All the remaining NFL playoff teams, ranked

Anything can happen in the playoffs, and I mean anything. In just the wild-card round alone, we saw:

Two first-year starters throttle two of the best defenses in the league

The first seven-seed win a playoff game since the postseason expanded in 2020

The reigning NFC champion Eagles fall to the team with the worst record in the postseason.

The Detroit Lions win their first playoff game in 32 years

Two of our top-five playoff teams get eliminated.

Andy Reid’s mustache freeze.

This is the most wide-open the NFL playoffs have been in recent memory. That being said, somebody’s gotta win the damn thing. Let’s rank the best teams remaining in the hunt for Super Bowl LVIII.

If the Detroit Lions weren’t ending a 32-year playoff win drought, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers would be the darling underdog story of these playoffs. For good reason, too. Sure, they won a bad division with an easy schedule, but this was supposed to be a down year for Tampa Bay. Baker Mayfield was a retread quarterback on his fourth team in three years. Todd Bowles was the odds-on favorite for the first head coach fired entering the season. But the Bucs defense is still the Bucs defense. Mike Evans is still Mike Evans, and the combined efforts of this solid-on-paper team put a slept-on Bucs team two wins shy of their second Super Bowl berth in four seasons.

If we can be real, though, the Buccaneers benefitted from their wild-card matchup. They caught a Philadelphia Eagles team who had just become the sixth team to ever make the postseason after losing five of their last six games. Tampa Bay got to feast on a weakened Eagles secondary and didn’t have to worry about A.J. Brown, either. At the end of the day, Mayfield is a high-ceiling/low-floor quarterback working with one elite offensive weapon. The defense is extremely talent-rich, but it’s been rarely tested this season. Somebody had to be last.

It feels criminal to list Green Bay this low after their Sunday beatdown of the Dallas Cowboys. Jordan Love put together an immaculate playoff debut against one of the league’s best defenses. The lowly Green Bay defense stepped up to help throw dirt on the Cowboys’ grave with four sacks, two interceptions and a touchdown in one of their best outings of the season. The Packers became the first seven-seed to ever win a playoff game.

Why are they still so low, then? The Packers looked great, sure, but the defense is still a massive weak spot. Even with the dominant performance against one of the league’s best offenses, Green Bay’s defense is still 28th in weighted DVOA. They just happened to break off a few big-swing plays against a Cowboys team crippled with nearly 30 years of bad playoff mojo. San Francisco doesn’t hold that same baggage, nor do they work with an offensive play-caller as milquetoast as Mike McCarthy.

The Houston Texans are so damn fun. It’s a pretty massive statement to host the second-best defense in the league by DVOA and outright dismantle them in a fashion as convincingly as that. C.J. Stroud was dealing. Defensive mastermind DeMeco Ryans was throwing the kitchen sink at the Browns offense. The end result gave Houston its first playoff win in five years.

The only thing harder than winning a game like that is winning two games like that. Houston now goes from hosting the second-best defense to heading to the home of the league’s best defense. Ryans isn’t scheming for 39-year-old Joe Flacco, one good receiver and a handful of backup running backs. He’s facing off against the MVP favorite Lamar Jackson, one of the deepest receiving rosters in the league and the league’s best rushing attack. Houston is ahead of schedule, but a win against Baltimore would prove the Texans belong among the league’s best.

You obviously can’t discount a team with Patrick Mahomes, Andy Reid, and Travis Kelce on it. Steve Spagnuolo is also flexing a masterclass of defensive development and execution previously unseen in Kansas City. The Chiefs, by DVOA, have never had a defense this good in the history of the Mahomes-Reid era, and it’s all being done on a shoestring budget. 

One playoff game in, the Chiefs showed they don’t necessarily need to have an elite receiving corps. Rookie receiver Rashee Rice’s career night meant that he and Kelce worked with 22 of the Chiefs’ 34 targets, while Isaiah Pacheco took a career-high 24 carries. Can the Chiefs continue to operate with just three offensive weapons? Probably not, especially against a defense like Buffalo’s. But with Spagnuolo and the defense dominating the way they had, Kansas City at least proved they can be a different kind of football team than the one we typically think of them as.

They did it. The Dan Campell Lions actually did it.

After 30 years without a division title and 32 years without a playoff win, the Lions officially began a new chapter in their franchise history Sunday night by (fittingly) beating the Los Angeles Rams and longtime Lion Matthew Stafford. Detroit has now ascended past “scrappy underdog” and can firmly stake their claim as a legitimate contender for a Super Bowl.

The Lions don’t have many household names, but Detroit quietly boasts an extremely talented roster. Their offense is truly dynamic, with a dual-threat running back room led by David Montgomery and Jahmyr Gibbs, an All-Pro receiving talent in Amon-Ra St. Brown, a historic rookie tight end in Sam LaPorta, and a seemingly rejuvenated Jared Goff. The defense is almost completely homegrown, either with draft picks like Alim McNeill, Brian Branch, and Aidan Hutchinson establishing the core or veteran reclamation projects like Alex Anzalone and C.J. Gardner Johnson rounding out the unit. The group has earned its status as one of the league’s best teams, and the X-factor of head coach Campbell can elevate this group well above its weight class.

The Monday afternoon matchup against the Pittsburgh Steelers showed why Buffalo needs to be respected in the postseason despite its slow start. We knew most of the Bills’ deal up to this point. Josh Allen is still doing absurd Josh Allen things, running for 50-yard touchdowns and airing out massive passes. Stefon Diggs is still the elite WR1 we’ve known him to be. The defense is still incredibly stifling, with Sean McDermott’s crew allowing the fifth-fewest points in the league through their last five regular season games while playing the Chiefs, Cowboys, and Dolphins.

This team is more than just the well-known faces, though. The biggest plays from the Bills’ offense (non-Josh Allen category) came from relatively new players like rookie tight end Dalton Kincaid and 2022 fifth-rounder Khalil Shakir. Injuries to the defense have forced players like A.J. Klein and Dorian Williams to step up at linebacker – and step up they did. The Bills, one of the oldest rosters in the league, are deeper than initially thought. If they can continue to flex their “next-man-up” mentality and overcome their big, red playoff boogeyman next week, then it should be Super Bowl-or-bust for Buffalo.

About as good a roster as one can legally construct in the salary cap era. Say what you want about Brock Purdy, but the sophomore seventh-rounder has orchestrated the best version of Kyle Shanahan’s offense to date. Does it help to have All-Pro talent at running back, tight end, and receiver? Absolutely, but Purdy’s dealt all season long, and it helped the 49ers secure the league’s best offense by both DVOA and EPA/Play. The 49ers defense has the most vaunted front seven in football, with one of the deepest defensive line rotations in the NFL. Losing Talanoa Hufanga means San Francisco’s secondary pretty much all comes down to Charvarius Ward and some unproven talent, but the pressure gets taken off the secondary when Nick Bosa, Javon Hargrave and Chase Young are putting the pressure on.

There was a point this offseason when Lamar Jackson wanted out of Baltimore. The Ravens did everything in their power to keep him – a new OC in Todd Monken, new receiving talent in both free agency and in the draft, and a new contract. It’s all worked just as well as anyone could have hoped. Baltimore already had one of the league’s elite defenses and one of the game’s best kickers of all time. Now you pair that with an explosive offense and an MVP season out of Jackson, and you get the best team in football. If John Harbaugh’s claim that tight end Mark Andrews could return from an injury ankle sometime this postseason is true, then the Ravens might be a Super Bowl lock.