that line the outfield, then smacks soft toss balls on a beeline towards mooing cows.

Muhoozi’s tools first came to the attention of Pirates international scout Tom Gillespie, who was sent a video early last year. He was intrigued enough by what he saw on the screen that he made plans to spend three days with him in person on his next trip to Africa several months later.

“The thing I saw in the video … he just got out of the box so quickly,” Gillespie said. “I could see the explosiveness. I could see the quickness and the bat speed, and I was like, ‘those things will translate.’”

Uganda might seem a surprising place for baseball talent to blossom. Most of the population has never seen a baseball field, and many here have no idea the game is played within their borders. But here, where roughly half of the population lives in poverty, there’s an academy run by baseball’s richest team, the Los Angeles Dodgers.

The academy, known to local players and coaches simply as “the complex,” is behind a blue-and-white painted wall in Mpigi, 85 miles west of Jinja. The only one of its kind in Uganda, the complex is similar to the academies major-league organizations have in the Dominican Republic: A combination academic and baseball school, where players live, go to class, and compete with each other from their preteen years through high school.

Baseball was originally introduced in Uganda in the 1990s by visiting coaches from the U.S. and Japan. In 2002, Richard Stanley, an American chemical engineer and former part-owner of the New York Yankees’ then Double-A affiliate Trenton Thunder, helped start a Little League program in the country while working as a volunteer there. He launched a program that would lead to the building of a baseball academy, the Allen VR Stanley Secondary School. Players from the school would make up a team that traveled to Williamsport, Pa, to compete in the 2015 Little League World Series. Much of the school became the Dodgers academy in 2019.

Muhoozi swings a sandbag during one of his regular training sessions at a local gym in Jinja. (Greg Presto – special to The Athletic)

Baseball grew in other pockets around the country, too: In Luwero, for example, two hours north of Kampala, there are multiple primary school fields where as many as 50 children gather each day to practice. Those fields have produced three of the four other players who have signed with MLB organizations: Ben Serunkuma and Umar Male, who signed with the Dodgers in 2022, and David Matoma, a Pirates prospect who signed in 2023.

Those players, as well as Muhoozi, all went through “the complex” first. The Dodgers’ facility remains the epicenter of baseball opportunity here, which can make players wary of having outside contact with scouts from other organizations like Gillespie.

Despite this apprehension, Muhoozi says his four years at the academy, which started in January 2020 when he was 12, were a godsend.

“That’s where I got to grow big” he said. “I ate well. I slept well. I gym-ed well.” It was much different from his home life in Jinja.

Jinja sits along the northern shore of Lake Victoria. With the source of the Nile running through the city, the area attracts tourists who come to raft the river’s rapids and bungee jump over the water, and houses international charity organizations and missionaries that want to set up outside the snarled traffic of Kampala.

Pull off one of the many roundabouts that dot the main road, and it’s just a few hundred meters up a muddy road to Muhoozi’s house. The home is made of rough-hewn wood and corrugated metal on a cement slab. Outside, a handful of dogs and the family’s mother goat, with her litter of newborns, hide from the baking sun in the shade of the cement building next door.

The house is lit by a dim, solar-powered bulb. The main room is both kitchen and living space, with broken couch frames that have plastic chairs slotted in where the cushioned areas used to be. Mahoozi’s cousins and siblings clean dishes after their daily meal, or use spent water bottle caps to play ludo, a popular board game reminiscent of “Trouble.” The family all sleep in the same room, behind another curtain, on mattresses on the floor.

“Things are hard,” Muhoozi said.“In a day, you can eat once, it’s not a guarantee … the situation at home isn’t that good. The house … is in a bad condition.”

Muhoozi (back right with cap) congregates with family at his home in Jinja. (Greg Presto – special to The Athletic)

The house actually belongs to Muhoozi’s grandmother, Atseko Odhakia. Muhoozi, his mother, and his siblings have lived here since he was a toddler, when his father left. He doesn’t know why: His mother doesn’t like to talk about it. Muhoozi’s father returned once, when he was around five, taking Armstrong’s older sister away from the family. Armstrong hasn’t seen his sister or father since.

Muhoozi considers his father to be deceased, “because I don’t want to bring him into my life. I don’t want any complications anymore.”

The abandonment created many complications for Muhoozi, his siblings, and his mother, Caroline Onziru. The 46-year old had to move into this house, owned by her mother. Each morning, she tries to scrape together itinerant work as a hairstylist; on a good day, she might bring home 60,000 shillings, a little less than $20. Muhoozi’s grandmother sweeps the floors of their church—sometimes with Armstrong’s help—for around $10.

“My life is hard, and I don’t like it at all,” Onziru said. “I have suffered so much.”

Without the money for school fees or consistent meals, and without a father figure for her kids, Onziru turned to her three brothers for help. Two of them live in the houses adjacent to Muhoozi.

“These kids came as a gift, and we take them as a gift. We are with them…we will try to educate them,” said Joseph Baguma, one of Muhoozi’s uncles. Baguma said he tried to imbue the quiet, tough kid with life lessons of respect for others.

Muhoozi’s mother says young Armstrong wasn’t playful, but “mysterious. [He] had a mission at heart.”

This determined boy walked a half-mile to the Jinja Army Primary Boarding School each morning. One day in May 2019, representatives from the Dodgers came to school and held a tryout. It was the first time Muhoozi had ever held a baseball or swung a bat.

“The bat was really heavy. It felt awkward. I wasn’t hitting the balls because everything was different from what I expected — I was used to playing cricket,” he said. “The ball was light, but it was hard to throw.”

The Dodgers scouts liked something that he did, though: The next year, he was at the complex.

By January 2024, the now-teenager had been a student at the academy for nearly four years. He watched Male, Serunkuma and another friend, Allen Ajoti, sign with the Dodgers during his tenure. Muhoozi excelled there: He was at the top of his class in grades and batting average and was clocked firing a ball into a screen at 96 miles per hour.

But the coaches at the academy wanted him to become a pitcher, after first asking him to become a catcher. He balked, then talked to Gillespie, who’d seen that initial video sent to him via WhatsApp — the same way he’d found Matoma, the Pirates’ first Ugandan signee.

Muhoozi’s quickness jumped out at Gillespie. When he met the prospect in person in May, his tools matched the video.

WIth Gillespie’s assurance that he’d be signed in January 2025, Muhoozi quit the academy, forgoing (for now) the exams that would have had him finish high school. He headed back home to Jinja to work and wait for his signing day, trekking up and down the hill to Masese school, and peppering Gillespie and others with videos and texts asking to critique his swing and his fielding form.

Gillespie thinks Muhoozi could be a second or third baseman, but with his speed and arm, he could wind up in center field. Muhoozi’s work ethic and coachability, combined with his talent, convinced Gillespie that he was the best Ugandan position player prospect he’d ever scouted.

Muhoozi’s grandmother Atseko Odhakia (left), Muhoozi (center) and his mother Carloine Onziru (right) celebrate his signing with the Pittsburgh Pirates. (Greg Presto – special to The Athletic)

“Any time he’s given any advice, he goes and tries to put it into practice right away, and does that effectively,” Gillespie says. “Whatever his environment is, every day he wakes up and he tries to figure out how he’s going to get better.”

In a matter of days, that setting will be the Pirates’ 46-acre Dominican complex in El Toro. Muhoozi has already done his research over the past few months, using ChatGPT to learn about the Pirates’ top prospects in the country — his future teammates, but also his future competition in the organization.

And when he returns home to Jinja, the mission-driven teenager has another focus for his time in Uganda: To use his signing bonus from the Pirates to build his mother her own house.

“My dream is to make her happy,” Muhoozi said. “Being poor isn’t a bad thing, but it gives you motivation so that you push yourself an extra mile … I want to make my family be in a good state.”

(Top photos of Armstrong Muhoozi: Greg Presto/special to The Athletic)

Culture

Neko Case Has Sung Hard Truths. Now She’s Telling Hers in a Memoir.

Published

21 hours ago

January 16, 2025

Press Room

Neko Case Has Sung Hard Truths. Now She’s Telling Hers in a Memoir.

One morning, when she was about 7 years old, Neko Case stood on her front porch, closed her eyes and wished with all her might to see a horse.

It was a tall order. She and her parents lived in the coastal city of Bellingham, Wash., and none of their neighbors were equestrians. But, as the musician recalls in her new memoir, “The Harder I Fight the More I Love You,” the young Case “clench-focused as hard as I could,” and when she opened her eyes something incredible had happened: Two gorgeous horses, ridden by two girls, came clomping directly toward her. In the midst of a difficult childhood, this stands out as one fleeting moment when she believed irrefutably in miracles, fairy tales and the possibility that good things could happen to her.

“At 52 years old,” she writes, “I can still see the horses clear as day.”

A cult-favorite singer-songwriter with a gale-force voice and a spiky, irreverent personality, Case has been releasing acclaimed solo and collaborative albums for nearly three decades, and has built an adoring fan base. But readers don’t need to be familiar with her music to be moved by her raw, unflinching memoir, which chronicles her impoverished and at times surreal upbringing as well as her long journey toward self-confidence. It’s a book that mixes defiant humor with an unsentimental resilience that recalls Cheryl Strayed.

“I wasn’t going to go tabloid,” Case said with a dry shrug, sitting in a booth at the Cosmic Diner in Manhattan on a recent, chilly Saturday morning. “I never had sex with famous people, so.”

Still, the book depicts Case’s early life as a minefield of emotional trauma. In a phone interview, A.C. Newman, her longtime bandmate in the power-pop group the New Pornographers, recalled a mutual friend once marveling of Case, “For her to achieve what she’s done, considering where she came from, it’s like winning a marathon with one leg.”

At the diner, Case, now 54, wore a dark-blue button-down, and her predominantly gray mane was skunked with a streak of flaming auburn. At one point she interrupted herself to look — respectfully — at a neighboring table’s breakfast order. “That’s a good-looking pancake,” she said. “I don’t want to stare a hole in their pancakes, but wow.”

Case has lately become a regular at this Midtown restaurant, splitting her time between New York and her Vermont home because of another exciting project she’s working on nearby: She is collaborating on the songs for a musical adaptation of “Thelma & Louise” that she hopes is bound for Broadway in the next year or two. “I was the target audience for that movie,” Case said of the 1991 hit. “I was exactly the right age. I saw it trillions of times.”

Callie Khouri, who wrote the film’s Oscar-winning screenplay and is also writing the musical’s book, was a fan of Case’s music and selected her personally to work on the musical. “Her music has such scope, sonically and lyrically,” Khouri said in a phone interview. “She’s such a righteous, true-north artist and person.”

Case is plain-spoken about the financial realities of being a working musician; she said she wrote the book mainly because she needed another source of income while the pandemic kept her from touring. Later in 2025, she will also release her first new album in seven years, which she described as an explicit rebuttal to what she sees as the digital era’s dehumanization of her industry. She intentionally employed more musicians than usual; some tracks feature an entire orchestra.

“I wanted everything to be played by real people,” she said, “to show how we fill space differently.”

Fans of her off-kilter, country-tinged albums like the Grammy-nominated 2009 release “Middle Cyclone” are unlikely to be surprised that Case writes uncommonly vivid and lyrical prose. Her mother’s pale-green station wagon, for instance, looks like “a nauseous basking shark.” The grasses of northern Washington house “grasshoppers the size of staplers with underwings like striped blushing flamenco skirts.” On a class trip, when her father packed an inadequate lunch (a few sad slices of cheese), a teacher’s aide gave her a pitying look and the young Case “dragged that shame around like a wet wool cape.”

The most startling revelations in the book are about Case’s mother. The musician writes that when she was in second grade and her parents were separated, her father picked her up from school one day, burst into tears and told her that her mother had died of cancer. She was stunned.

An emotionally somnambulant year and a half later, her father just as suddenly announced that her mother was alive and, actually, they were on their way to see her just then. When mother and daughter were reunited, Case writes that her parents informed her that her mother had been sick with a potentially fatal disease and fled to Hawaii for treatment, so her daughter would not have to see her suffer. Case was too young and vulnerable to question the story. “I forgave her with such desperate haste, I didn’t even have time to be mad,” she writes.

Her mother flickered in and out of her life for the next several decades, but even when they were living under the same roof, Case came to experience her mother like “a deer, always just out of reach,” she writes.

After a final, failed attempt at reconnection when Case was in her late 30s — her mother moved in with her when she was living in Tucson and suddenly left without a word — Case cut ties with her mother for good. Shortly after, as she writes in the book, she had a revelation: Perhaps her mother had never been sick at all. The thought was at once crushing and profoundly liberating.

“There was much I could have forgiven,” she writes. “But it was the grift of her that ground that down — that love held out to dance before me, always snatched back just as I reached out my arms for it.” (Attempts to reach Case’s mother for comment were unsuccessful.)

“I guess I was an over-sharer out of desperation, like, ‘Please, notice me,’” Case said, noting that there is nothing in the book about her childhood that her closest friends do not already know. Newman, though, is relieved that others “can now read her story” and understand the scope of what she has endured. “Sometimes, when Neko was being kind of hard to deal with, I’d always have that in the back of my mind,” he said. “Like, I can’t tell you guys, but holy [expletive].”

When asked if any of these revelations were difficult to disclose in such a public manner, Case just shrugged. “So much has been done to me where I haven’t been considered,” she said. “I don’t have any guilt.”

CASE’S DISTINCT VOICE is as mighty as a canyon; she often sings like someone hollering into a void and pausing to let her echo confidently resound.

“We were all kind of shocked she could sing so well,” Newman remembered. He met Case in the tight-knit Vancouver indie music scene in the mid-90s, when she was playing drums in the punk trio Maow. When he heard her sing at a friend’s wedding around that time — she belted out a rendition of the Students’ 1958 doo-wop tune “I’m So Young” — his jaw dropped.

“That’s when I wanted to work with her,” Newman said. “I felt like I was getting in on the ground floor of something, like I’d found this friend who had an incredible voice, but nobody else knew about it yet.”

Case’s debut album, “The Virginian,” recorded with a rotating backing band she cheekily dubbed Her Boyfriends, came out in 1997. “It sounds terrified to me,” she said now. “I’m just like, ahhhh! Singing on 10 the whole time. No dynamic whatsoever.”

But Case found acclaim as she honed her talent over her next few albums. Learning tenor guitar — a four-stringed instrument initially made for banjo players — unlocked a unique sound and sensibility in her songwriting. Newman marveled at her rapid creative growth over that period: Each album, he said, “felt very much like a leap forward.”

Still, Case’s brief forays down the music industry’s more mainstream avenues made her feel that she didn’t quite belong. In the book, she tells her side of a long-rumored story about the Grand Ole Opry. While playing an outdoor festival on its plaza in July 2001, on the brink of heat stroke, she stripped down to her bra.

“It wasn’t an act of punk-rock defiance,” she writes. “I just had an animal need to cool down in any way possible.” The Opry management cut the power and after her truncated set “delivered the classic line,” Case writes, “‘You’ll NEVER play in this town again!’” (Representatives for the Opry said the event predates its current management team, and that “Neko Case is most welcome at the Grand Ole Opry and is among the many artists we’d love to welcome for an official Opry debut in 2025.”)

“I thought about what men had to do to get banned from the Opry,” she writes. Jerry Lee Lewis dropped an expletive on the air. Hank Williams got so wasted, he failed to show up. She eventually chalked the incident up to sexism, but she thinks the situation for female artists in country music is now “worse than it’s ever been.”

“Women have actually been demoted,” she said at the diner, pointing to incidents like the so-called “Tomato-gate,” a 2015 controversy in which a radio programmer recommended limiting female artists’ airplay, likening them to “the tomatoes of our salad” in a trade publication.

“It’s not true at all,” Case said unequivocally. “People don’t turn off their radios because women come on the radio.”

But she has seen firsthand how difficult it is to challenge the full force of the industry. “The gatekeepers are so thick, and they’re everywhere,” she added. “I always feel like people just need to start a new country music.”

Over the years she’s done just that, and beyond. Case’s songs have a spaciousness and a sense of possibility that far exceed the confines of genre. Her music is deeply in touch with the expansiveness of the natural world, and that gives her narration a kind of shape-shifting power: She has written songs from the perspective of killer whales and tornadoes, wronged, aching women and gruff, swaggering men.

“Her songs have always been little movies to me,” said her longtime friend Paul Rigby, a Vancouver-based musician with a jazz background who has been collaborating with Case since 2006. “There are things that are based in reality, but there’s also fantastical stuff. I think it’s very important to her to try to understand what she thinks is her part in the world.”

NOT LONG AFTER “The Virginian” was released, a major label came courting. “Picture it like something out of a fairy tale,” she writes. “There’s a knock at the door, a fascinating stranger stands outside, and they want to grant you all your wishes!” It was like she was a child blinking horses into existence all over again. The label flew her to Los Angeles, wined and dined her — and then the deal suddenly fell through.

“It was such a farce,” Case said, as a waiter cleared her empty breakfast plate. But does she ever wonder what would have happened if she had been on that promised fast track to success? “I don’t think I would have gone very far,” she admitted, “because I just didn’t have the confidence or the skills yet. I wouldn’t have become really famous and gotten weird or anything. I think I just would have gotten kicked out early.”

Instead, over the course of nearly three decades, she’s painstakingly built something more enduring and true to herself. “She’s a person who knows so deeply who she is, and makes no bones about it,” Khouri said. “She’s not a person who is looking at herself and wondering what the world is thinking of her. She’s standing her ground, looking out at the world and saying, ‘Shouldn’t we all be trying to do better?’

Case now knows that she did not actually make those horses appear all those years ago by magic. That doesn’t mean they weren’t important, though.

“As time went on, I began to understand in a new way the appearance of the horses when I was a kid,” she writes. “Not as something that would swoop in and fix me, but as a force pushing me to keep orienting myself toward the cinnamon scent of what was right and good for me.”

“It was like an engine that was running so hard all the time,” Case said of her drive, and that constant thrust of creative momentum. “I was always running away from things, too, like I just very much did not want to be in my old life.”

“The momentum was so great in me that I didn’t ever stop to try and understand it,” she added. “So maybe that’s what kept it going.”

Culture

Ranking 18 NFL teams that missed the playoffs: Who’s most likely to rebound in 2025?

Published

1 day ago

January 16, 2025

Press Room

Ranking 18 NFL teams that missed the playoffs: Who’s most likely to rebound in 2025?

The NFL playoffs are in full swing. The wild-card round came and went this past weekend, and on tap is the divisional round, which features four games between eight teams.

Having lost in recent days, the Los Angeles Chargers, Green Bay Packers, Pittsburgh Steelers, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Denver Broncos and Minnesota Vikings find themselves in a state of reflection and assessment as their offseasons begin sooner than they would have liked.

Another 18 NFL teams didn’t even make the playoffs. Some appear capable of rebounding and rejoining the ranks of the contenders next season — if they make the right moves this spring. Others have a ways to go before they can even sniff the postseason.

We’re ranking all of the non-playoff teams from most likely to rebound in 2025 to least likely.

1. Cincinnati Bengals (9-8)

A five-game season-ending win streak put the Bengals on the precipice of the postseason following a slow start to 2024. But the Broncos won their final regular-season game to clinch the AFC No. 7 seed, and that left the Bengals on the outside looking in. That final stretch showed what Cincinnati is capable of. The Bengals must pay wide receivers Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins, and they need to invest in a defense that will have a new coordinator following the firing of Lou Anarumo. If they do so, Joe Burrow and company should have a shot at contention.

2. Dallas Cowboys (7-10)

We don’t yet know who will coach this team following Mike McCarthy’s departure this week. Improved health alone, however, should position the Cowboys’ return to the thick of things in the NFC East. The roster isn’t perfect, but Dallas certainly has enough horses to contend as long as Jerry Jones hires a strong head coach and finally addresses the run game after neglecting that area last year.

3. Miami Dolphins (8-9)

A healthy Tua Tagovailoa will go a long way to helping the Dolphins rebound. Figuring out the Tyreek Hill situation (is he in or is he out?) also is a must. Trading him for assets to further round out the offense and fortify the defense might be the best call.

4. Seattle Seahawks (10-7)

The only 10-win team to miss the playoffs, Seattle is right on the edge. The Seahawks will have a new offensive coordinator. Can that new hire squeeze another serviceable season out of Geno Smith? The defense should improve in the second season under Mike Macdonald.

5. Atlanta Falcons (8-9)

Raheem Morris’ team is a high-end pass rusher and more consistent Kyle Pitts away from being able to win the NFC South. Michael Penix Jr. showed why the Falcons took him eighth overall despite having signed Kirk Cousins to an expensive deal in free agency. Penix could blossom into a star in 2025 after showing flashes in his late-season cameo.

6. Arizona Cardinals (8-9)

Yes, they fizzled down the stretch, but Jonathan Gannon’s Cardinals appear poised to make real strides in 2025. They doubled their win total in 2024. Kyler Murray looks comfortable in the system, and James Conner is locked in for the long term. Now they just need Marvin Harrison Jr. to make a leap to further elevate the offense, and a difference-making pass rusher to lead the defense.

The Brock Purdy contract will command a lot of attention this offseason, but the 49ers also need to fortify a defense that was ravaged by injuries in 2024. They also need offensive stars like Christian McCaffrey, Brandon Aiyuk and Trent Williams to help extend this window of competitiveness that might have only another season or two of life to it.

8. Carolina Panthers (5-12)

Bryce Young answered a pressing question with the way he finished the 2024 season, winning two of the final three games. Another offseason with Dave Canales should position the 2023 No. 1 pick for continued growth in 2025. With quarterback questions resolved, the Panthers can turn their attention to getting the help they badly need at edge rusher, defensive line and defensive back.

9. Indianapolis Colts (8-9)

The roster was solid enough for the Colts to flirt with a playoff berth in both of Shane Steichen’s first two seasons as head coach. But there are still very big questions about quarterback Anthony Richardson and whether he has the mental fortitude necessary to finally blossom into the difference-maker that could elevate Indy from 8-9 to 11-6.

10. Chicago Bears (5-12)

Caleb Williams found himself overshadowed by Jayden Daniels, and rightfully so. But Williams didn’t have a bad year (3,541 passing yards, 20 touchdowns, only six interceptions, completion percentage of 62.5). The Bears can’t miss on this head coaching hire. There’s still a gap between Chicago and the NFC North’s third-place team, Green Bay. But the pieces are there for Chicago to compete.

Drake Maye was the bright spot of another season of regression for the once-proud franchise. Mike Vrabel brings credibility and hope. A deep collection of draft picks and gobs of salary-cap space could lead to a significantly upgraded roster in 2025.

12. Jacksonville Jaguars (4-13)

The Jaguars have an important building block in Trevor Lawrence, who, as it turns out, might be solid but not elite. They still have an underperforming general manager in Trent Baalke. And they will have a new head coach, who will be tasked with maximizing Lawrence’s skills. There are some pieces to work with, but that playoff run in the 2022 season feels like a long time ago.

13. New York Jets (5-12)

Another franchise reset is on the way with a new coach and general manager. Aaron Rodgers’ plans remain a mystery, as do the Jets’ feelings about continuing this marriage. The cupboard isn’t bare, but a quick fix seems unlikely.

14. Las Vegas Raiders (4-13)

They currently have no coach, no general manager and no long-term solution at quarterback. They do have a star in tight end Brock Bowers, and pass rusher Maxx Crosby. But, also, the AFC West is tough.

15. Tennessee Titans (3-14)

Will Levis is not the answer. Brian Callahan might not be, either. Former general manager Ran Carthon, fired last week after two seasons, seemed to assemble some quality talent through the draft and free agency. Can a veteran quarterback help this squad rebound to the middle of the pack?

16. New Orleans Saints (5-12)

A familiar refrain: Aging quarterback, aging defensive stars, limited salary-cap space. … There’s not much here to sell to a leading head coach candidate.

17. New York Giants (3-14)

Malik Nabers is a star, so teaming him up with the right quarterback could help the Giants improve. But is the No. 3 pick too late for Joe Schoen and Brian Daboll to have a shot at a legit franchise savior? The quarterback pickings in free agency are slim as well.

18. Cleveland Browns (3-14)

The Browns have a mess on their hands. Deshaun Watson is unlikely to play in 2025 after another Achilles tear, but his restrictive salary-cap hit remains on the books. Cleveland has the No. 2 pick. Should it be spent on a quarterback? Even as Kevin Stefanski likely reclaims play-calling duties of an offense that will have a new coordinator (Tommy Rees) and line coach, this turnaround will take a while.

(Top illustration: Demetrius Robinson / The Athletic; photos of Tua Tagovailoa, Joe Burrow and Micah Parsons: Carmen Mandato and
Wesley Hitt / Getty Images; Nick Cammett / Diamond Images via Getty Images)