After a trio of Wild Card matchups that weren’t exactly memorable, the AFC’s Divisional Round promises to pack a punch — and plenty of pressure.
Not all pressure is created equal, however.
The Houston Texans were playing with house money last year, and after limping into the post-season weren’t exactly expected to make a splash this January, either. But now that we’ve seen signs of life in C.J. Stroud’s offence — not to mention, the destruction this defence is capable of — all eyes are on them and whether or not they’ve got enough to challenge the champs.
Through his six seasons as an NFL starter, Patrick Mahomes has never failed to advance to the AFC Championship. He and the rest of the Kansas City Chiefs’ A-team are well-rested and perfectly positioned to advance once again. A win keeps their search for a third straight Super Bowl — a feat no other team has accomplished, and one we may never see, if the Chiefs are stumped on Saturday — alive and well and thriving. A loss to the Texans on Saturday would set the bracket on its head and open the field wide open.
If that happens, we can think of two MVP candidates hitting the field in Buffalo who would be happy to take Mahomes’ place atop the league — if they can get past one another, that is. No two quarterbacks face more pressure to advance than the two men meeting in Buffalo on Sunday night. Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen has done it all this season, but Mahomes & Co. keeps getting in his way as he tries to win it all. Lamar Jackson knows that feeling well, having run into the red and gold brick wall that is the Chiefs in last year’s AFC Championship.
Pressure? Yeah, just a little.
Here’s a look at each AFC Divisional Round matchup this weekend, with one pressing question for each contending club.
No. 4 Houston Texans @ No. 1 Kansas City Chiefs | Saturday 4:30 p.m. ET
The back-to-back champs are back in action Saturday afternoon, well-rested and ready to defend their title… again. It’s been 24 days since Patrick Mahomes and the rest of the Kansas City Chiefs’ starters last took a snap — after securing the AFC’s top seed on Christmas Day, head coach Andy Reid gave the A-Team an extra week of rest in Week 18 before their scheduled wild-card bye.
The Houston Texans, meanwhile, were supposed to be a Goliath in the league this year, after their success in 2023. Instead, they wore the label of home underdogs against the Los Angeles Chargers last week and once again aren’t being given much of a shot against the champs this Saturday. You don’t have to scroll back too far to see their last meeting — the Chiefs topped the Texans in Week 16 by a score of 27-19, with Houston not only losing the matchup but also losing receiver Tank Dell to a devastating knee injury. That loss is still being felt in a big way.
Whether or not they can pull off one of the greatest upsets in recent history will likely depend on how the answers to these two questions unfold:
One key question for the Texans: Can Houston exploit Chiefs’ o-line weakness?
Patrick Mahomes’ offence isn’t what it used to be, and yet while it no longer requires a high-scoring shootout to top the defence-heavy champs, it still requires a special performance to oust him.
That could suit Houston just fine. While Stroud showed signs of his old rookie-year magic last Sunday against the Chargers, it’s a safe bet the Chiefs’ elite defence won’t be giving Nico Collins much space. Instead, it’ll have to once again be the Texans’ defence that steps up. They were the reason for the club’s Wild Card win — they completely disrupted L.A.’s offence, intercepting the nearly unpickable Justin Herbert four times and sacking him four times.
Herbert isn’t Mahomes. No one is. Winning the turnover battle is a big ask, even for a defence whose secondary snatched up the second-most INTs this season league-wide. But Mahomes, who has typically been among the elite at playing in the face of defensive pressure, has struggled at times when blitzed this season. According to Pro Football Focus, he’s got a passer rating of just over 70 per cent when facing full-on pressure this season. He’s been playing behind a patched-up offensive line, and his 36 sacks taken through 16 games marks the highest total of his career.
That’s an area the Texans targeted when these teams last met. According to Pro Football Focus, the Texans blitzed Mahomes on 30.4 per cent of snaps when the clubs met in Week 16, and while they didn’t get the win that day they surely gleaned some insights.
The Texans registered the fourth most sacks of any defence this year, and boast the second-strongest pass rush among remaining teams.
One key question for the Chiefs: Can Worthy ride upward momentum into first playoff start?
Chiefs head coach Andy Reid wasted no time showing off the speed of his new rookie receiver earlier this season, but patience has been required as Xavier Worthy has worked to find his footing with mixed results.
There are promising signs, though, that the speedy 21-year-old can enter the post-season at close to full stride. Worthy’s coming off the best month of his rookie campaign in just about every measurable. He saw single-game career-highs in targets (11), receptions (eight), yards (79), and catch rate (88.9 per cent) all within December, and was used successfully in the run game, too, down the stretch. Two of those games coincided with Hollywood Brown’s season debut with Kansas City after having most of his first season with the Chiefs wiped out by injury.
Against Houston in Week 16, Worthy was Mahomes’ top target — he reeled in seven catches on 11 targets for 65 yards and a touchdown. We know Travis Kelce is always going to be a force in the playoffs, especially when it comes to short-yardage clutch plays. But with Worthy’s confidence up, and Brown among the healthy weapons demanding attention from Houston’s strong secondary, might Worthy have some room to run?
No. 3 Baltimore Ravens @ No. 2 Buffalo Bills | Sunday 6:30 p.m. ET
Consideration for the NFL’s MVP award is limited to the regular season, but maybe the league can make an exception this time because Sunday night’s showdown between Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson feels like a referendum on this year’s award. We could review each QB’s regular-season feats — filled with career-highs for both — but that’s not the point of this matchup. Because this isn’t really about the MVP — it’s about two elite quarterbacks vying for the opportunity to claim a different piece of hardware, which has alluded them so far in their young and illustrious careers. It’s about legacies and windows of contention and ticking clocks and rewriting the narratives that are proven right every year they fail to reach the game’s biggest stage.
The Divisional Round stage doesn’t feel like a grand enough stage for this one, does it?
One key question for the Ravens: Can the Jackson-Henry run game keep rolling?
No team racked up more rushing yards in 2024 than the Baltimore Ravens, who led the league not just in total yardage on the ground but in yards per carry (5.8), first-down success rate when rushing (29.6), and explosive runs of 20 yards or more (29).
Few teams know this better than the Bills, who fell prey back in Week 4 to Baltimore’s run-heavy gameplan. Derrick Henry had his best game of the season in Baltimore’s 35-10 statement win, rushing for 199 yards on 24 carries — including an 87-yard touchdown sprint. He caught a pass for another score, too. Between Henry and RB2 Justice Hill, running backs were responsible for four of Baltimore’s five TDs that game (Lamar Jackson had the fifth on a run of his own). Hill was used heavily in the passing game, catching a TD pass and running one in. Could he be a not-so-secret weapon in this matchup?
Not much has changed for the Ravens’ offence since then — they racked up 299 rushing yards against Pittsburgh last Saturday, with Henry posting 186 himself. A lot has changed since for the Bills, though — and that’s the key here. Buffalo was without linebackers Matt Milano and Terrel Bernard and cornerback Taron Johnson — all three of whom are vital parts of the Bills’ run defence, and all three of whom will be in the lineup Sunday night. Buffalo is a different team with those three in the lineup. Last Sunday against Denver, the unit held the Broncos to just 79 rushing yards on just 17 carries — hardly a comparison for the Ravens (it’s hard to compare any offence to the one in Baltimore) but notable considering how little the run game registered in Buffalo’s win over the Broncos.
One key question for the Bills: Can Allen get a little help?
We’ve already looked at how different today’s Bills’ defence is compared to the banged-up one that first met the Ravens back in Week 4, but what about the offence? Rookie Keon Coleman was still developing his game, Mack Hollins wasn’t at his best, and Amari Cooper was still playing for the Browns at the time. While much has been made about Allen’s ability to make magic on offence without much star-power around him, he’ll need his weapons to be at their best if he’s to solve Baltimore’s defence.
Can Cooper cause problems for the Ravens’ secondary? Is Coleman ready to hit his stride after a quiet playoff debut last week? How creative will they get with running back James Cook?
While Jackson and Henry have worked their magic on offence all year, Baltimore’s defence has been busy, too. The unit has been elite against the run all season, but the first half of the campaign revealed holes to be patched up against the pass. Safe to say, they’ve been mended — the Ravens’ defence is now running at full capacity and enters this game having held opponents to less than 20 points in five consecutive contests.
Allen, whose game relies heavily on play-action passes, failed to muster much offence that way in Week 4, thanks to Baltimore’s excellent coverage against those kinds of plays. We’re about to see just how well the Bills learned from that last experience.