NFL Playoff Picture: Matchups, analysis for star-studded AFC, NFC Championship Games

Ralph Vacchiano

NFL Reporter

The two-time defending Super Bowl champions will play next weekend. And they’ll get to face a team they’ve knocked out of the playoffs three of the last four years. The NFL’s Final Four will also feature a possible MVP (Bills quarterback Josh Allen), the likely NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year (Commanders quarterback Jayden Daniels), and a 2,000-yard running back (Philadelphia’s Saquon Barkley) who should be the NFL’s Offensive Player of the Year.

In other words, the conference championship next Sunday will be loaded, with three of the best teams in the NFL (the Kansas City Chiefs, the Philadelphia Eagles and the Buffalo Bills), and perhaps the most surprising and exciting team and best story (the Washington Commanders). It should make for thrilling doubleheader next Sunday, and maybe an even better Super Bowl LIX two weeks after that.

Here’s a look at the matchups in the two star-studded conference championship games:

NFC

6. Washington Commanders at 2. Philadelphia Eagles

The Philadelphia Eagles have had their eyes on this game and more since they fell apart at the end of last season. This has been their reason for every move they made in the offseason. They felt it was inevitable from the moment they knew running back Saquon Barkley was on board.

So they expected to be here. The NFL expected them to be here. It felt like their destiny.

But the Washington Commanders? Nobody saw them coming — or at least nobody but them.

The upstart Commanders are the party crashers in this Final Four, which is a fitting description because this whole season has felt like a party for them. They’ve been celebrating everything since Josh Harris bought the team from Dan Snyder, then hired general manager Adam Peters and head coach Dan Quinn, and drafted quarterback Jayden Daniels. 

Everything this franchise has touched in the last year has turned to absolute gold.

It was clear all season long that they had built a strong foundation and that the future of Washington football was finally bright. But no one thought the future could actually be now. How can anyone deny that anymore, though, after what they did against the Detroit Lions on Saturday night? Daniels became the first rookie quarterback in NFL history to top 275 passing yards (299) and 50 rushing yards (51) in a playoff game. He also helped the Commanders’ offense roll to 481 yards while their defense forced five turnovers in a 45-31 divisional round win.,

The young team from D.C. feels like they can beat anyone right now. And they might be right.

But the Eagles might be their biggest test of all for this young team. Daniels doesn’t look too big for the moment. And he’ll surely remember his five-touchdown performance when they beat the Eagles in Washington 36-33 on Dec. 22. But he is working against history because no quarterback has ever led his team to a Super Bowl in his rookie year.

And to do it, he may have to carry a defense that could be particularly vulnerable to the Eagles’ brand of offense. The Commanders ranked 30th in run defense in the regular season, giving up 137.5 yards per game on the ground. And they haven’t exactly fixed that issue in the playoffs. They gave up 201 rushing yards in Detroit on Saturday night.

The Commanders also couldn’t stop Barkley in either of their regular season matchups. He ran for 146 yards and two touchdowns in the first game (a 26-18 Eagles win in Philadelphia) and 150 yards and two touchdowns in the second. And of course, he’s red hot right now, coming off his record 205-yard performance on Sunday in a 28-22 win over the Rams.

The Eagles are also 14-1 since the start of October, with their only loss coming in that game in Washington. But the Commanders are hot too, riding a seven-game winning streak into their first conference championship in 33 years. So maybe the first all-NFC East NFC Championship Game since the then-Washington Redskins lost to the New York Giants in the 1986 season was completely unexpected.

But the way these teams have been playing, maybe it shouldn’t have been a surprise at all.

AFC

2. Buffalo Bills at 1. Kansas City Chiefs 

This is the game the Buffalo Bills have wanted all along.

In their quest for their first Super Bowl appearance since the 1994 season and their first championship ever, they always knew they’d have to get through the Kansas City Chiefs to get it. The Chiefs have become the Bills’ nemesis, having knocked them out of the playoffs in three of the past four seasons.

They are the thorn in Bufflao’s side and the big obstacle the Bills knew they’d have to climb.

So when they managed to hold off the Baltimore Ravens 27-25 on Sunday — thanks to a dropped two-point conversion with 1:33 to go by Ravens tight end Mark Andrews — the Bills finally got what they have always wanted. They have a chance to exorcise their demons for real. They got a measure of satisfaction by beating the Chiefs 30-21 during the regular season, but that was in Buffalo and it was back in mid-November. This will be in front of the Chiefs home fans with everything on the line.

The Bills are certainly strong enough to finally beat them. Quarterback Josh Allen has played like an MVP all season long and threw for 262 yards and ran for 55 more in that game against the Chiefs. And the Bills defense kept Patrick Mahomes in check, holding him to 196 passing yards (albeit with three touchdown passes) and picking him off twice.

The bigger question is about the Bills’ mental toughness and whether the Chiefs are just in their heads at this point. No NFL team is more battle-tested than the Chiefs, and they proved that all season long by winning 11 one-score games. They know how to win the close ones, and they know how to beat the best teams in the postseason.

But do the Bills? They’ll find out.

Still, as tested as the Chiefs are — and they’re not just the two-time defending champs, they’ve also won the AFC four times in the last five years — there is definitely a sense that despite their gaudy record they are more vulnerable this season than they have been at any time during their dynasty. The downside of winning all those close games is that a lot of them were a lot closer than they should have been.

But are they really vulnerable? Well, the Chiefs didn’t exactly cruise past the Texans in the divisional round on Saturday. They won 23-14, so it wasn’t technically a one-score game, though their lead didn’t grow to 9 until they took an intentional safety with 11 seconds remaining. So in almost every way, this was no different than the 11 one-score games they won during the regular season. The Texans were even only down one point as the fourth quarter began.

And actually, in some ways this was even more of a struggle for the Chiefs. They had just 212 yards of offense — by far their worst output of the season if you don’t count when they rested all their starters in Week 18. And only 50 of those yards came on the ground.

Meanwhile, the Bills beat a powerful and dangerous Baltimore Ravens team in the divisional round — a team with the likely MVP in quarterback Lamar Jackson and the second most-dangerous running back in the NFL in Derrick Henry. Both of them had pretty mediocre games for them. Of course, so did Allen (who threw for just 127 yards and ran for only 20). It’s not a good sign that the Bills offense was held under 300 yards.

Maybe none of that will matter on Sunday, though, in what is surely a heavyweight matchup. In many ways, these two teams have been preparing for each other since way back in the offseason. And they have felt like they’ve been on a collision course with each other all year. 

Ralph Vacchiano is an NFL Reporter for FOX Sports. He spent the previous six years covering the Giants and Jets for SNY TV in New York, and before that, 16 years covering the Giants and the NFL for the New York Daily News. Follow him on Twitter at @RalphVacchiano.

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