What We've Learned Before the NFL’s Conference Championships

Let's break down some odds and numbers ahead of football’s Final Four.

With Sunday’s Divisional Round games in the books, the field is set for the NFL’s Conference Championships — and it features a fascinating mix of mostly familiar powerhouses, plus one surprising upstart.

Collectively, the Chiefs, Bills, Eagles and Commanders have played the most total playoff games over the previous five seasons (33) of any NFL Final Four since the AFL merger in 1970:

Of course, nearly half of the total is being carried by Kansas City alone — seven straight conference title-game appearances will do that — with K.C. and Buffalo making up nearly 80 percent together, and Philly tacking on another 18 percent.

The only team of the group that doesn’t have such extensive playoff experience is Washington, whose only previous playoff appearance since 2015 resulted in a Wild Card loss to Tom Brady and the Buccaneers. And yet, we can be sure that the Eagles will regard the Commanders with plenty of respect after seeing what Jayden Daniels did to Detroit — more on that later — and after blowing a 27-14 fourth-quarter lead to them in late December.

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This year’s combination of experienced contenders and dark horses to be feared is reflected in the Playoff Predictor odds, which use both Elo ratings and SRS scores to simulate the remainder of the playoffs thousands of times. According to the Predictor, the Bills are favorites — but at 33 percent, only slightly ahead of the Eagles (27 percent).

🏈 2024-25 NFL Playoff Predictor 🏆

Let’s go through some of the big takeaways from those odds and other data, coming out of the Divisional Round:

• Buffalo versus Philadelphia is your most likely Super Bowl — but there’s a 65 percent chance it’s a different combo.
  
  According to the Playoff Predictor, here are the odds of each matchup going down in New Orleans on Feb. 9:
  

  Though they aren’t traditional rivals, Bills-Eagles would give us a rematch of an OT classic from the 2023 season (which Philly won, 37-34), and it would match the clear best two remaining teams in the SRS ratings.
  
  But there’s a 28 percent chance we get a rematch of Super Bowl LVII, in which the Chiefs beat the Eagles 38-35 in another classic that went down to the wire. We could also get a rematch of Super Bowl XXVI — which was less of a classic, with Mark Rypien and the Redskins rolling over Buffalo 37-24. And finally, there’s a 17 percent chance we get a Chiefs-Commanders matchup, largely a novel one in any historical sense. (The Marty Schottenheimer and/or Trent Green Bowl?)

• Bills-Chiefs is probably going to be crazy.
  
  Beyond a few other matchups such as the Bills-Ravens game we just saw, Buffalo-K.C. is one we’ve been waiting for a rematch of pretty much all season. The Bills handled Kansas City at home in November, 30-21, but the two teams have an incredibly extensive history of playoff battles in recent years. Since 2020, this is the fourth K.C./Buffalo playoff contest; that’s tied for the second-most number of times a combo of teams faced each other in the playoffs in a five-season span, trailing only the Raiders-Steelers matchup that happened every single postseason from 1972-76:
  

  We’ve seen pretty much every crazy way these games can go — except seeing Josh Allen and the Bills actually get the W over Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs. But the composite of the models thinks Buffalo ought to be favored slightly despite playing on the road.

• However the Chiefs’ season ends, we can say we saw it coming.
  
  On a related note, we’ve been talking pretty much all season about how the Chiefs’ quest for an unprecedented third straight Super Bowl hinges on how much we think their postseason experience and Mahomes’ unbeatable clutch resume trumps their good-but-not-great underlying numbers from the 2024 regular season. Because of this, the narratives over K.C.’s season will be especially dubious — but seem especially obvious in hindsight — no matter how their campaign ends.
  
  I was thinking about this as K.C. found themselves leading the Texans (who were themselves below-average by SRS during the regular season and had a banged-up C.J. Stroud) by just a single point during the fourth quarter on Saturday. If they had lost that game, we would have tsk-tsked about the obvious signs of shakiness K.C. had been showing all year long. And if they lose to Buffalo, we still might do that. But of course, if they beat the Bills again and go on to win another Super Bowl, we’ll chalk it up to the heart of a champion (or something). No matter what, we’ll have not known much about this Chiefs team for most of the year, but we’ll act like we did all along.

• Jayden Daniels might legitimately be the best rookie ever.

  

  Earlier in the year, I wrote about how Daniels was off to the best start by any rookie QB in modern NFL history. But it’s time to revise those superlatives and examine whether Daniels is actually the best rookie in NFL history, at any position, full stop.
  
  For one thing, his 20 Approximate Value (AV) this season was just the third time in NFL history that a rookie posted 20+ AV in their first season. Only two players — Patrick Peterson in 2011 (22) and Edgerrin James in 1999 (21) — were ever higher as rookies:
  

  
  No disrespect to Peterson and James — and I realize that AV is intended to balance between positions — but Daniels was the highest QB on the list, narrowly edging out Cam Newton from 2011. Because of his status in the game’s most important role, and the fact that “approximate” applies a lot more to other positions, you can easily make the argument that Daniels had the GOAT rookie regular season in 2024.
  
  And then there was his playoff performance on Saturday night:

  That resulted in the fourth-most fantasy points (25.1) by a rookie QB in a playoff game since 1966:
  

  The fact that he did it on the road against a team who had been historically good during the regular season adds to the legend of Daniels’ rookie campaign. Simply put, we’re not used to seeing players perform at this level on this stage at this position before.

• The Eagles may have the highest ceiling of any Final Four team — but who knows what to expect from them?
  
  We just got done talking about how Kansas City’s true quality is maybe the biggest unknown left to be solved in these playoffs. But Philadelphia isn’t too far behind in that regard, either.
  
  The Eagles were highly impressive in forcing four turnovers against the Packers — a theoretically very good team — and essentially never letting Jordan Love be a factor against them in the Wild Card Round. Then, against a theoretically weaker opponent on Sunday, Philly was outgained 402-350 by the L.A. Rams (which would have been much worse without a pair of Saquon Barkley TD runs that totaled 140 yards) while Matthew Stafford outplayed a gimpy Jalen Hurts, with Philly only winning in the end in part because the Rams ran out of downs on their final drive.
  
  And yet, the snowy conditions played a significant role, limiting how many conclusions we can really draw from that performance. Next weekend’s forecast at The Linc is 43 degrees and cloudy, making weather less of a factor for the NFC title game against Washington. That ought to mean the Eagles can play more to their full potential, assuming Hurts’ knee is good to go. And again, Philly’s A-game is as good as anyone’s in the league — they are 63 percent favorites to make their second Super Bowl in three years for a reason. But would anyone be surprised if they make the home crowds sweat it out to the very end next Sunday?

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CORRECTION (Jan. 20, 2025, 9:33 a.m.): An earlier version of the first chart had the incorrect Final Four team names listed by year, though it didn’t affect the overall list order. This issue has been fixed.

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