The NFL’s final four is set, and 75 percent of it is chalk, with the Chiefs, Bills, and Eagles making it to championship Sunday. The season’s scriptwriters did throw a fun surprise our way with no. 6 seed Washington rounding out the group. Despite the season’s somewhat predictable ending, it has been a fascinating one to track, with new twists and turns throughout. The NFL’s last four teams have defied some of our notions on how this league works and will be remembered as the defining teams of this year in pro football. In just a few weeks, only one will be left standing. But before the Super Bowl matchup is decided on Sunday, let’s take a look at the lessons these teams have taught us about the league over the past 20 weeks.
The Bills taught us … that just because you have a superhero QB doesn’t mean you should treat him like one all the time.
There have been plenty of signs that Josh Allen’s grown as a quarterback throughout the 2024 season. He threw a career-low six interceptions. He finished with 15 turnover-worthy plays after recording at least 22 of them in each of his first six seasons, according to Pro Football Focus. He’s also getting rid of the ball quicker than ever, which dropped his sack rate to a league-leading 2.8 percent. And the latest sign that Allen’s decision-making has matured came at the end of Buffalo’s divisional-round win over Baltimore, when he resisted the urge to return to his old reckless ways.
Allen was asked about that third-down play this week and couldn’t hold back a smile as he denied that he thought about pitching the football … before eventually admitting that a younger version of himself would have gone for the glory.
Look at that smirk on Allen’s face! He wanted to pitch that ball so badly. Allen may have matured as a quarterback, but it’s clear that he’ll always have to push back some of his wilder playmaking instincts. And this season, he’s gotten help fighting those urges from Bills offensive coordinator Joe Brady, who’s in his first full season on the job after taking over on an interim basis in 2023. I don’t want to give Brady too much credit for Allen’s improvement. Similar to past Bills offensive coordinators, Brady’s success (and growing notoriety) is mostly a product of Allen’s talent and not the other way around. But Brady doesn’t lean on his star quarterback as heavily as Brian Daboll and Ken Dorsey did while coordinating the Bills offense. Allen attempted only 483 passes in 2024, after averaging nearly 600 attempts over the previous four seasons. Brady is getting just as much use of Allen in obvious passing situations, but under his watch, the Bills have become a run-first team on early downs. That’s been his biggest departure from the Daboll and Dorsey offenses.
Bills’ First-Down Offense by Coordinator, Since 2020 (TruMedia)
As you can see in the table, the first-down results are worse under Brady. Reducing Allen’s usage rate will have that effect. But it’s also improved the overall health of the offense—more on that in a bit—and Allen’s playmaking load has been reduced. Allen no longer feels the need to make miraculous plays all the time because he’s no longer being asked to do it all the time. “We want Josh to make routine plays routinely,” Brady told former Bills center Eric Wood in July. “While Josh is capable of making incredible plays, it’s about finding the balance where he can excel without feeling the pressure to do it on every snap.”
The Bills have found that balance by quietly building one of the league’s best rushing attacks. Allen is still a big part of that sometimes, but Brady prefers to call runs from under-center formations, where the quarterbacks don’t pose the option threat they do in shotgun formations. The first-down run game isn’t any more efficient than it has been in past years—again, that’s the result of Allen being less involved. But maintaining Buffalo’s rushing efficiency without mashing the “QB run” button has been a massive accomplishment for Brady and offensive line coach Aaron Kromer. The success of the run game is no longer powered solely by Allen or the light boxes that Buffalo’s old pass-first style would draw. It’s powered by the strength of the offensive line and the new design of the run game. Buffalo has moved away from the pass-happy identity that helped it rise to the rank of contender, and Brady believes this shift could make the team a more challenging matchup in the playoffs.
“[If] the only way we can win is by running the football every week, then teams are going to load the box,” Brady said in July. “If the only way we can win is by throwing it 50 times, then eventually, teams are going to play shell defense and make you have to throw outlets. I think it’s important for our identity to understand what we’re good at. But if we can find different ways to win football games and score one more point than them, I think we’ll be a lot harder to defend.”
Don’t get it confused, though. The Bills may be more formidable in the run game now, but this remains an Allen-centric offense. When Brady’s offense falls behind the chains and gets into trouble, it’s still up to Allen to rescue it. But on the days when there’s no need for anything to be saved, there’s also no need for a hero.
The Eagles taught us … that a dominant passing game is not required to have a dominant offense.
Many NFL offenses have a run-first philosophy, but the Eagles were the one team that truly committed to the bit in 2024. Philadelphia finished the regular season with the lowest pass rate in the league, and only three teams finished with fewer net passing yards, per TruMedia. Unlike the other teams at the bottom of the league’s passing charts, the Eagles weren’t down there due to a lack of competence in the passing game. They were down there by choice.
The NFL’s Least Productive Passing Games, by Yards
Not much has changed in the postseason. Philadelphia is running the football at a slightly higher rate than it did in the regular season and is averaging just 93 passing yards through two playoff games. Opponents know the run is coming, yet they still can’t stop it. And while the numbers suggest that this isn’t the most dominant run game the Eagles have had in recent seasons, having Saquon Barkley behind the league’s best offensive line has made it the most explosive one we’ve seen in Philadelphia. Even on the rare occasion that a defense can get the better of the Eagles run game on a good chunk of downs, it takes only one or two perfectly blocked plays for Barkley to rip off a game-breaking run. Last Sunday’s divisional-round win over the Rams serves as a good example. Of Barkley’s 205 yards against Los Angeles, 140 were gained on two plays. He averaged just 2.7 yards, with a 29 percent success rate, on his other 24 carries, according to TruMedia. Down-to-down efficiency is less of a concern when you can do this:
No team makes those explosive gains look easier than the Eagles, and it’s due in large part to the brilliant simplicity of the team’s run game. Philly offensive line coach and run game coordinator Jeff Stoutland, who’s widely considered the best offensive line coach in the sport, adds extra layers to soup up his base run concepts—such as zone reads and run-pass options—but those initial concepts are very simple. Philadelphia’s most used run play is inside zone, which is as basic a run play as you’ll find in any playbook. It’s also the concept the Eagles were running on Barkley’s two long runs against Los Angeles. Stoutland said it’s the first run play he installs because of the strain the combo block by the play-side guard and center puts on a linebacker if it’s blocked correctly (and powerfully). Here’s the Eagles offensive line explaining the concept in a film breakdown in 2019:
“You have to be able to knock people off the ball in zone [run] schemes to create gap replacement by the linebackers,” Stoutland says in the clip above. When the combo blocks are displacing defensive linemen, linebackers are more likely to vacate their gaps to provide cover, which opens up lanes for Barkley to get into the second and third levels of the defense. There, he’s been the NFL’s most explosive playmaker this season.
The Eagles’ run games of the recent past may have been more efficient down to down, but they haven’t posed that kind of threat to defenses. Because of that new threat, opposing coaches have had to rethink how they approach Philadelphia’s offense. If you play a one-high shell, you leave yourself open to game-breaking runs with just one defender in the middle of the field beyond the second level. That’s how the Rams got burned last Sunday. And when teams play two-high coverage to limit home run plays in the passing game—which Philly is capable of with A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith in the mix—they have to live with giving up 6 or 7 yards per run.
2024 Eagles Run Games, Based on Safety Shell (TruMedia)
Barkley, with his explosive runs, has been the one-high beater, and the offensive line has punished two-high defenses. More often than not, defenses have opted for the one-high option, which allows them to get an extra run defender in the box. It’s really the only way to prevent successful runs on early downs and get the Eagles into obvious passing situations. But quarterback Jalen Hurts has feasted on single-high defenses this season while finding more difficulty against two-high looks.
Jalen Hurts's 2024 Passing, Based on Safety Shell (TruMedia)
It’s really a no-win situation for defenses. Even though Hurts has struggled at times this season, and the team’s passing attack has faltered, Philly’s dominant offensive line and productive run game have been able to provide the QB with clean pockets and protect him from complex coverage calls. That’s been the case for many of the winning quarterbacks across the league in 2024—but the Eagles are pushing it to the extreme, and they’re one win away from the team’s third Super Bowl appearance since 2018.
The Commanders taught us … to reconsider what makes a rookie QB pro-ready.
Jayden Daniels was the second player taken in last year’s NFL draft, but he wasn’t your standard blue-chip quarterback prospect. At 6-foot-4, Daniels had prototypical height, but he weighed only 210 pounds and had a lean frame. He paired that with a high scramble rate, so durability was a concern for scouts. Daniels also had a high pressure-to-sack rate in college, suggesting he’d take a lot of sacks in the NFL. In LSU’s offense, he mostly threw quick, short passes or vertical shots to the perimeter, so there weren’t many examples of him working the middle of the field. Daniels was also an older prospect, having played five seasons of college football. All of those combined to make many question Daniels’s pro readiness.
Even as Daniels has exceeded all expectations in Washington this season, some of those critiques have proved valid. Daniels had the league’s highest scrambling rate and suffered an injury to his ribs on a run play that affected him for weeks. He tied for the league’s fifth-highest sack rate, and he’s still not throwing to the middle of the field very often. But Daniels also finished the regular season in the top six in expected points added and QBR, and he’s one win away from becoming the first rookie quarterback to ever start a Super Bowl. It turns out that Daniels was more than ready to take on pro defenses. Pro defenses weren’t ready for him.
Commanders offensive coordinator Kliff Kingsbury deserves major credit for easing Daniels’s transition to the NFL with creative tactics that test defenses’ discipline before and after the snap. “[His] offense gives you a lot of eye candy to make sure you’re on your P’s and Q’s, and then they just run simple concepts,” former Lions defensive coordinator Aaron Glenn said ahead of Detroit’s divisional-round loss to Washington. “Which you like as an offense, because it’s easier on the players.”
Daniels can make a lot of throws with consistent accuracy and has expanded his passing range as the season has progressed, giving Kingsbury more options in his game planning. The Commanders OC has spammed no-huddle tempo and run-pass options to keep defenses honest, and in the playoffs, he’s keeping things simple for Daniels by dressing up a few core passing concepts with different formations and pre-snap motions. In the Lions game, Kingsbury found countless ways to set up Daniels to throw crossing routes against the man-heavy defense. According to TruMedia, Daniels targeted a receiver running a crossing route on nearly a third of his attempts against Detroit.
Commanders coach Dan Quinn and Kingsbury also deserve credit for viewing Daniels’s scrambling ability as a strength, not a weakness. And they’ve leaned into it to a historic degree. Daniels’s 76 scrambles didn’t just lead the NFL in 2024, but it’s also the most scrambles a QB has recorded in a season since at least 2001, per TruMedia. Those scrambles have produced 56.0 EPA for Washington’s offense and Quinn has cited them as a driving factor behind the team’s fourth-down aggressiveness. “It’s something that is part of our game,” he said after the Commanders converted three fourth downs in their wild-card win over the Buccaneers. “A lot has to do with [no.] 5. Sometimes he can make a play that … was not the huddle call, by using his legs.”
Kingsbury and Quinn haven’t tried to cram Daniels into an offense that was built for another quarterback. They didn’t stick him on the bench and attempt to coach away the idiosyncrasies in his game that allowed him to dominate at LSU. Instead, they built an offense around his unique skill set, and they let the rookie cook. And both look like better coaches for it. Kingsbury is reportedly turning down head coaching interviews, and Cowboys fans are beginning to regret the team letting Quinn leave instead of promoting him to the head job last offseason.
The Chiefs taught us … not a damn thing.
I don’t mean to dismiss what Kansas City has accomplished this season. The two-time defending champs tied for the league’s best record at 15-2, won the AFC West for the ninth straight year, and are now just two wins away from doing something no other team has been able to accomplish in the Super Bowl era: win three titles back-to-back-to-back. The 2024 Chiefs could go down as one of the most historically significant teams ever, and they deserve their proper respect. But that doesn’t mean this version of Kansas City taught us anything that we hadn’t already learned from the past versions of the Chiefs. Patrick Mahomes, Andy Reid, Steve Spagnuolo, late-game devil magic, and a few favorable calls from the referees can cover up a lot of weaknesses. That’s all I got from this team, but we already knew that.
This year’s Chiefs feel like an extension of last year’s Super Bowl–winning squad. The offense is slightly improved but still highly flawed and lacking high-end receiving talent. The defense has regressed to league average but still has Spagnuolo putting together its game plans, which made the difference last postseason. The formula for success has remained largely the same, too: keep the game close enough through the first three quarters and wait for Mahomes to make one or two plays—or for the opposing team to make one or two mistakes—that swing the game in Kansas City’s favor. And the Chiefs repeated that process seemingly every week of the regular season.
This team now defies typical analysis. The more you think about the Chiefs and how their season has played out, the harder it is to explain. Any other team with this statistical profile entering the playoffs would be dismissed as a fraud. Among postseason teams, only the Steelers, Texans, and Rams had a worse point differential. Seven teams, including the no. 7 seed Broncos, finished the regular season with a better DVOA. Yet here they are as 1.5-point favorites to make it back to the Super Bowl, and not a single one of us will be surprised if and when Mahomes and the Chiefs are hoisting another Lombardi Trophy next month. As the Patriots proved during their 19-year run, when you have the best quarterback of a generation, you’re always within arm’s reach of the top.
