How Week 16 shook up both 1-seed races: Barnwell sizes up the Seahawks, Rams, Broncos and Patriots

How can the 2025 NFL season be so settled and unsettled at the same time? Nominally, with two full weeks to go, the identities of 12 of the league’s 14 playoff teams are basically sorted, including all of the wild-card teams. After losses by the Colts in Week 15 and the Lions in Week 16, it would take something truly extraordinary for those teams to climb back into the playoff picture. The only real races left for playoff berths are in the AFC North and NFC South, where the principals will all meet in Week 18 rematches.

The seeding within and particularly at the top of those AFC and NFC brackets, though, is chaotic. The Broncos and Rams came into Week 16 as the top seeds in their respective conferences. They both left the week with losses. The Broncos are still narrowly atop the AFC, but their grip on a potential top seed and sense of invincibility have both weakened after losing their 11-game win streak Sunday.

Things are much worse for the Rams, who had seemed to have some sort of psychic hold on Sam Darnold and the Seahawks. Despite leading 30-14 with the ball and 9:39 to go, L.A. couldn’t put Seattle away Thursday. The Seahawks forced overtime, won the game on a gutsy (and thoughtful) 2-point conversion, shifting the balance of power in the NFC.

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Now, the Seahawks are the top seed in the conference. A Rams team that looked to be spending January at home in a dome might instead be traveling next month to play in the same uncomfortable conditions that ended their 2024 postseason in Philadelphia. If the 49ers win against Philip Rivers and the Colts on «Monday Night Football,» the Rams will fall all the way to the sixth spot.

Let’s touch on the race for those top seeds in both conferences. And while there are still four teams that could earn the top spot in the NFC and (somehow) six that could end up there in the AFC, I’m going to focus on the four teams who have already played this week and have at least a 20% chance of landing the top seed, per ESPN’s Football Power Index (FPI) projections. While teams like the 49ers (20.7%, pending Monday’s result), Bears (11.4%) and Jaguars (13.6%) could have everything go their way over the final two weeks of the season, our four favorites are the Broncos and Patriots in the AFC and the Seahawks and Rams in the NFC.

I’ll start by taking a look at the impact of that Rams-Seahawks game from Thursday night and what it told us about where these teams might be heading if they have another rematch come January.

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NFC

Week 16: Beat the Rams 38-37 (in overtime)
FPI odds of finishing as the NFC’s 1-seed: 47.6%

It had to feel good, right? Just a few weeks after Sam Darnold threw four interceptions in a crushing loss to the Rams, the Seahawks were down 30-14 and facing another frustrating defeat to their division rivals. Darnold had thrown two interceptions, including one near the goal line. The Seahawks didn’t have an answer for Puka Nacua. And as they were looking at being swept by the Rams and beneath them in the NFC West, the Seahawks had to realistically expect that a win on wild-card weekend would just put them up against these Rams in Los Angeles yet again, where Darnold took nine sacks in an ugly loss to end his Vikings career last January.

Rashid Shaheed won the Percy Harvin award for justifying a trade without catching a pass, as the former Saints receiver returned a punt for a touchdown to get Seattle back in the game. After the Rams went three-and-out, a Shaheed end-around took advantage of Los Angeles’ aggression and went for 31 yards. Tight end AJ Barner caught a touchdown pass on the next play, and after one of the more bizarre 2-point conversion attempts in league history ended with Zach Charbonnet sheepishly picking up a live ball in the end zone for a successful try, the game was tied.

The Rams were arguably the better team for most of the next 10 minutes. They drove into field goal range, but Harrison Mevis missed a 48-yarder that would have given them the lead with 2:11 to go. The two teams traded possessions to end regulation, but when the Rams got the ball first to start overtime, Matthew Stafford hit Nacua for a 41-yard touchdown, forcing the Seahawks to score a touchdown if they wanted to match.

But the Seahawks did more than match. Darnold had his best drive of the night, hitting Jaxon Smith-Njigba and Cooper Kupp for big completions. A bullet pass found Smith-Njigba for a touchdown. And then, with a slow-developing 2-point play, Darnold held his nerve and hit little-used blocking tight end Eric Saubert to finish the comeback and push the Seahawks atop the NFC.

For Darnold, facing the Rams has been as much about what happened last time as it is what’s about to happen. After the nine-sack game in the postseason loss with Minnesota, Darnold was sped up the first time the Rams and Seahawks played. He came off some of his reads too quickly or didn’t trust what he saw. Antsy to get the ball out, he had his worst game in a Seahawks uniform, throwing four interceptions.

In the first half Thursday, the goal seemed to be playing an entirely different style of football to avoid negative plays. Darnold has been at his best in 2025 throwing downfield off play-action, and heading into the second Rams game, his average throw had traveled 8.4 yards in the air, the sixth-deepest average toss of anybody in the NFL.

Through the first two quarters of Thursday’s game, though, Darnold had thrown only six passes. He was 4-of-6 for 72 yards, but most of those yards had come on a 46-yard screen pass to Kenneth Walker III, where the Seahawks showed play-action and sent two receivers deep before unloading a ball into the flat. Darnold’s average pass traveled just 0.8 yards in the air. Essentially, the Seahawks were limiting their exposure to Darnold.

As the Seahawks fell behind in the second half, offensive coordinator Klint Kubiak really had no choice but to put the ball back in Darnold’s hands. Darnold threw two interceptions when the Rams dropped defenders into his throwing lanes, which obviously isn’t ideal, but he went 13-of-22 for 149 yards and the touchdown pass to Smith-Njigba. His average throw traveled 6.8 yards in the air. It wasn’t the best performance, but when the Seahawks needed Darnold to win the game, he came up with a series of effective throws. That’s a major step forward versus where he had been against the Rams over the prior 12 months.

What was more notable and significant for the Seahawks in this game, perhaps, is what happened when they weren’t throwing the football. Suddenly, for the first time seemingly all season, the Seahawks had a run game! In addition to his long catch-and-run on a screen, Walker turned his 11 carries into 100 yards and a touchdown, including a 55-yard scamper. Shaheed had his 31-yard run. Charbonnet turned nine carries into 32 yards and a score, along with a critical third-down conversion just before the touchdown pass in overtime to Smith-Njigba.

Seattle generated 7.8 EPA on expected runs Thursday night. To put that in context, that was only their second game of the season with positive EPA on designed runs, joining the Week 12 win over the Titans. The Seahawks were 31st in the league in cumulative designed rush EPA and 28th in EPA per designed rush attempt heading into Week 16, ahead of only the Raiders, Saints, Jets and Cardinals — four teams who have a combined record of 13-47. You’re not supposed to be able to consistently win games in the NFL with a run game as bad as Seattle’s unit.

I’m not sure the Seahawks are ever going to be a consistently efficient rushing attack with their current personnel, but with Walker’s explosion and teams being so focused on Smith-Njigba, it’s a surprise that they haven’t been able to create more big plays on the ground. The Seahawks had just two runs of 30-plus yards all season before getting two of them in the second half on Thursday between the Shaheed end-around and the Walker 55-yard touchdown.

What might end up being meaningful is how the Seahawks finally got those explosives. Kubiak is obviously a product of the scheme his dad, Gary, learned under Mike Shanahan in Denver before coaching alongside Kyle Shanahan in Houston. That’s a scheme built around heavy play-action formed off zone runs, which was the NFL’s most popular offense before falling somewhat out of style over the past decade, as both Shanahan and Sean McVay responded to defensive shifts by building out more robust and dynamic run games with an array of gap schemes.

Kubiak’s offense isn’t all stretch zone like his dad’s attacks by any means, but according to ESPN’s run classification data, the Seahawks came into Week 16 using zone runs on 66.4% of their snaps this season, the sixth-highest rate. There’s nothing wrong with heavy doses of zone runs if they work, but the Seahawks haven’t run the ball well all year.

Walker’s touchdown run came on a gap run, with the Seahawks running duo, a core gap concept ESPN’s data suggests they run at one of the lowest rates in the league. The Rams responded to motion before the snap by stemming their line in that direction, creating more space on the backside for Walker as he exited and ran away from Rams linebacker Omar Speights, who didn’t seem to find the ball until it was too late. Center Jalen Sundell came off his initial double-team and got to block safety Kamren Kinchens, who was running to the strong side and was knocked over. Kupp flew in expecting to dig out Kinchens and didn’t even have anyone to hit. And L.A. cornerback Cobie Durant wasn’t able to contain Walker from getting outside, where Walker topped 21 miles per hour on the way to the end zone, per NFL Next Gen Stats.

next week before finishing up against the 49ers in San Francisco in Week 18. Win both those games, and the Seahawks will be the 1-seed in the NFC. Lose either, and the odds drop below 20%, although the Seahawks could lose to the Panthers and beat the 49ers and win the top seed with some help. Still, Mike Macdonald’s team won’t want to ask for any assistance.

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Week 16: Lost to the Seahawks 38-37 (in overtime)
FPI odds of finishing as the NFC’s 1-seed: 20.1%

For the Rams, meanwhile, the loss was a disaster. Stafford was seemingly on his way to winning MVP with another great prime-time performance. McVay’s team was in control of its own destiny. With the Falcons and Cardinals to come over the next two weeks, the Rams would have to avoid a repeat of their letdown loss to the Panthers, but they were going to be heavy favorites to win each of their remaining games. The path to a first-round bye and a potential return to the Super Bowl was clear.

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Now? The Rams will need help. Even if they win their final two games, they would need the Seahawks to lose one of their remaining games. They would also be in line to lose a potential tiebreaker with the Bears by virtue of Chicago’s superior record in the NFC, meaning that the Rams now also need Chicago to lose one of its final two games to claim the 1-seed after Chicago’s spectacular comeback win over Green Bay. (The Rams still have better odds to win the top seed than the Bears, per FPI, because their chances of winning their final two games are better.)

McVay has experienced an incredibly wide range of emotions during his wildly successful run as Rams head coach, but if you want to know how frustrated the Rams were by their loss, consider that McVay fired special teams coordinator Chase Blackburn after the defeat, making the former Giants linebacker the first coordinator to be fired by McVay in-season during his time running things in Los Angeles.

The Rams might have made that move after the season, given how frustrating their special teams have been, and I’m not sure moving to assistant Ben Kotwica is likely to result in dramatically different approaches to kicking and punting with two weeks left in the regular season, but that didn’t matter. This felt more emotional than logical, but we can’t really blame McVay when we think about what has happened this season. The Rams might be 14-1 with better kicking and special teams play.

In the Week 3 loss to the Eagles, then-starting kicker Joshua Karty had two fourth-quarter field goal attempts blocked, including a 44-yarder that would have won the game on the final snap. Two weeks later, against the 49ers, Karty missed a 53-yard attempt and had an extra point blocked.

After going 10-of-15 on field goal attempts and 23-of-26 on extra points, the Rams made the decision to bench Karty and replace him with Mevis, who had been perfect before missing a 48-yarder in windy conditions late Thursday night in Seattle. Shaheed also took an Ethan Evans punt to the house, and a shank on Evans’ only other punt attempt of the game set up the game-tying touchdown drive. You can replace the kicker, but if there are problems across the board, the only thing you can really do to shake things up during the season is fire the coordinator and hope it leads to different results.

The other issue the Rams faced in the loss to the Seahawks might not be as easy to fix. As talented as the Rams are at the top of their roster, and as excited as they can be about the work done by young players like Blake Corum, Emmanuel Forbes Jr. and Nate Landman in meaningful roles this season, this isn’t the deepest team in football. And the Rams felt the impact of those missing pieces in key spots on Thursday night.

At wide receiver, the Rams didn’t have veteran Davante Adams, who missed Thursday’s game with a hamstring injury. They felt the impact of his absence in the red zone, where Adams has been an absolute terror against overmatched cornerbacks. What had been the league’s third-best red zone offense, turning trips into touchdowns two-thirds of the time heading into Week 16, went 3-for-6 on red zone trips against the Seahawks. That’s basically turning one touchdown into a field goal, of course, but that would have been the difference between winning and losing.

The workload that would have gone to Adams was spread around, but the primary beneficiary was wide receiver Konata Mumpfield, who had just nine targets all season before seeing eight in Thursday’s loss. Mumpfield caught three of them for 40 yards, but he wasn’t always on the same page with Stafford, including a critical third-and-8 before the missed field goal where the Seahawks showed an all-out blitz. Stafford threw deep to Mumpfield, but the wide receiver broke off his route and ended up in the same spot as Xavier Smith, which could not have been the play design.

The first unsuccessful red zone trip nearly ended in a touchdown when Stafford found tight end Terrance Ferguson for a 1-yard score on fourth-and-goal, but the points quickly came off the board. Starting right guard Kevin Dotson had been injured on the prior play and did not return, ceding the role to reserve Justin Dedich. On his first snap of the game, Dedich inexplicably ended up several yards downfield on a play-action pass to Ferguson. The touchdown was wiped off for an illegal man downfield penalty, and the Rams settled for a field goal.

There were other regulars whom the Seahawks were still able to pick on. Kinchens had a rough game, as he was blocked out of the play on Walker’s long touchdown run and juked onto the ground when Barner switched field and ran to the corner for the game-tying 26-yard score. Durant, arguably the team’s best cornerback, couldn’t squeeze the deep out to Kupp in overtime in zone coverage and then couldn’t run with Smith-Njigba with unfavorable leverage on the ensuing touchdown.

Without Adams, we saw the Rams resort to a tactic they’ve leaned into with fun and successful results this season. For years, McVay’s offenses have been static in terms of personnel groupings by design. No team has run 11 personnel (three wideouts, one running back, one tight end) more often than McVay since he took over as Rams coach, and ideally, that has been the same 11 players on just about every snap. McVay wants everything to look identical pre- and even post-snap until it doesn’t, and lining up with the same personnel groupings allowed the Rams to base everything out of the same looks.

Once Nacua went down earlier this season, though, the Rams fell for a new tactic: 13 personnel, with three tight ends on the field at the same time. Since the Week 7 win over the Jaguars, the Rams have lined up in 13 personnel roughly 44% of the time, an unheard-of figure for an offense that might not have run more than a handful of 13 personnel snaps all season most years.

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The trend is worthy of its own story, as other teams have followed in kind by going with three tight ends and/or six offensive linemen at a higher rate than we’ve seen in recent memory, but going bigger affords offenses several advantages. If teams have athletic tight ends, they can get mismatches against opponents that are forced to match with their base defense. If defenses dare stay in nickel, well, you’ve got a huge size advantage if you want to run the ball. Pass rushers have longer paths to get to the quarterback, which helps teams operating from under center. And specialized personnel groupings shrink the defensive playbook, helping eliminate some of the more exotic looks presented by defensive coordinators and getting them to more defined checks, which McVay and the offense can then exploit.

With Adams injured on Thursday, it’s no surprise that the Rams leaned heavily into 13 personnel as their base offense. The Rams were in 13 personnel for 54 of their 88 snaps, or more than 61% of the time. If Tyler Higbee had been available to play, that figure might have been even higher. And the Rams were explosive out of those groupings, which can be a problem for other offenses when they get bigger.

The issue is that they weren’t efficient out of 13 in the second half. The Rams ran a 64% success rate out of 13 personnel in the first half, which is a truly elite rate for any offensive package. While they created explosives out of 13 in the second half, their success rate out of that grouping fell all the way to 28%, which isn’t sustainable for an offense.

And unfortunately for the Rams, the explosives weren’t enough. The 58-yard completion to Nacua at the end of the third quarter that set up a touchdown and the 41-yard score in overtime were both out of 13 personnel, but the Rams went five drives without scoring between those two big plays, including three three-and-outs. Those five failed drives in the fourth quarter might end up being the difference between finishing off the Seahawks and landing the 1-seed in the NFC or spending January on the road as a 5- or 6-seed.

AFC

Week 16: Lost to the Jaguars 34-20
FPI odds of finishing as the AFC’s 1-seed: 36.2%

Unlike the Rams, the Broncos didn’t cede first place in the AFC with their loss in Week 16. Their path to that title, though, suddenly got a lot tighter. Yes, they should have no trouble on Christmas dispatching a Chiefs team that might have lost its starting quarterback to a torn ACL for the second consecutive week, as Gardner Minshew went down in the middle of a spiritless loss to the Titans. But if the Chargers can beat the Texans next week, their rematch with the Broncos in Week 18 will be for the AFC West title.

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Sean Payton will be upset about losing, of course, but he might be even more concerned about how his team lost. If the Broncos were going to see their winning streak come to an end, it would have been fair to expect that loss to fall on the shoulders of Bo Nix, who has had both a very high ceiling and a very low floor at different times this season. If the Nix who struggled so much against teams like the Raiders and Titans earlier this season showed up here in December against the Jaguars, nobody would have been shocked by a Broncos defeat.

Instead, it was the much-vaunted Broncos defense that came up short. Trevor Lawrence has been playing great football over the past month, but it had mostly come against subpar defenses. Playing at home in front of a rabid crowd, the Broncos defense was supposed to bring Lawrence back to Earth.

But Lawrence went 23-of-36 for 279 yards and three touchdown passes, adding another score on the ground. His 87.4 Total QBR was the best mark anyone has posted in a game against the Broncos defense all season and nearly 37 points above the average for starting quarterbacks when they’ve played Vance Joseph’s unit. While Lawrence took five sacks, he lost only 14 combined yards on those plays.

The game plan wasn’t surprising. A normally efficient Jags rushing attack didn’t have a great day, as Travis Etienne Jr. and LeQuint Allen Jr. combined for 60 yards on 20 carries, but coach Liam Coen tried to get the run going. The Jaguars also wrote off throwing toward Pat Surtain II, who spent most of the day on Brian Thomas Jr. and was thrown at just one time.

Instead, the Jags were able to weaponize a few problems that have worked for other teams as they try to pierce holes in a dominant Denver defense. One was by going after Riley Moss, the other starting outside cornerback for the Broncos. According to NFL Next Gen Stats, Moss was targeted 12 times on Sunday, with opposing receivers catching eight balls for 92 yards.

Coen tried to isolate his receivers against Moss and had some success with Parker Washington, who had a career day. Washington’s biggest gain came on a 63-yard catch-and-run, where Coen built a four-strong concept to one side (four eligible receivers releasing to the same side) and isolated Washington on a speed out against Moss. Lawrence’s throw was on time, and both Moss and Talanoa Hufanga missed their tackles. Washington beat Moss on another quick out with a missed tackle for 23 more yards on the next drive.

Moss wasn’t the only one. Washington beat Ja’Quan McMillian for a big catch on a scramble drill early in the game before outjumping the slot corner for a touchdown on a fade route. Coen isolated rookie corner Jahdae Barron on one side of the field against Etienne on a wheel route as part of a mesh concept in the red zone, with Etienne escaping Barron’s tackle for a score. Coen lined up Brenton Strange as an offset H-back and then used play-action to shoot him through the middle of the offensive line like he was Nacua or Kyle Juszczyk, with Strange running a seam route past a surprised Dre Greenlaw for 23 yards. The Jaguars wanted to get one-on-ones with weaker Broncos defenders against Jacksonville’s playmakers, and that worked well for Lawrence’s offense.

The Broncos have also had some issues diagnosing and sorting out motions and stacks in recent weeks, as they allowed big plays against the Raiders and Packers in consecutive weeks on snaps where McMillian tried to signal a playcall at the snap and the defenders around him seemingly didn’t get the message. It happened again against the Jaguars, as Lawrence changed a protection at the snap versus a blitz look, forcing the Jags to change their offensive alignment. McMillian tried to signal to P.J. Locke that the safety needed to get over toward Washington in the slot, since McMillian was about to head out on a slot blitz. Instead, Locke stayed put and an uncovered Washington easily caught a pass in the flat for 20 yards.

Will teams try to exploit these same issues? Of course. Will they be as successful? Probably not. The Jags were playing in a competitive or leading game script, which didn’t leave them in many one-dimensional spots. Lawrence is playing excellent football, and when he got the ball out quickly, the Broncos didn’t really have an answer. He went 10-of-14 for 155 yards and three scores when he got the pass out within 2.5 seconds. Not everyone has that sort of quarterback or those sort of answers so quickly after the snap.

If the defense isn’t great, though, it reduces the offense’s margin for error. Nix wasn’t bad in this game, going 28-of-47 for 352 yards with a touchdown pass and a pick, but the offense needed to be better than usual. The second-year pro underthrew a pass to an open Courtland Sutton on a trick play, and while Sutton got the ball in his hands, the throw gave the defenders time to catch up and knock it out on the way down. A scrambling Nix narrowly missed Sutton on what should have been a touchdown in the fourth quarter, too, forcing the Broncos to kick a field goal down 34-17.

Those might have been partially on Sutton, but others were on Nix. Facing a fourth-and-2 with 8:12 to go, Nix seemed to pre-select a throw to Pat Bryant before the snap and threw a contested pass to his rookie wideout that fell incomplete, even while his running back was wide open at the sticks for a first down. On the ensuing drive, Nix stepped out of bounds while scrambling and trying to throw the ball away for an unnecessary sack, repeating a mistake he made last season against the Ravens.

Nix also had what was his best game as a pro last week against the Packers, so I’m not worried that there’s some sort of downward trend here. He has his strengths and weaknesses, and he’s probably best described as an inconsistent quarterback. That’s fine when you have a dominant defense, but on Sunday, the defense wasn’t dominant. And if the Broncos can’t count on their defense to suffocate playoff-caliber offenses in the AFC, well, there’s going to be a lot falling on Nix’s shoulders in the weeks to come.

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Week 16: Beat the Ravens 28-24
FPI odds of finishing as the AFC’s 1-seed: 39.9%

For reasons I don’t understand, one of the classic clichés of the football universe that pops up after long winning streaks end is the idea that a loss was somehow good. Stefon Diggs said last week’s 35-31 loss to the Bills was one the team «probably needed.» The commentary team covering the Jaguars-Broncos game wondered the same thing about Denver’s loss as their streak ended Sunday, too. I’ve never heard a team on a winning streak wish to lose, and I don’t suspect I will anytime soon, but I’m willing to believe that teams can learn from their mistakes when they do lose.

Well, if there was some sort of benefit from losing to the Bills last week, the Patriots didn’t seem to realize it in the first half against the Ravens. The Pats couldn’t match Derrick Henry’s physicality on the ground, as the star back turned 18 carries into 128 yards and two touchdowns over the course of the game. Mike Vrabel’s defense was able to gain some measure of revenge when they forced a Henry fumble and recovered it, but the run defense was a major issue for the Pats, who were missing starting linebacker Robert Spillane.

Turnovers in scoring position — a problem in the early-season loss to the Steelers — also reared their head early for Drake Maye & Co. Hunter Henry wasn’t able to bring in what should have been a Maye touchdown pass in the first quarter. That drive ended with zero points when Kayshon Boutte wasn’t able to compete on a third-and-14 curl route in the red zone, with Marlon Humphrey intercepting Maye. The Pats QB then fumbled while scrambling with 23 seconds to go in the first half, costing the Patriots three more points. If the Week 15 loss was supposed to focus and recenter the Patriots, well, they seemed on the path to being even more focused and centered next week after another defeat.

What does make life easier for a team, though, is not having to face a two-time MVP. And while the Ravens started the game with one of those on the field in Lamar Jackson, the 28-year-old left the game in the second quarter with a back injury and didn’t return. The Ravens were in position to kick a field goal when Jackson left and finished that drive with three points, getting to halftime at 10-10.

While they did add 14 more points with Tyler Huntley at quarterback in the second half, Huntley completed a total of three passes for 38 yards across both scoring possessions. When the Ravens fell behind after a late Rhamondre Stevenson touchdown, Huntley’s first throw was horizontal to Rasheen Ali for a loss of 5 yards, and his second was a checkdown fumbled away by Zay Flowers, giving the Pats the ball back. One first down later, the game was over.

There’s nothing wrong with being opportunistic. For a team that perpetually heard dismissive comments about strength of schedule all season, though, beating the Ravens without Jackson for a half will be another argument thrown in the face of Patriots fans by skeptics as the postseason approaches.

Let’s talk about that schedule, because we need to contextualize exactly what has happened here. Pro Football Reference uses a metric called the simple rating system to judge team quality, and as a result, we get each team’s respective strength of schedule in a given season. The Patriots’ strength of schedule heading into the Ravens game was 5.0 points easier than that of a league-average team.

That’s the easiest schedule in football in 2025, which shouldn’t surprise anybody. What’s more significant, perhaps, is that the Patriots have played one of the easiest schedules in modern football history. By Pro Football Reference’s measure, the Patriots have played the seventh-easiest schedule of any team since the AFL-NFL merger in 1970, and the second easiest of any team in the 21st century. Easy doesn’t cut it; we’re talking about a generational gift of a slate of opponents, and that’s without even considering getting to play the Ravens — one of the few solid teams the Pats have faced — with their backup QB in for half the game.

Should that disqualify the Patriots from being taken seriously as Super Bowl contenders? If we use the same metric and look back into the past, the answer is no. Teams with easy schedules often post gaudy regular-season records, but when the competition gets tougher in the playoffs, they don’t stop winning there, either.

Jets and Dolphins to finish the season, the Patriots should be well-positioned to pounce if the Broncos slip against the Chargers. The only thing that might be holding them back, unfortunately, is dealing with injuries of their own. They already came into the Ravens game without star defensive tackle Milton Williams (ankle) and left tackle Will Campbell (knee), both of whom are on injured reserve. Arguably the team’s two biggest offseason additions, both Williams and Campbell are expected to return for the playoffs, but they’ve been missing for weeks.

The injury bug repeatedly struck on Sunday night. The biggest name might have been rookie sensation TreVeyon Henderson, who has been a big-play machine for a Pats rushing attack that sorely lacked explosive runs in years past. Henderson was evaluated for a concussion in the second quarter and did not return, and while Stevenson did produce a 21-yard touchdown for the game-winning score, the veteran back has just five runs of 20 or more yards since the start of 2023. Henderson has six of those this season alone.

Henderson wasn’t the only one to leave injured. By the end of the game, the Patriots had lost Boutte and DeMario Douglas at receiver and defensive tackle/short-yardage fullback Khyiris Tonga. Spillane has missed the past two games with an ankle injury. Key defenders like Christian Barmore and Carlton Davis III are already banged up. The Patriots spent heavily in free agency to rebuild their roster this offseason, but there’s not a ton necessarily lurking behind those new additions.

The best thing for just about any injury is rest, and while the Pats just had a Week 14 bye, the only rest they’re going to want between now and the end of the AFC playoffs is the week off that comes with being the top seed in the conference. Losing to the Bills cost the Patriots a shot at controlling their own destiny, but if the Patriots can continue to beat inferior competition down the stretch, they’re next in line for the top spot in the AFC. And if they do land that top seed, don’t be surprised if their regular-season strength of schedule matters less than you think.