With five weeks remaining in the regular season, the NFL playoff race is getting more jumbled by the hour, especially in the AFC, as we saw in Week 14 on Sunday.
After Josh Allen and the Buffalo Bills hung on to beat Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs in Kansas City, a whopping six AFC teams sit at 7-6, fighting over two wild-card spots. The Pittsburgh Steelers and Indianapolis Colts — who both lost this week and will meet on Saturday in Indy — hold those final positions for now via conference record tiebreaker (both are 5-4 against the AFC).
There are also three teams at 8-5, including the Chiefs, marking their worst record through 13 games since Mahomes became a starter in 2018. The other two 8-5 teams are the Cleveland Browns and the foe they beat on Sunday, the Jacksonville Jaguars, as 38-year-old Joe Flacco bested a hobbled Trevor Lawrence. Flacco wasn’t the only backup quarterback in the AFC North to lead his team to victory, as Jake Browning and the Cincinnati Bengals routed the Colts, briefly moving into playoff position before Sunday’s late-afternoon window shook things up again.
Meanwhile, the Baltimore Ravens (10-3) survived the Los Angeles Rams in overtime to take the lead in the race for the AFC’s top seed, a half-game ahead of the Miami Dolphins (9-3), who play the Tennessee Titans on Monday night. The Chiefs have fallen two games back of Baltimore.
In the NFC, the San Francisco 49ers took care of business against the Seattle Seahawks to get to 10-3, putting extra pressure on the Philadelphia Eagles (10-2) ahead of their Sunday night showdown in Dallas against the 9-3 Cowboys. The race for the NFC South slipped into a three-way tie, with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers holding the tiebreaker after beating the Atlanta Falcons on the road.
The Athletic NFL writers Mike Jones, Ted Nguyen and Dan Pompei share their thoughts on Sunday’s biggest developments.
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