We covered all the divisional round action in the takeaways. So, I wanted to start this week, like last, by taking a look forward, with some initial thoughts on what’s ahead for championship Sunday …
• The familiarity of the AFC combatants is, obviously, notable. Sean McDermott’s NFL mentor is Andy Reid, who brought the Buffalo Bills’ coach into the league as “assistant to the head coach” (a role that’s led to a lot of upward mobility for young coaches and scouts under Reid) in Philadelphia.
Buffalo has won the past four regular-season meetings between the teams, and Josh Allen is 4–1 against the Kansas City Chiefs outside of the playoffs. But the Chiefs, of course, have won all three playoff meetings between Allen and Patrick Mahomes—the 2020 AFC title game, the epic shootout after the ’21 season and last year’s three-point Kansas City win in Orchard Park.
In total, this will be the ninth time the teams have met since the start of the 2020 season, with the matchup taking on the quality of a division game.
“What are they? Two-time defending Super Bowl champs?” McDermott said as he and I talked in the training room beneath Highmark Stadium on Sunday night. “Yeah, incredible, incredible feat. And all season long, I know the buzz about them is like, Hey, they’re just barely winning, and this and that. Then they go put it on a really good team in Houston. And they’re fresh—it sounds like they’re healthy.
“So again, we got to have a good week of preparation, put a good plan together, and go out there as a team because that’s the only way it’s going to get done.”
• The Chiefs’ initial vision for the offense was to have Marquise “Hollywood” Brown and Xavier Worthy running downfield, stretching coverage vertically and opening up space underneath for Travis Kelce and Rashee Rice. Then, Brown got hurt and Rice went down for the year—and Kansas City had to make it work with what it had.
That’s why a play from the Chiefs’ 23–12 win on Saturday stuck with me, even if it went down on the scoresheet as an incomplete pass. On the first play of Kansas City’s final real possession of the first half, Mahomes reminded everyone what kind of deep ball he can throw when he has the weapons to go get them. Brown tracked the ball beautifully and came very close to coming down with it. So no yards were gained. But on the next play, Kelce found a wide-open patch of grass underneath and rumbled for a 49-yard gain.
The Chiefs scored three plays later to take a 13–3 lead.
Maybe more importantly, the vision was realized.
One thing the Chiefs’ coaches emphasized to me over the summer is that beyond just being fast, both Brown and Worthy are great ball-trackers—capable of playing it in the air like centerfielders. That certainly showed up on the aforementioned incompletion. And so I’d expect that to be a factor on Sunday.
• Adam Peters has a compelling case for Executive of the Year. One thing I love about the way he and coach Dan Quinn built the Washington Commanders is they focused heavily on guys they had connections to, whom they knew would be tough, hard-edged program fits.
So Quinn brought Dorance Armstrong, Dante Fowler Jr. and Tyler Biadasz with him from Dallas; and landed Bobby Wagner, pulling on their Seattle connection. Kliff Kingsbury had a background with Zach Ertz from Arizona, and Anthony Lynn coached Austin Ekeler with the Los Angeles Chargers. Meanwhile, Scott Fitterer consulted for the Commanders last spring, and the former Panthers GM gave Peters and Quinn plenty of detail on Jeremy Chinn and Frankie Luvu.
Add up those eight, and you have five defensive players playing a total of 280 snaps against the Detroit Lions, and three offensive players playing a total of 154 snaps. That’s a pretty good percentage of the overall workload, and, even better, it’s a pretty good percentage of the workload that the guys in charge could count on being done right.
Now, over time, some of those guys will be filtered out, as the Commanders continue to build. But all of them helped establish what Quinn and Peters were trying to set up last year, and that’ll be invaluable going forward, regardless of how the rest of this season plays out.
• It’s worth mentioning Kingsbury here too, and I know I’ve been down this road before.
In doing my job, I try to talk to and rely on people who might know more than I do on whatever subject is at hand. And in the case of Kingsbury, it helped me see how the public view of the former Texas Tech and Arizona Cardinals coach was way, way off.
A couple of years ago I asked around—and I can’t even exactly remember why—about whose offenses were the most difficult to play against. Kingsbury’s Arizona offense came up repeatedly among defensive coaches—in part because it was so different from most of what you see in the NFL, with a real effort to stretch a defense vertically and horizontally through creative formations and spacing. I remember one coach saying it was like the NFL’s version of having to prepare for Navy or Army, because the Cardinals were playing a different game.
I think part of what’s hard for the public to get past is Kingsbury’s roots in the college game, even though he was actually an NFL player for a time. Folks think Air Raid and tie the coach to players who haven’t made it coming out of that system. They’ll cite simple motion stats as some sort of harbinger for innovation—as if innovation can’t happen without it.
And yet, here is Kingsbury, two rounds into the playoffs, with an offense that rang up 481 yards and 45 points (O.K., maybe it’s 38, subtracting the pick-six) on Detroit; and 350 yards, 23 points and every clutch play the Commanders needed in Tampa.
Now, I don’t think Kingsbury’s going to run off at the first chance to be a head coach again. He’s still being paid by Michael Bidwill, has taken good care of his money and doesn’t need to chase the next dollar. He’s come across something pretty special in Washington, and a very special quarterback, and I think he appreciates that.
I’d say it’s time for people to start appreciating him, too.
• Is there cause for concern with Jalen Hurts?
I think there might be. He’s nicked up and has thrown for just 259 yards total in two playoff games. The stats look efficient, but the Packers and Los Angeles Rams were both able to effectively cage-rush Hurts (outside of a 44-yard burst for a touchdown on Sunday), and force Hurts to win from the pocket, which isn’t his game.
Now, the rub here is that the Commanders will have to stop Saquon Barkley on Sunday to make that matter, and stopping the run has been a problem for Washington in the playoffs. But if the defense can find a way to do that, or the offense can start fast and get out to a lead, then it’ll be really interesting to see what becomes of a Philly group that’s clearly struggling to find sustainable footing in the passing game.
• Can we stop with the How did Jalen Carter fall takes?
Everyone knew going into the 2023 NFL draft that the Georgia 3-technique was probably the class’s best player. Carter was so good that scouts would tell you in ’21, when the Bulldogs had a once-in-a-generation type of defense, and the sophomore wasn’t even starting, that he was the unit’s best prospect.
Character questions followed Carter through his time in Athens, and certainly seemed to come to roost in the street-racing tragedy of 2023—he was charged with reckless driving and racing in a crash that killed two people.
So the Eagles weren’t super scouts for trading up to take him ninth. Rather, they were in a position—with strong infrastructure, and some of Carter’s former Georgia teammates on hand—to take a risk that other teams couldn’t that high. And you can give them credit for building that foundation and making it work. But this wasn’t some diamond in the rough they’ve found, and polished.
Everyone saw, again, how good he was at the end of the Rams game. But it’s not like NFL people didn’t know Carter could become that a couple of years ago.
• Speaking of the Reid family, it’s pretty incredible to consider all the connections in this round of the playoffs that go back to the Chiefs coach.
Of course, you have both sides of the AFC title game. And then, you have Eagles GM Howie Roseman, who learned the business at the side of Reid, one of many young execs who came out of the coach’s years helming the football operation in Philly.
• If you want to know what makes a quarterback worthy of a top-of-the-market contract, look no further than the AFC game. Mahomes, of course, won back-to-back Super Bowls in the two seasons after the Chiefs traded Tyreek Hill. And now, Allen is back in the AFC title game the year after Stefon Diggs was traded away.
Big quarterback contracts can lead to tough decisions. So the quarterbacks landing those deals must be good enough to make up for what’s lost when those calls are made. It’s pretty obvious that Mahomes and Allen are.
• What do I appreciate about Nick Sirianni? He has every right to be bitter about the nonstop hot-seat discussion he’s had to endure—even after four playoff appearances in four years, a trip to the Super Bowl and now a second trip to the NFC title game.
But when we talked Sunday night, there was none of that. There was only appreciation for the game he just got to be a part of, the coaches he was around and the players he got to lead. I remember having a conversation with him a few years ago, and he had his assistants over to enjoy beers in the yard after a win, and ahead of a playoff bye. He did it, he explained, because his dad and brothers would do that after their high school games, and he was jealous since, absent a bye, NFL coaches rarely have time for stuff like that.
Anyway, I love the perspective Sirianni brings to his profession. It’s really cool and, I bet, a factor in how he’s been able to handle living in the cauldron that Philly is for an Eagles coach.
• And, finally, a tip of my cap to the crowd at Highmark Stadium. The Bills went 10–0 there this season, and now, officially, have just one year left in the old place (the new stadium is rising like a Phoenix in the parking lot). Being there Sunday night really felt like being at a community event, in a league where too many games feel like corporate functions. The fans are packed in, right on top of the field, and completely engaged the entire time.
I hope the Bills can somehow bottle whatever they’ve got there and bring it to the other side of the parking lot in 2026.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as First Look at NFL Championship Sunday: Bills and Chiefs Are Familiar Foes.
