December in the NFL will dawn with almost nothing decided. The standings at the top of almost every division scrunched tighter in Week 13. The identity of the league’s best team had seemingly been decided, and then the Los Angeles Rams suffered a massive upset at Carolina. The candidates to claim the top seed in both conferences are multiple. We’ve got just one more month to sort it out.
Here is what to know.
The Panthers stunned the NFL’s best team
The Carolina Panthers are a hard team to figure. Less than a month ago, they lost to the putrid New Orleans Saints at home. In three of their past six games, they have failed to crack double-digit points. Their quarterback may or may not be permitted to board certain amusement park rides. And yet here they are, forcing the league to reckon with them after one of the upsets of the season.
The Rams came into soggy Charlotte as a juggernaut, and they left with a stunning 31-28 defeat. The Panthers earned a slugfest victory with opportunistic defense and rugged offensive line play, forcing three turnovers by MVP front-runner Matthew Stafford, including his first two interceptions in 10 weeks. The Panthers ran for 164 yards and yielded just two sacks.
The Panthers improved to 7-6, just a half-game behind the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the NFC South and on the periphery of the NFC wild card chase.
How have they already won more games than any Carolina team since 2022? Coach Dave Canales, an excellent game manager, has concocted an offense that takes pressure off quarterback Bryce Young. On Sunday, the Panthers struggled to generate explosive pass plays against the Rams, who use more dime formations than any defense in the NFL. Canales twice leveraged fourth-and-short attempts — when the Rams would play with fewer defensive backs — with deep balls. Young twice burned cornerback Emmanuel Forbes Jr. in one-on-one coverage for touchdowns, the plays that made the difference in the game.
The loss carried consequences for the Rams, whose three losses have come by three points, three points and after a game-winning field goal attempt was blocked on the final snap. The Chicago Bears — the Bears?! — moved past them based on tiebreakers for the top seed in the NFC. The 49ers matched them in the win column in the NFC West, and the Seattle Seahawks can tie them at 9-3 with a victory later Sunday.
The AFC South is wide open
The Indianapolis Colts were the story of the early season, opening with a 7-1 tear that seemed to give them a hammerlock on the AFC South. Four games later, the Colts have faded and the division could be stolen by the surging Houston Texans or the lingering Jacksonville Jaguars.
The Texans toppled the Colts, 20-16, in Indianapolis, giving the Colts their third loss in four games. The Colts have not outright collapsed — those three losses came by one score, and two came on the road. But their offense has cooled off after playing like the best unit in the NFL for two months. The Colts have averaged 20 points in their past four games, and Daniel Jones has struggled to produce in late-and-close situations.
Making matters worse, cornerback Sauce Gardner, their trade-deadline swing, hobbled into the locker room with a calf injury under the assistance of two trainers.
The Jaguars obliterated the Tennessee Titans for their third straight victory and moved into a tie atop the division at 8-4 with the Colts. The Texans are 7-2 in their past nine games and have won four in a row. They’re still outside wild card position, but why couldn’t the Texans make the Super Bowl? In a conference without a dominant force, Houston plays defense better than any team does anything else. Their showdown with the Kansas City Chiefs next week, a rematch of last year’s divisional round, could be decisive for wild card positioning.
The AFC South will be decided in a handful of on-field confrontations. The Texans and Jaguars have already split their season series. But the Jaguars still play the Colts twice, including next week. And the Texans and Colts will meet again in the final week of the season.
The Eagles need to make a change
Firing the offensive coordinator of an 8-4 division leader would be an extreme measure. But the Philadelphia Eagles’s circumstances call for extremity. They have a Super Bowl-caliber roster, and based on their 24-15 Black Friday loss to the Chicago Bears, they are not functioning at a Super Bowl level. The Eagles’ offense has been listless for the majority of the season, but it was never worse than Friday, when they produced two first downs in the first half.
First-year coordinator Kevin Patullo, handpicked by Coach Nick Sirianni after Kellen Moore’s departure, has led a sagging attack. It’s not his fault that Saquon Barkley doesn’t have the same burst as last year, or that the Eagles’ offensive line is banged up, or that Jalen Hurts has struggled with accuracy on intermediate passing. But there is no reason the Eagles should be scoring on only 33.6 percent of their drives, fifth-worst in the NFL.
Moving on from Patullo wouldn’t be scapegoating. It would be acknowledging a first-year play-caller isn’t ready for the task of leading a Super Bowl repeat.
Owner Jeffrey Lurie has to be wondering — or at least should be asking himself — why the Eagles’ offense under Sirianni has performed best when overseen by a coordinator an arm’s-length from his system. Shane Steichen coaxed Hurts’s best performance in 2022 before he left to coach the Colts and the Eagles slumped in 2023. Moore, brought in by Philadelphia management, helped Philadelphia rebound last season.
At 8-4 after two straight losses, the Eagles seem closer to a 2023-style collapse than the dominant Super Bowl run they made last year.
The George Pickens trade was a Cowboys coup
Who would have thought that the Dallas Cowboys’ season might be defined by a trade other than the one that sent Micah Parsons to the Green Bay Packers? Months before the Cowboys dealt Parsons, they acquired George Pickens from the Pittsburgh Steelers for a 2026 third-rounder, plus a swap of late-round 2027 picks. Parsons has been exceptional, and the decision will reverberate in Dallas for years. But Pickens has been a revelation that could impact the Cowboys just as much.
In Thursday’s 31-28 victory over the Kansas City Chiefs, Pickens caught six passes for 88 yards, including a 39-yarder that set up the go-ahead touchdown, plus a two-point conversion. Even playing alongside CeeDee Lamb, Pickens has proven he was a No. 1 wideout hiding in plain sight, held back by the Steelers’ quarterbacking malaise. The Cowboys didn’t just trade for Lamb’s sidekick. They traded for an elite player at a premium position at the effective cost of a Day 2 pick.
Pickens ranks second in the NFL with 1,142 receiving yards, and a league-high 60 of his 73 catches have gone for first downs. That doesn’t include the yardage he has amassed through pass interference flags, at which he may the NFL’s best. Pickens is making only $3.6 million this year, and the Cowboys can franchise tag him this offseason, or use the leverage provided by the tag to help sign Pickens to an extension, devoting some of the money that would have gone to Parsons to Pickens. (Coincidentally, he’s represented by David Mulugheta, who is also Parsons’s agent.)
The Steelers, meanwhile, have shown that the damage from their post-Ben Roethlisberger failure to find a quarterback extends beyond the position. Pickens can be a headache, but the Steelers may have underestimated what they had in him because of how his quarterbacks — mostly Kenny Pickett, Mitchell Trubisky, Russell Wilson and Justin Fields — limited him. Pickens is just 24, and the Steelers replaced him with 27-year-old DK Metcalf, whom Pickens has already clearly surpassed. No matter what can be said about Jerry Jones’s dealing, he and the Cowboys aced their Pickens’ trade.
It’s getting dire for the Lions
In January 2024, after the Detroit Lions squandered a lead in the NFC championship game, Coach Dan Campbell lamented the defeated by saying the Lions, ascendant as they appeared, may have missed their best chance to win a Super Bowl. Those worries now seem prophetic. Injuries ravaged the Lions last year as they were blown out in the divisional round. With a month left this season, they may not even make the playoffs.
The Lions dropped to 7-5 with their 31-24 loss to the Green Bay Packers, the latest speed bump in a season that might be slipping away. The Lions are two games behind the Chicago Bears, who won’t stop winning, and they’re also behind the 8-3-1 Packers. Amon-Ra St. Brown left with an ankle sprain that could keep him out next Thursday for what’s become a monumental game against the Cowboys.
The Lions cannot fall back on a presumed wild card in the top-heavy NFC. After their loss dropped them 3-4 in their last seven games, the Lions are in eighth place in the conference. The San Francisco 49ers’ victory over the Cleveland Browns nudged them 1½ games ahead of the Lions in the wild card race. The Panthers eked into the wild card race with their upset of the Rams. Detroit’s next two games come at home against the surging Cowboys and at the Rams. They might decide their season, if not this era of Lions football.
The post What to know from NFL Week 13: Panthers’ upset shakes things up appeared first on Washington Post.
