I have always considered this weekend of a National Football League season the best. Eight teams left to vie for four playoff spots in next week’s Championship Games.
Are the eight best teams here?
Did we lose one or two that deserve to be here and aren’t?
No.
As one-time great NFL coach Bill Parcells always contended to the media when they tried to shift actual results to what they thought, either up or down, “You are your record.”
In other words, the eight teams that are playing this weekend are exactly the eight teams that should be here based on all that really matters … actual results. That is not to say the teams here are not necessarily the ones many thought would survive before the games were played.
If you check the forecasts in Sports Illustrated and other leading magazines before the season began you will see their predictions for 2025 pretty much mirrored the final standings for 2024. They had the Kansas City Chiefs, Baltimore Ravens and Buffalo Buffalo Bills leading the way in the American Football Conference.
This season, only one of those three teams that had dominated the AFC in recent years advanced to the playoffs.
No publication had the New England Patriots cracking the playoff field, let alone having one of the best records in all of football.
In the National Football Conference, the Philadelphia Eagles were in some preseason projections picked to repeat as Super Bowl Champions. No one had predicted the Carolina Panthers would be included in the playoff field.
In a few months, projections for the 2026 season will be published, and that is a lot easier to predict than the actual games. Of the 14 teams that were included in the playoff field this season, a dozen or more will be projected to be back next year. In fact, historically, just a little over half of the playoff field is likely to be back in the postseason from one year to the next.
This season, of the 14 teams that advanced to the playoffs, seven were not there last year. That list includes the two teams that meet in Seattle on Saturday night, the San Francisco 49ers and NFC playoff top seed Seattle Seahawks. The other five teams in the playoffs this year that were not in the 2024 field are the Panthers, Patriots, Chicago Bears, Pittsburgh Steelers and Jacksonville Jaguars.
Before we complete our picks for this weekend, I want to take an opportunity to look down the road to next season and give you a Super Bowl LXI pick 13 months early.
With John Harbaugh leaving his head coach post with the Baltimore Ravens and presumably moving into that position with the New York Giants, the possibility of the Harbaugh brothers meeting in a Super Bowl is revived. They did complete the 2012 season against each other in Super Bowl XLVII, and John’s Ravens downed Jim Harbaugh’s 49ers. Since Jim joined the Los Angeles Chargers, a Super Bowl rematch between the brothers was not possible given both coaches were now working for AFC teams.
Now, the possibility is in play that the NFC New York Giants could meet Jim’s Chargers in a Roman Numeral game.
Will it happen?
The chances are a lot better than I think most publications will predict in a few months. Jim’s Chargers have all the pieces to be a serious Super Bowl threat next season. This year, their efforts were blunted by the loss of their best two offensive lineman to injuries. Their talented quarterback, Justin Herbert, is now winless in three postseason efforts following his loss last week to the New England Patriots.
If the Chargers don’t suffer debilitating injuries, they are the team to beat in 2026 and my early projection for a Super Bowl winner.
Will Jim meet his brother in a Super Bowl again? If he is the coach of the Giants next season, Harbaugh will have the horses to compete for a playoff slot … a Super Bowl berth though? That appears a little ahead of schedule for the improving Giants.