We’re down to the final four teams of the NFL season, and as always it’s fun to spend this time of year trying to fit these four into a comfortable story. What is it that separates them from the rest of the league, that has them still playing while the other 28 teams are sitting at home? Of course, after the thrilling games this past weekend, it’s hard to say much separates these teams from the four they beat other than simple luck. But the lopsided contests in the first playoff round suggests at least that these top eight were part of their own tier, give or take the 49ers and the Cowboys.
As we look across these teams, there are some patterns that start to emerge. They are all very dangerous offensive teams, with just enough playmakers on the defensive side to keep them alive when their offense hits some rough patches. They aren’t going to suffocate their way through the playoffs like the 2000 Ravens or the 2015 Broncos, but they can toughen up for a game or a drive as needed.
They come about these offenses in pretty different ways though. Both Kyle Shanahan with the 49ers and Sean McVay with the Rams come from the Mike Shanahan coaching tree, but they’ve gone different routes since then, with Kyle doubling down on his father’s stylistic quirks while McVay has eased back on them to construct an offense that is a hodgepodge of different influences. Zac Taylor in Cincinnati was an assistant under McVay, but his scheme bears much greater resemblance to the spread passing attack that Joe Burrow excelled with in college. And Andy Reid continues to run a machine of his own in Kansas City, perfectly melding his West Coast background with Patrick Mahomes’s Air Raid experience.
The schemes are different, and the most important figures in them are different too. In Kansas City you have one of the league’s proven superstars at quarterback, an MVP and Super Bowl champion who is on his way to joining the pantheon of all-time greats. This weekend he’ll be facing off against Burrow, a rising star who could definitely join the Mahomes level one day, even if he hasn’t had time to prove it yet (though interestingly enough the two are only a little more than a year separated in age).
The pair in the NFC are also an interesting mirror of each other. In Los Angeles you have Matthew Stafford, a quarterback everyone has been expecting great things from since he was the top high school recruit headed to Georgia, soon to be the top overall pick. He wallowed in miserable circumstances for years in Detroit, and in his first year in Los Angeles he was pretty much the same player he’s always been. He can do some spectacular things, but he makes a couple baffling mistakes each game that prevent him from being one of the league’s elite.
Jimmy Garoppolo is probably the most fascinating member of this group. While Stafford has been given every opportunity, Garoppolo has spent most of his career just waiting to be replaced. He’s never proven to be good enough to lock down a starting job, but every time someone else comes in for him they end up performing worse. He’s a strangely similar player to Stafford though. His raw numbers are impressive on paper, but you watch him on the field and you can’t understand where these numbers come from. And for every great play he makes to extend a drive, he makes a terrible mistake to cancel it out.
The fact remains that at the quarterback position we have only one proven superstar, one potential future star, and two players who are just kind of okay. After two decades of Manning and Brady and Rodgers seeming to make deep playoff runs every year, this is a pretty new development.
Rodgers and Brady were the first and second team All Pro quarterbacks once again, and neither is left alive at this point. You see a similar pattern when you look down the All Pro teams at other positions. There is no All Pro running back remaining, one All Pro tight end, one All Pro offensive lineman, one All Pro defensive end, two All Pro defensive tackles, no All Pro linebackers, one All Pro cornerback, and no All Pro safeties. Each of the four remaining teams has a couple players on these lists, but for the most part they’re scattered around with no clear pattern.
You might have noticed one position I skipped in the previous paragraph (or spotted it in the title of this post). Of the five wide receivers who received All Pro votes this year, three of them are still alive in the playoffs. The only team left without an All Pro wide receiver is Kansas City, and they have an All Pro tight end in Travis Kelce, as well as wide receiver Tyreek Hill who made the team just a year ago.
The one thing that unifies the four remaining teams is elite wide receiver play. And this stretches down to the four who were eliminated just a week ago. Davante Adams was also first team All Pro this year. Stefon Diggs earned that honor last year. Mike Evans has recorded the longest string of seasons with 1000 yards to start a career in NFL history. And while AJ Brown may not have the resume to match the others, his talent when he’s on the field puts him in that same category.
In fact, if I was to go through and name the best receivers in the NFL, each of the final eight teams would probably have someone who ranks in the top twelve. The only members of that twelve who didn’t make the Divisional Round of the playoffs were either injured like DeAndre Hopkins and Michael Thomas, or playing for cursed franchises like Justin Jefferson and Keenan Allen.
It’s easy to write this off as a coincidence. Except that this isn’t the first time this has happened. A year ago the final four teams included Adams, Diggs, Hill, Evans, and also a healthy Chris Godwin. The year before had Adams, Hill, and the emerging rookies Brown and Deebo Samuel. The last team to make it this deep in the postseason without an elite receiver was probably the 2018 Patriots, and even they had a solid veteran in Julian Edelman and a Hall of Fame tight end in Rob Gronkowski.
It's especially interesting to look at it this year, when one of the final four teams is Cincinnati. Just nine months ago the Bengals were the subject of one of the most intense draft debates in recent memory, with sharp lines being drawn between the people who agreed with their decision to draft Ja’Marr Chase and those who thought they were making a mistake not investing in their offensive line. The latter group definitely had a strong case, after Burrow lost the second half of his rookie season to a knee injury suffered under a deluge of pressure.
Less than a year later, the debate has mostly been settled. Chase is likely to be the rookie of the year, and while the Bengals line still allows an ungodly amount of pressure—Burrow was second in the league in sacks taken and suffered nine sacks in their victory over Tennessee—it hasn’t really slowed down their offense. Meanwhile, the teams that did invest highly in offensive linemen saw limited returns even as rookies like Rashawn Slater, Penei Sewell, and Christian Darrisaw played well.
We’ve reached the point where it’s hard to argue that any position other than quarterback has more individual impact than an elite wide receiver. While pass protection is still important—look at the Rams, the best protection unit in the league—it is more a function of a unit as a whole rather than an individual player. You can design protection schemes to help weak links, but ultimately there are going to be moments where your worst offensive lineman is matched up in a situation where he has to win, and the entire unit will fail if even one piece breaks down.
It's the opposite for wide receiver. Defenses can roll coverage to a top receiving option and can try to hold him in check, but elite wide receivers typically find some way to create space a couple times a game. Just look at the Bengals a week ago. Their offense did not have a very good day against Tennessee, and what they did have came largely on the shoulders of Chase. When they couldn’t find him down the field, he took a simple screen pass for a massive gain. And when they needed a play most—with the game tied in the final minute—he beat double-coverage to get open on the sideline to get them into field goal range.
The growth of the wide receiver position has been steady over the past twenty years, and it traces itself to multiple sources. One major factor is the rise of 7-on-7 leagues for youth football players. Football is a brutal game that cannot be played year-round, but development programs have adapted, at least at some positions. Positions that demand physicality like offensive and defensive line are still out of luck, but the passing game is run pretty much year-round with 7-on-7 leagues. This has led both to greater development of traditional wide receivers, and to players who in the past might not have ended up at receiver finding opportunities there because they can train at it year-round.
The other major factor is, of course, the rule changes to increase player safety. Most of the conversations around these come back to quarterbacks, but the truth is quarterbacks have always been somewhat protected, and the changes to the rules haven’t done that much to alter how they play. They may be more willing to hold the ball under duress knowing there are limits to how much contact they can take, but this has been counteracted by schemes that have them getting the balls out of their hands faster than ever.
More than any other position wide receivers have been the real winners of these rule changes. In the old days the middle of the field was more or less a no-go zone for receivers, knowing that anything other than a perfect throw would leave them vulnerable to a devastating hit that would separate them from the ball and from their senses. But safeties and linebackers can no longer punish receivers in the way they used to, and the middle of the field is now wide open for business.
It's difficult to measure all the implications of this change. Notably it has made life a lot easier for receivers who start the play in the slot, giving them more flexibility to break inside without fear of losing their heads. The slot receiver has grown into an essential position for every offense, and many of the league’s best receivers—including Deebo Samuel and Cooper Kupp among the remaining teams—play as frequently on the interior as they do on the outside.
And the growth of the slot receiver has only made life easier for receivers playing on the outside. As offenses spread the field, it becomes a lot easier to design route combinations to stress coverage schemes. Playing traditional bracket coverage with a safety over the top is a lot harder when that safety also has to be in position to come up and make a tackle on a slot slant route. One-on-one matchups are easier to engineer and identify when the offense can drop three capable receivers on the opposite side of the formation and let them run over the middle to avoid crowding each other. Defenses need more players in coverage than ever, and the big winners are top receivers who are finding themselves with many more opportunities to simply beat the man in front of them.
The best receivers are better than ever before, and the league is also deeper with quality receiving options than ever in its history. The fact that all of the final eight teams had an elite receiver is remarkable as much for the fact that there are eight elite receivers to be found across the NFL. If a top-notch receiver is a prerequisite to being competitive, what is it that put the four teams that won last week over the top?
Obviously there were a lot of difference-makers we can point to in last week’s games, but one of the biggest differences between the teams that won and the teams that lost was (with one exception) the depth they had at the receiver position. All eight teams have elite top options in the receiving game. But the four that won did so in large part because they have quality second and third options as well.
As impactful as Chase was in key moments against Tennessee, he spent much of the game unable to do anything as the Titans threw everything they had in coverage at him. Fortunately for the Bengals, they have a quality secondary option in Tee Higgins. Higgins didn’t have a great game (he lost a couple contested catches that are supposed to be his forte), but he was able to generate consistent opportunities in the passing game, ending up with seven catches for 96 yards.
Compare that to Tennessee. AJ Brown had several spectacular plays including a one-handed touchdown grab, but outside of him they didn’t have anyone they could go to in the passing game. Their offseason acquisition of Julio Jones was supposed to add that piece to their offense, but it looks like he’s pretty much done as a major threat. Brown is all they have in the passing attack, and that wasn’t enough when they needed plays at the end of the game.
The same problem killed both Tampa Bay and Green Bay. The Buccaneers entered the season with probably the most loaded group of weapons in the league, but after Chris Godwin got hurt and Antonio Brown got kicked off the team, they were left with Evans more or less alone. Facing off against Jalen Ramsey for much of the day, Evans still managed to produce a couple big moments. But Tampa Bay’s efforts to involve Scotty Miller and Tyler Johnson didn’t get them much, and even with a good day from Rob Gronkowski they fell just short.
Green Bay has been in search of a second receiving option for years, much to the frustration of Rodgers. And against the 49ers the absence of this reliable secondary threat absolutely killed them. The 49ers were able to use the athleticism of their defensive front to corral Rodgers, preventing him from making many big plays scrambling behind the line of scrimmage. He was forced to operate entirely in structure, and the only receiver he trusts within structure is Adams. As the game wore on, he stopped even looking at other receivers, forcing the ball into double and triple coverage to his top wideout because he didn’t believe any of the others could get open.
The Rams and 49ers aren’t the best examples of teams with deep receiving corps, but this weekend they got enough from their secondary options in crucial moments to push them through to the next round. Odell Beckham has steadily increased his role every week with the Rams, and he played his best game since joining the team, ending with six catches for 69 yards and generating consistent separation on the outside whenever Stafford decided to look his way. And while it’s hard to celebrate anything for a 49ers offense that didn’t score a touchdown, at the end of the game when they needed to move the ball to get into field goal range they were able to pick up easy chunks of yards by feeding the ball to George Kittle over the middle of the field.
Of course, there was one other game that kind of breaks this pattern. Because at the end of the day both Buffalo and Kansas City deserved to be among the final four teams, and it was only luck that pushed the Chiefs forward and sent the Bills home. Kansas City of course has perhaps the best one-two punch of receiving threats in the league, and both Hill and Kelce had huge days with big plays in do-or-die situations. The Bills had the best defense in the NFL this year, but they couldn’t stop the Chiefs at the end of the game because they could not take away both of their superstar pass-catching options.
The one thing that almost got the Bills to the next round was the performance of Gabriel Davis. The Chiefs actually did manage to shut down Buffalo’s top option, holding Stefon Diggs to only 3 catches for 7 yards. But they did this at the expense of leaving their lesser cornerbacks on an island with Davis, and he absolutely demolished them, catching 8 passes for 201 yards and four touchdowns. At the end of the day, they still fell short because of their failures on the defensive side. But their talent and depth at wide receiver gave them a shot, and it will leave them in position to be contenders again in 2022.
