The theme of the 2025 NFL playoffs has been “out with the old,” with Patrick Mahomes, Lamar Jackson, and Joe Burrow all watching from home. That theme continues in the conference championship round — for the first time in 14 years, all four participants are new from the previous season, as the Broncos host the Patriots and the Seahawks host the Rams.
Let’s take a closer look at each game:
Patriots-Broncos
▪ First some of the factoids: the Broncos are 4-1 all-time against the Patriots in the postseason, including 4-0 in Denver; the Patriots have 39 all-time postseason wins, tied with the 49ers for most in the NFL; the Broncos are looking for their ninth Super Bowl appearance, which would be second-most behind the Patriots (11).
▪ At 23 years old, Patriots quarterback Drake Maye will be the 11th quarterback under age 24 to start a conference championship game. The others are 2-10, with Dan Marino and Ben Roethlisberger the only winners.
▪ Patriots coach Mike Vrabel is just the fourth person in NFL history to lead the same team to a conference championship game as a player and coach. The others are Gary Kubiak (Broncos), Art Shell (Raiders), and Mike Ditka (Bears). Vrabel can also become the first coach since Kubiak in 2015 to lead his team to the Super Bowl in his first season.
▪ Broncos fans still hold a good amount of animosity toward former coach Josh McDaniels, but he gets nothing but love from current coach Sean Payton. The Broncos’ first player transaction after hiring Payton in 2023 was signing Jarrett Stidham as a free agent, in part because he played for McDaniels in New England and Las Vegas, which made Payton confident in Stidham’s upbringing.
“I have a ton of respect for Josh,” Payton said Wednesday. “He’s won a lot of Super Bowls. We studied his film when we look at league trends. It’s always good tape, and there’s a lot that goes into it. Josh is fantastic at putting together good plans offensively.”
▪ Payton is a fan of Vrabel, too, becoming friendly with him at league meetings when Vrabel coached the Titans.
“When the Lions were asking me about Dan Campbell (in 2021), I made this comment and it’s a compliment to both coaches. I said, ‘You’re getting an offensive version of Vrabel — a guy who was a heck of a player, tough, and their teams will reflect that,’ ” Payton said.
▪ Payton is also impressed (sensing a theme here?) by Maye’s jump from his rookie year to his second — most notably his touch on underneath throws, and his athleticism.
“I wasn’t aware, he finished the season fourth in rushing yards behind the guys that we would expect near the top,” Payton said. “He’s extremely fast and those come from obviously pocket scrambles, but he can run.”
That echoes what two Texans coaches told me after last Sunday’s game, that Maye was a better athlete than they expected.
▪ Lastly on Payton, his mentor is Bill Parcells, his former boss with the Cowboys, and they speak by phone daily, or close to it. Payton was asked if he spoke with Parcells last week about his 1990 Super Bowl run with Giants backup quarterback Jeff Hostetler, who started the final two regular season games and all three playoff games, going 5-0.
“Obviously that topic came up, and then there were other things that we discussed,” Payton said. “That injury happened a little earlier.”
▪ Strength on strength: Maye was one of the NFL’s best deep-ball passers, and the Broncos allowed the lowest completion percentage of deep passes (20.3 percent). They held Josh Allen to 0 for 9 with two interceptions in the divisional-round win over the Bills.
▪ Maye has a chance to become the first quarterback in history to win three games against top-five defenses in a single playoff. The Chargers had the No. 5 defense, the Texans No. 1, and the Broncos No. 2.
▪ The Broncos have won all three of their Super Bowls with a quarterback drafted by the Colts — two by John Elway and one by Peyton Manning. Sunday’s backup, Sam Ehlinger, was the Colts’ sixth-round pick in 2021.
▪ 49ers defensive end Keion White isn’t playing this weekend since his team was eliminated, but the collective bargaining agreement entitles him to collect a playoff check of $81,000 this week since he spent eight games on the Patriots’ roster this year. Steelers safety Kyle Dugger doesn’t qualify for the payment since he was traded to an AFC team.
▪ One of the most impressive aspects of the Patriots’ season is how they went 14-3 despite (or perhaps because of) having a lot of new faces. The Patriots had 416 regular-season appearances by players in their first season with the team, which would be the most of any team that reaches the Super Bowl. The current record is 327 games by the 2021 Bengals.
▪ Usually NFL teams live in the moment, don’t look too far ahead, and certainly don’t talk about the Super Bowl prematurely. But that seemed to be part of the Broncos’ MO last week, perhaps as Payton’s way of energizing his team in light of the Bo Nix/Stidham news.
When asked if he has a message for Denver fans for this Sunday, Payton responded that he wants them to give everything they’ve got to make life uncomfortable for the Patriots.
“They’re going to have plenty of rest after this one — two weeks,” he said, a clear reference to the Broncos making the Super Bowl.
Left tackle Garett Bolles also relayed a similar message in a one-on-one interview Wednesday.
“The job’s not done,” he said. “We got one big one coming up on Sunday, and we’ve got another one after that.”
Payton’s quote surely made its way to the Patriots’ virtual bulletin board. Bolles’s quote could be a late addition.
Rams-Seahawks
▪ The NFC Championship game promises to be an epic battle between two division rivals, the Seahawks and Rams. They split the season series, with the Rams winning, 21-19, in Los Angeles, and the Seahawks winning the more recent game, 38-37, in overtime in Seattle. The Seahawks have won eight straight since their loss to the Rams.
The Rams are 2-0 all-time against the Seahawks in the playoffs, with both victories coming in Seattle in the wild-card round (2004 and ’20).
▪ The Rams are looking to become the fifth wild-card team since the 2002 realignment to reach the Super Bowl. The others are the 2020 Buccaneers, ’10 Packers, ’07 Giants, and ’05 Steelers. The Rams are 7-9 all-time in conference championship games but have won four straight (1999, 2001, ’18, ’21).
▪ This will be just the third championship game since 1970 to feature the No. 1 scoring offense (Rams, 30.5 points per game) against the No. 1 scoring defense (Seahawks, 17.2 points per game).
The defense won the previous two battles, an Eagles win over the Cowboys in January 1981, and a Seahawks overtime win over the Packers in January 2015.
Seahawks fans also remember Super Bowl 48 when their No. 1-ranked defense blew out the Broncos’ No. 1-ranked offense, 43-8.
▪ Sunday’s game could be the best and last opportunity for Rams receiver Davante Adams to reach a Super Bowl. He went 0-4 in NFC Championship game appearances with the Packers (2014, ’16, ’19 and ’20).
“You do everything you can to get there. It’s been so hard, and [I’ve] been working so hard at it,” Adams said. “[Getting to a Super Bowl] just feels like almost a mythical thing to me at this point.”
BILLS DYSFUNCTION
Pegula’s blame game lacks for true result
Bills owner Terry Pegula hadn’t taken questions from reporters in more than six years. Wednesday, he showed why.
Pegula’s 54-minute press conference with general manager Brandon Beane to explain the firing of former coach Sean McDermott was great content for us in the media, but was a disaster if you work or root for the Bills. His explanations for firing McDermott after nine seasons should not assuage fans that Pegula is providing strong, sound leadership for the franchise.
Firing McDermott, Pegula said, came down to the loss to the Broncos in the playoffs last week and how Josh Allen was crying in the locker room. But the loss, Pegula said, came as a result of a “bad call” on Ja’Quan McMillian’s interception. So whose fault is it, the coach or the refs?
Pegula then made a couple of statements that lacked tact. First, he said McDermott’s tenure came down to “great roster, good coaching, no Super Bowl appearance,” which seems awfully simplistic and glosses over several subpar roster moves made by Beane over the last few years, particularly at receiver.
Then Pegula simultaneously crushed McDermott and receiver Keon Coleman, the 33rd overall pick in 2024 who was a healthy scratch a handful of times this year.
“The coaching staff pushed to draft Keon,” Pegula said. “I’m not saying Brandon wouldn’t have drafted him, but he wasn’t his next choice. That was Brandon being a team player and taking advice from his coaching staff, who felt strongly about the player. [Brandon] has taken for some reason heat over, but I’m here to tell you the true story.”
Fans quickly unearthed multiple videos produced by the Bills last spring in which Beane followed Coleman intently at the NFL Combine and celebrated his 40 time because it meant the Bills could plausibly draft him.
McDermott and Beane did have their disagreements on players.
One was Kaiir Elam, the Bills’ 2022 first-round pick. He is more of a press-man cornerback, and McDermott decided Elam wasn’t a good fit for his zone-based defense. Instead of adjusting his scheme, McDermott buried Elam, who was eventually bypassed on the depth chart by sixth-round pick Christian Benford and traded to the Cowboys after three seasons.
McDermott also had his flaws as a coach, struggling with game management in high-profile games and never getting the Bills over the top.
“I felt like we hit the proverbial playoff wall year after year —‘13 seconds,’ missed field goal, the catch," Pegula said. “So, I just sensed in that locker room, like, where do we go from here with what we have? And that was the basis for my decision.”
That’s a reasonable answer: After nine years and no titles, it was arguably time for a new voice for the organization.
Instead, Pegula came across as impulsive, petty, and classless. Not to mention, while Beane got a promotion to president of football operations in conjunction with McDermott’s firing, few observers across the NFL believe the Bills have a great roster outside of Allen.
“This one baffles me,” former Buccaneers coach Bruce Arians said on the “Pat McAfee Show” on ESPN. “How Brandon Beane got elevated and Sean McDermott got fired — that just blows my mind because they didn’t have any damn players.”
STRANGEST OF STORIES
Joe Mixon mystery lingers in Houston
One of the strangest stories of the season was the fate of Texans running back Joe Mixon. He suffered a mysterious foot/ankle injury over the summer that prevented him from suiting up at all in 2025, and he spent the season on the non-football injury list, which is often where players land when they get hurt away from football and the team doesn’t approve of how it happened.
The NFI list allows the Texans to withhold Mixon’s entire $7 million salary, though it is unclear if they did so. Texans general manager Nick Caserio shed the tiniest of light on the situation last week, saying Mixon didn’t do anything wrong, but still kept all details to himself.
“I’d say it was more just a medical condition or situation that really didn’t improve as much as everybody hoped,” Caserio said. “He didn’t jump off a building, he wasn’t cliff diving or anything like that, he wasn’t doing anything irresponsible. It was just a freak thing. Honestly, I’ve never seen it.”
TOUGH JOB AHEAD
“Sully and Haf” take over show in Miami
The Dolphins have yet another new leadership structure, with Jon-Eric Sullivan as the general manager and former Boston College coach Jeff Hafley as their new head coach. The duo was introduced last week as “Sully and Haf,” which sounds like a Boston buddy cop duo or a sports bar in Southie.
Sullivan, who previously spent his entire 21-year NFL tenure with the Packers, said the Dolphins need to toughen up to compete with their northeast division rivals. The Dolphins are 3-11 in December/January road games in Foxborough and Buffalo the last 15 years.
“Our division runs through Buffalo and New England and New York, cold-weather places,” Sullivan said. “There’s a saying in our business, ‘Fast gets slow but big doesn’t get small.’ We’re not going to sacrifice speed and explosion and skill for a bunch of big stiff guys, but we’re going to have substance to us at all levels of our team.”
Troy Aikman, who consulted for the Dolphins on the hires, was in attendance for the introductory press conference. Considering owner Stephen Ross tried to hire Tom Brady as his head football honcho before the Brian Flores lawsuit ruined it, I wouldn’t be surprised if Aikman eventually leaves ESPN for a top role with the Dolphins.
WHERE’S THE BEEF
NFC South to feature some meaty rivalries
Beef will be on the NFL menu in 2026.
The Buccaneers-Falcons rivalry will be must-watch in the fall after Atlanta’s coaching hire of Kevin Stefanski, whose relationship with Baker Mayfield soured when the two were in Cleveland.
Responding to a Falcons reporter’s tweet calling Mayfield a “failure” in Cleveland, Mayfield shot back that he’s “Still waiting on a text/call from [Stefanski] after I got shipped off like a piece of garbage. Can’t wait to see you twice a year, Coach.”
The AFC South also got a lot spicier with the Titans hiring Robert Saleh and having to face the Jaguars’ Liam Coen twice a year. In September, Saleh told 49ers reporters that Coen and his staff have a legal but “really advanced signal-stealing-type system,” which Coen did not appreciate.
Coen confronted Saleh after the Jaguars-49ers game, telling him to “keep my name out of your mouth.” Saleh responded, “I will [expletive] your world up. I will [expletive] end your life.” The owners meetings in March should be fun.
Extra points
Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti told Lamar Jackson he could sit in on the team’s head coaching interviews once it whittled down a list of finalists. But the Bills are having Josh Allen participate in all of their head coach interviews along with Brandon Beane and other executives … Trevor Lawrence had a solid season, but one of the five MVP finalists? Come on. He was 20th in passer rating, 28th in completion percentage, fifth in interceptions, and the Jaguars won a handful of games in spite of him … Caleb Williams’s game-tying touchdown for the Bears in the divisional-round loss to the Rams traveled 51.2 air yards, the longest completed red zone pass since at least 2016 … Does anyone want the Eagles’ offensive coordinator job? There was a lot of dysfunction in Philly last year, and Jalen Hurts doesn’t seem the easiest to work with … This marks the 15th straight year that either the Patriots or Chiefs are playing in the AFC Championship game.
Ben Volin can be reached at ben.volin@globe.com.