With the four divisional round matchups in the NFL and the College Football Playoff national championship game on Monday night, this holiday weekend is the best three days of football all year long.
Only three of the eight NFL teams—the Texans, Bills, and Rams—are back from last year’s divisional round. The rest are new entrants, a reminder of how aggressively the NFL deck reshuffled this season after several years of relative continuity at the top.
Familiar powers like the Chiefs, Ravens, and Eagles all faltered this year and made room for the league’s next wave. Four of the eight quarterbacks playing this weekend have less than three years playing experience in the NFL, and three of them are in their second year.
Let’s dive into the four matchups. All lines are from FanDuel as of Friday morning.
Buffalo Bills at Denver Broncos (-1.5)
The venue has flipped for this rematch of Buffalo’s 31-7 beatdown of the Broncos in the wild-card round last season. In that game, the Bills offense scored on six of its seven full possessions and completely shut down Bo Nix after the Broncos scored an opening-drive touchdown.
The entire matchup for Buffalo offensively hinges on the ability to run the ball effectively between the tackles. In the playoff game last season, the Bills had 41 carries for 213 yards (5.2 per carry) excluding kneel-downs. They were constantly in favorable down-and-distance scripts and it opened up the explosive passing game downfield. Denver’s run defense grades out really well overall—second in success rate allowed this year—but the Broncos can be more vulnerable to inside runs, specifically against bigger offensive fronts. Denver hasn’t allowed a 100-yard rusher since Jonathan Taylor in Week 2, but it does feel like James Cook will need to be near that number for Buffalo to feel good about its chances of winning this game.
If Buffalo does end up in obvious passing downs, it’s going to take a Herculean performance from Josh Allen to sustain consistent offense. The Broncos use man coverage at the second highest rate in the NFL, and there’s been a considerable drop-off in the Bills offensive efficiency against man defenses this season.
Bills’ Rank in EPA Per Dropback Against Man Coverage
The main reason, I think, is personnel. Receivers Tyrell Shavers and Gabe Davis picked up injuries against the Jaguars and joined Curtis Samuel and Josh Palmer on the injured reserve. That leaves the Bills dangerously thin at receiver. The group includes Brandin Cooks, Khalil Shakir, and Keon Coleman, and none of them are able to consistently separate. All rank outside the top 100 in the league in yards per route run against man coverage this season. The Bills offense also faced a similarly good run defense in Jacksonville last week and struggled to run the ball, and that could set this up for a slow-paced, low-scoring game, like many of the Broncos’ biggest games this season.
Verdict: Bet Under 46.5 (-110)
San Francisco 49ers at Seattle Seahawks (-7)
The biggest takeaway for me from the Week 18 matchup between these two teams was how little impact Christian McCaffrey and the Niners run game had. The Seahawks’ dominant run defense completely smothered them. McCaffrey finished the game with eight carries for 23 yards and didn’t have a single carry longer than 5 yards. The Seahawks run defense isn’t just the best this season by EPA per rush allowed, but it’s the best run defense of the past five seasons. Trent Williams didn’t play in the regular-season finale and he is the linchpin for the entire San Francisco offensive line. But even with him back for this game, the path to consistent rushing success seems quite daunting.
So where can the Niners find success? We’ll probably see the Niners play a lot of 21 personnel, with McCaffrey, Kyle Juszczyk, and tight end Jake Tonges replacing the injured George Kittle. Tonges hasn’t played a ton of snaps, but he has excelled in flashes when called upon as Kittle’s understudy. Tonges has posted at least 40 yards in each of the past three full games he’s played.
The Seahawks pass rush is also so elite that they’re often able to force QBs to throw to their running backs. Seattle has allowed the most receptions per game to backs this season, but ranks sixth in DVOA against them. That suggests a lot of empty-calorie receptions for McCaffrey in a Niners offense that continues to be either feast or famine on a week-to-week basis. The Niners targeted McCaffrey seven times in the last meeting and will probably look to him even more in this one.
As impressive as the Niners defense was last week in the upset win against Philadelphia, I do wonder how much of that was just the Eagles’ stunning offensive schematic ineptitude on full display. Robert Saleh decided to not bring any consistent pressure and just sit in a two-high shell. He took away explosive plays and forced the Eagles to move the ball slowly, which they really couldn’t do. The Niners defense generated a 24.3 percent pressure rate—lowest of all 12 teams who played on wild-card weekend—and the Eagles were still helpless.
I don’t have a ton of confidence this plan will work against a much better schemed offense like Klint Kubiak’s Seahawks. The Seahawks scored only 13 points in the last meeting, but they moved the ball consistently and methodically the entire game.
It should be noted that Sam Darnold popped up on the injury report with an oblique issue on Thursday. Even if he is totally fine to play, that gives coach Mike Macdonald all the more reason to be cautious protecting a lead if he has one.
Verdict: Bet Under 44.5 (-105), Jake Tonges Over 35.5 Receiving Yards (-110)
Houston Texans at New England Patriots (-3)
The Texans have tried their best to replenish the receiver depth behind Nico Collins, but his likely absence—due to a concussion he suffered last week—will be a massive loss for their offense. Collins ranked inside the top 15 in the NFL in yards per route run. The Texans do not have another receiver in the top 100 (tight end Dalton Schultz is no. 81). He’s by far their biggest explosive-play threat, and the odds of Houston sustaining any real running game against a healthy New England defensive front seems dubious.
If Collins isn’t there, and it doesn’t end up being the Woody Marks rushing game, where does Houston’s offense come from? The Texans have improved their offensive line play this season, but C.J. Stroud still looked anything but comfortable in the pocket on Monday night. The best path for the Texans offense seems to be getting the ball to Marks and Schultz, who may be able to exploit New England’s linebacker issues in coverage.
New England’s offensive output in this game will come down to one key element: How will Drake Maye handle pressure, and does that pressure ultimately result in more sacks or scrambles?
If you wanted to poke holes in Maye’s statistical profile, you could note that the Patriots are 29th in pressure to sack rate this year. A lot of that is because he’s holding on to the ball longer and trying to find the deep ball more consistently. The trade-off has certainly been a net positive for him overall. But in this matchup, against a ferocious pass rush and an elite secondary, the trade-off might not be so good. Will Anderson Jr. and Danielle Hunter are arguably the best pass rusher duo in the NFL. However, that ferocious pash rush will create opportunities for Maye to scramble, as well as find his backs out of the backfield on dump-offs.
The Texans rank third in EPA generated from sacks, but they also allow the fourth most EPA to quarterbacks when scrambling. Whether Maye is able to navigate the pocket and turn potential big negative plays into a positive scramble or two could ultimately be the difference in a game that’s very even on paper.
Verdict: Bet Woody Marks Under 55.5 Rush Yards
Los Angeles Rams (–3.5) at Chicago Bears
It’s uncanny how much the 2025 Bears season looks like an exact replica of the 2024 Commanders season. The inflection point of both seasons was even the game these teams played against each other. Last year, Washington beat Chicago on a Hail Mary and finished the rest of the regular season 6-3 before making the NFC championship game. This year, Chicago needed a late Commanders fumble to win a Monday night game and finished 8-4 en route to an NFC North title.
I’m not saying that this means the Bears will nosedive next season like the Commanders did in 2025. Chicago has done a much better job of building a sustainable roster and has a clearly excellent head coach in Ben Johnson. But like last season’s Commanders, every bounce has gone the Bears’ way late in games, helping them pull out close victories. Even last week, as Caleb Williams played the finest quarter of his young NFL career and scored 25 points in the fourth, the comeback was possible only because Green Bay’s kicker left seven points on the board. The Packers didn’t even play their cleanest offensive game and still tallied 27 points (34, if you want to count the missed kicks).
In this matchup against the Rams defense, which has struggled to cover anyone for a month, the door will remain open for another classic Caleb comeback if necessary. The question is: How deep of a hole could the Bears defense dig them into?
Along with San Francisco’s, Chicago’s defense is one of the two worst units left in the playoffs. Here’s where it ranks in several key metrics:
Chicago is below average in nearly every key defensive category and really hasn’t improved much as its secondary has gotten healthier. Now it faces the best offense in the NFL; the Rams offense is multidimensional, elite in the red zone, and should be plenty comfortable exploiting Chicago’s issues with defending the middle of the field.
The Bears should be able to hit plenty of explosive plays down the field to keep this game close, and it would not surprise me one bit if they stole it late, given how this wild magical carpet ride has played out for them. But the Rams offense vs. the Bears defense is one of the biggest mismatches of the entire playoffs, and the Rams should score consistently.
We also got a telling sign from Johnson last week that he’ll be managing the game very aggressively (some would say too aggressively) in potential fourth-down situations. Johnson knows that his defense is bad, so he has to try to optimize every offensive possession to produce points, even if his team has the ball on its side of the field. This increases the variance of offensive outcomes and could lead to a shorter field or two for the Rams offense.
Verdict: Bet Rams Team Total Over 27.5
Best Bets
Bills-Broncos Under 46.5 (–110)
49ers-Seahawks Under 44.5 (–105)
Rams team Total Over 27.5 (–110)
Woody Marks Under 55.5 yards (–110)
Jake Tonges Over 35.5 yards (–110)
Picks Against the Spread
Bills +1.5
Seattle -7
Texans +3
Rams -3.5
