In a week where NFL teams could secure their position in the playoff race and tune up right before the postseason, nearly every contender for the Super Bowl stumbled in ways that make you wonder if they can be consistent enough to win outright. The only standout was the Philadelphia Eagles, who whipped the New York Giants 48-22.
The nature of football is that consistency doesn’t matter as much as it does for other sports — with one-game elimination series, fluke results determine the winner more often than consistently good play.
But being consistent improves your odds. We’ve seen good teams win the Super Bowl more often than fluky teams. The best hope any team has is to be consistently good and have multiple ways to win.
The Top Teams in the NFL Struggled in Week 14
This week, we’re left a lot less confident that some of the favorites can do that. After the Cowboys were taken to the wire by perhaps the worst team in the league and the Miami Dolphins playing left- (or right?) handed on offense for the second week in a row, it’s tough to take the best teams in the league at face value.
The top teams in Super Bowl odds heading into Week 14 were the Buffalo Bills, Kansas City Chiefs, Philadelphia Eagles, Dallas Cowboys, San Francisco 49ers, Cincinnati Bengals, Minnesota Vikings, and Tampa Bay Buccaneers. While that group ended up with a winning record on balance, almost every one of them disappointed.
The Buffalo Bills Proved They’re Inconsistent and Injury-Plagued
The Bills played frustratingly close to the Jets. The game started with 10 punts, with neither offense advancing meaningfully into opponent territory. The Bills couldn’t move the ball until the final moments of the second quarter — after Quinnen Williams was injured and out of the game — when they converted a fourth down off an induced penalty from a fake fourth-down snap.
It took everything the Bills had to eke out a one-score victory against the Jets’ third-string quarterback, Joe Flacco, who was in the game after Mike White was injured badly enough that he needed a hospital visit after the game. In that game, Allen passed for 5.44 yards per attempt and finished with a passer rating of 86.3.
After losing Von Miller to injury this season, it seemed like the injuries had piled up too much for the Bills to take on their role as potentially the best team in the league; the injuries at safety, cornerback, linebacker, and along the defensive line piled up to make the Bills’ strong start to the season irrelevant when figuring out who they are now.
The offense hasn’t kept up, either. The fireworks at the start of the season have turned into slugfests later on. While they made up for their red-zone issues simply by entering the red zone on nearly every drive, that has dried up while the red-zone offense hasn’t gotten better.
The Kansas City Chiefs Can’t Close Doors
The Chiefs raced to a 27-point lead early on and let the Denver Broncos — who rank 28th in offensive expected points added per play — score 21 quick points to get back into the game after the Chiefs ended two consecutive drives with turnovers. The Chiefs struggled in the middle portion of the game, and the Broncos kept the game competitive until their starting quarterback was forced to leave the game because of the NFL’s concussion protocol.
That their backup quarterback threw an interception in the final moments to cut short their comeback isn’t much of a credit to the Chiefs. The Chiefs have had this problem consistently. They play down to their opponents too often and rely on late-game heroics to rescue games.
They turn on the jets surprisingly late and don’t always have the ability to do that. At a glance, it looks like they’re playing cat-and-mouse with opponents, but the fact that they do this time and again demonstrates how poorly they misjudge their opponents in those situations.
The Chiefs give themselves little margin for error and sometimes other teams exploit that.
The Dallas Cowboys Didn’t Live Up to Their Potential
The Dallas Cowboys were on their back foot the entire game against the Houston Texans, who went back to starting Davis Mills and switched him off with Jeff Driskel. The Texans’ defense is still missing first-round pick Derek Stingley, and the Cowboys still struggled to move the ball. The Texans’ offense was missing their two top receivers and do not have a starting-caliber quarterback and happened to score against the Cowboys time and again.
The Cowboys scored first but lost the lead late in the first quarter and didn’t gain it back until 2:39 left remaining.
With Dak Prescott throwing multiple picks and the vaunted Dallas Cowboys defense giving up 7.89 yards per passing attempt to the combination of Houston quarterbacks (with no sacks), it’s tough to recommend Dallas as the kind of consistent team that typically makes noise in the playoffs.
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They had a good chance to be the best team in the NFC, and in some ways still do, given Prescott’s return to the lineup. Since his return, Dallas has been the highest-scoring offense in the league. They also have been fifth in points allowed per game.
In total, this has meant that their point differential laps the competition at plus-17.0 points per game, the difference between them and the fourth-place Chiefs (plus-8.0 points per game) is the same as the difference between the Chiefs and 16th place (Cleveland at minus-1.14 points per game).
But this has come with some wild swings. Games like their 40-3 beatdown of the Vikings pump up that number while losses to Green Bay and nearly another to the Texans move in the opposite direction.
The Cowboys are probably the best team in the league — or at least the NFC — on a good day. But the problem is that they have issues having good days.
The San Francisco 49ers Have New Problems, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers Have Old Ones
The 49ers showed out against the Buccaneers and didn’t showcase any evidence in the game that they should be untrustworthy. But it is tough to buy in to rookie quarterback and near-undrafted free agent Brock Purdy. One good performance in relief and one good start won’t be enough to demonstrate reliability.
The defense has been incredible and their ability to consistently find opponent weaknesses is incredible. The 49ers’ D has been more consistent than the Cowboys’ over the past few weeks. Since Week 8, they haven’t given up more than 17 points and that was to the Miami Dolphins.
Despite that, it’s difficult to believe that Purdy could lead a team to the Super Bowl through the playoffs. If there are limitations in the kinds of offenses he can run or holes in his game, teams will figure it out and exploit them. Despite his recent success, this is more likely than not given his experience and draft pedigree.
How an offense performs tends to project into future success more than how a defense performs, and projecting this offense seems difficult, especially with Deebo Samuel out for several weeks with a high ankle sprain. That shouldn’t impact our evaluation of how they do in the playoffs, however, as he should be back by then. In either case, trusting Purdy to lead the offense seems shaky at best.
More concerning is the level of play from Tom Brady and the Buccaneers. Brady has now strung together several weak performances in a row and the Buccaneers’ defense, which has been leading the way in many of their wins, collapsed against a Purdy-led offense.
It’s tough to put stock in an offense that has had 14 weeks to figure itself out and has failed to do so despite returning their receivers to the lineup.
Tampa Bay has only scored more than 22 points once this year (and that was at the beginning of October). It’s been 10 weeks since they’ve scored more than 22 points. And they’ve averaged 15.8 points per game in that span, scoring lows of three and seven points.
The Minnesota Vikings Exposed Their Weaknesses and Crumbled
The most disappointing team of the weekend might have been the Vikings, who struggled against the Lions defensively. The offense was efficient through the air, with perhaps the best performance of the year from Kirk Cousins and a franchise-record performance from Justin Jefferson. Nonetheless, they were ghastly on the ground, averaging below two yards per carry. And the defense gave up play after play — an already simple scheme looked solved by Jared Goff and offensive coordinator Ben Johnson.
Though the Lions have played well over the past several weeks, the fact that the Vikings lost by multiple scores despite a great quarterback performance speaks to how much of an issue the defense was and the impact of poor coaching decisions in the game.
The closest a non-Eagles team came to looking like a contender was the Bengals, whose strong defense kept Cincinnati in the game while the offense initially struggled. Burrow looked off and had difficulty completing passes to start. But ultimately, the Bengals put together a complete game and cruised to a win.
If the Bengals are truly past their early-season play, they’ll be contenders along with the Eagles.
None of this is to say these teams are bad. The Chiefs, Bills, and Cowboys have excellent aggregate statistics, and they deserve them. But they aren’t consistent. It’s difficult to trust any specific team to perform at their highest level in the playoffs without that additional element of week-to-week play. Week 14 is a good reminder that even the best teams in the NFL can’t be trusted to perform week after week.