When we last saw our friends from the NFL playing meaningful football in February, the Kansas City Chiefs were winning the second Super Bowl of the Patrick Mahomes era, and the “NFL is scripted” bit was being memed into a fine pulp.
A primer, should you be the type of well-adjusted person who spends their time engaging in meaningful pursuits (weird!) rather than melting your eyeballs online: During the playoffs last season, former Texans running back Arian Foster said sarcastically on a podcast that the league employs screenwriters to craft the narrative of every game and season, and the joke took off. The entire Vikings season? Must have M. Night Shyamalan on staff. The Chargers blowing a 27-0 lead in the wild-card round? Perfectly in character. The NFC championship game was basically a Red Wedding rip-off with 49ers quarterbacks. The league even adopted the schtick as its major ad campaign ahead of the 2023 season, which begins tonight as the Chiefs host the Lions.
This is, of course, all fun and games (except, apparently, to Kirk Cousins, who as you can see by yet another shirtless appearance in that NFL promo, is predictably too into it). The NFL is not scripted, obviously. No self-respecting writer would do the conferences like this.
As the curtain rises on the new season, the balance between the AFC and the NFC is as tilted as a Kanye stage. The AFC has the defending Super Bowl champion Chiefs, plus another dozen or so teams with genuine playoff aspirations. With seven postseason slots for division winners and wild-card teams, at least three of the conference’s heralded quarterbacks—Mahomes, Aaron Rodgers, Justin Herbert, Trevor Lawrence, Lamar Jackson, Josh Allen, Joe Burrow, Deshaun Watson, Tua Tagovailoa, and Russell Wilson—will be done by early January. The NFC? It’s a top-heavy group, with just the Eagles, Cowboys, and 49ers, and I think the Seahawks, in the top tier of contenders. That’s four teams representing two divisions! There are AFC teams like the Patriots and Steelers, with great defenses and coaches, essentially written out (no pun intended) of true contention, while the NFC playoffs have several spots that seem virtually up for grabs. Ask yourself: Are you sure the Baker Mayfield Buccaneers can’t win the NFC South? That should send a chill down your spine.
Who are the best passers in the NFL? Who are the worst? We used film analysis, advanced stats, and more to put the league’s passers in order.
No need to just take my word for it: The lopsided nature of the league is reflected by almost every measure you could find previewing the season. Here at The Ringer, seven of the top 10 (and 10 of the top 15) teams in our power rankings are in the AFC. And we’re not alone. Six of the top 10 teams in Pro Football Focus’s rankings are in the AFC. ESPN’s Football Power Index has seven AFC teams in the top 10. The Athletic also has seven AFC teams out of the top 10 in its power rankings, and 10 out of the top 15 by the publication’s statistical model. CBS’s power rankings? Seven of 10. Raw statistics count six AFC teams in the top 10 by point differential, though the 49ers, Eagles, and Cowboys are all in the top five (though it’s worth noting that those teams played more of the subpar opponents within their own conference). Vegas even agrees; the oddsmakers at FanDuel see nine AFC teams in the top 15 by Super Bowl odds. My Ringer colleague Steven Ruiz has AFC quarterbacks in each of the top seven slots of his QB rankings, despite the fact that he has a blood pact with Geno Smith to honor. In our staffwide season predictions, only Danny Kelly was brave enough to choose a Super Bowl champion from the NFC, despite the fact that, if my math is correct, the conference is guaranteed to have 50 percent of the game’s participants.
What happened? How did it get this way?
One factor is that the big surprises of last season—that some of the NFC teams that we thought would be good actually stank—are baked into how we see the league now. The Rams posted the worst season ever by a reigning Super Bowl champion. The Cardinals followed up an 11-6 season in 2021 with a 4-13 campaign dismal enough that Kliff Kingsbury bought a one-way ticket to Thailand after it ended. The Packers, fresh off back-to-back MVP seasons from Rodgers and three straight first-place finishes in the NFC North, stumbled their way to 8-9 and found themselves learning what a darkness retreat was instead of thinking about playoff opponents in February. Tom Brady un-retired, only to put together the worst record of his career with the Buccaneers, though that was somehow still good enough to win the NFC South.
But Brady’s role in this whole scenario goes even deeper, all the way back to his Patriot days. We can directly link today’s AFC landscape, with its glut of young, talented quarterbacks, to decisions franchises made in the mid-to-late 2010s, when New England’s rivals smelled the end of the Patriots dynasty—along with the end of dominant runs by the Steelers and whatever team Peyton Manning played for in the conference, too—and decided it was time to load up. Teams like the Bills, Ravens, and Bengals, not to mention the Chiefs, hit on franchise-changing quarterbacks who have come of age and are now in their primes. Others like the Chargers and Jaguars did so, too, and are still reaping the benefits of having those players on the rookie salary scale. (Yes, Herbert may have signed an extension this offseason, but his cap hit is still $8.4 million this year.)
There’s a third factor, too, that’s a bit ironic given the latter trend. As much of the AFC went all in to fill a post-Brady void, the Chiefs are in the process of building the NFL’s newest dynasty. For as stacked as the AFC might be, it’s really Kansas City and Mahomes against everybody else, and part of the reason the conference dominates is because it contains the league’s most dominant team. This could cut either way: The best competition for the Chiefs, on paper, might be in their own division with the Chargers, and the AFC playoffs seem certain to be a gauntlet that runs through Arrowhead Stadium. On the other hand, one NFC team is guaranteed to get a shot at them, assuming they make it to the Super Bowl in Las Vegas on February 11.
Kansas City already won a title after moving on from its most dynamic skill position player, Tyreek Hill; it seems now like each season is a new exercise in Mahomes playing with a hand tied behind his back and looking just as good as before. Against an up-and-coming Lions team on Thursday, the Chiefs will likely open the season without their best skill position player in Travis Kelce, who hurt his knee in practice this week, and their best defensive player in Chris Jones, who is holding out for a new contract. And yet they’re still clear favorites—not just to beat Detroit in Week 1, but to hoist another Lombardi Trophy. Winning back-to-back Super Bowls for his second and third rings was how Brady first cemented the Patriots dynasty, and Kansas City and Mahomes are favorites to follow in that path this year.
You wouldn’t write it this way. David vs. Goliath isn’t a good story if David doesn’t ever pull off the upset. But until another team proves otherwise, “Can anybody stop the Chiefs?” is the story of the NFL for 2023 and beyond. That, and the fact that somebody is going to have to win the NFC South.
