After looking at what it will take to bring the the wild-card and divisional losers as well as the non-playoff teams to success in 2025, let’s examine the future of the teams who fell in the conference title games.
Washington Commanders: Lean into Jayden Daniels
I don’t want to be foolish and overpromise what the future holds for Washington. Most of all, I want to be sensitive to the fact that no matter what you hope comes next, a Conference Championship loss and missing out on a trip to the Super Bowl always stings. No destiny is promised in the NFL.
You need only look to the AFC and see that “getting back” just because your quarterback is young — unless said quarterback is Patrick Mahomes — is far from some guarantee. All those disclaimers out of the way, the Commanders should be able to walk out of a surprising postseason run with their heads held high and with wide-eyed optimism toward Phase 2 of the Jayden Daniels era.
Obviously, Daniels himself is the prime reason for optimism. Everything we’ve seen the last three weeks should only harden the Commanders’ faith that they have one of the inner-circle quarterbacks in the league. He is a defensive back-breaker as a scrambler and is highly accurate at all levels of the field. When you have a quarterback like that, you’re always in the mix. Washington has one of those guys for the first time in recent memory.
The fact that the Commanders made it this far after picking second overall in last year’s draft is a testament to the culture Dan Quinn and Adam Peters built in Year 1. That type of equity goes a long way in the building and will make this an attractive destination for outside players.
Daniels and this new group of decision-makers have set the floor for Washington. Yet, one of the biggest reasons for optimism regarding a possible future ceiling is that this is likely to be the worst supporting cast around Daniels on offense over the duration of his rookie contract.
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No disrespect to some of the role players who way exceeded expectations on the offensive line and in the pass-catching corps but those were concerns last offseason for a reason. Daniels and a surprisingly well-constructed offense by Kliff Kingsbury did a lot of work to prevent those holes from becoming cavernous but both showed up in the NFC Championship loss. Philadelphia isn’t able to press and bracket McLaurin at the rate that it did if there’s a dynamic WR2 on the field. The offensive line may not have been overmatched on the designed running back carries with a talent infusion and more depth up front.
Daniels will surely be in the mix to be the overall QB1 in fantasy football drafts this summer. There’s almost no realistic range he could go in where I wouldn’t find him an intriguing draft pick.
Daniels has the rushing ability to stave off a full sophomore collapse, even if Washington’s offense hits speed bumps like we saw with C.J. Stroud in Houston, and Daniels’ already demonstrated a passing ceiling. With skill-position additions around him, the path to sustain or even increase his passing output in Year 2 will be made significantly easier. Imagine what a Chris Godwin-type of power slot receiver, who can impact the run and pass game, would do for this offense. Godwin himself is a free agent but a receiver of that archetype is exactly what this team needs. With bushels of cap space and three picks in Rounds 1 to 3, they have the resources to accomplish these goals of making the offense more threatening while supplementing talent on defense.
Buffalo Bills: Get just a tad more dangerous
The tone of Buffalo’s postmortem is quite a bit less rosy than its NFC counterparts, both because this was just another episode of the recurring postseason nightmare it cannot escape but also given the dangerously simple path forward to make another run.
The Bills have to leave this postseason feeling as haunted as ever. Not just that they lost to Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs, again, but because of how close these two teams felt both throughout the course of the season and on Sunday night.
To lose ever so slightly on the margins once again, and fail to exorcise the demon that’s cursed your playoff dreams since you became a true contender is crushing. To lose to them when your operation has been as smooth as it was all season and there were a few chinks in their armor is all the more devastating.
The more complicated part of this for Buffalo, especially as it compares to Washington’s offseason to-do list, is that the path forward is some damning mix of simple and complex.
The Bills team we watched on Sunday night is very close to being a Super Bowl team. A few breaks in the other direction and they could have been there this season. They have the right quarterback, continuity on the offensive line and an overall good, well-coached roster.
However, you also felt like they were missing a blue-chip star on both sides of the ball — a coverage-dictating pass-catcher on offense and a game-closing edge rusher on defense. Pointing out when you don’t have those guys and projecting the impact a hypothetical version of said player could have had in big moments is easy. Finding them is not quite a bit more difficult.
There’s a feeling around the Bills offense of the relationship where you come away thinking, “We just couldn’t get the timing right.” The Bills used to have one of those blue-chip star pass-catchers in Stefon Diggs. That era ran its course, but it was incredibly productive at the time. The problem is that during the best years of that period, Buffalo never had the rushing ecosystem or bevy of complementary pass-catchers that this current version offers. That allowed opposing defenses to too easily key on taking away Diggs, sometimes successfully, in big games without fear of a run game that could take advantage of light boxes or consistent receivers able to win in plus matchups.
The Eagles are a great example of the nightmare-matchup offense the Bills could be if they find an alpha wideout. The second you forget that they have an elite wideout while dwelling on their dominant run game or quarterback-designed carries, that’s when A.J. Brown obliterates man coverage on the perimeter. That attack is on the table for Buffalo and they have the exact ecosystem to drop in that type of WR1 but again, it’s easier to say these ideas in theory than it is to find this player in practice.
Josh Allen showed without a shadow of a doubt this season that he’s one of the premier quarterbacks in the game who raises the ceiling and floor of the offense all on his own. He was the second-highest-scoring fantasy quarterback this season despite his top pass-catcher, Khalil Shakir, registering 821 yards on 97 targets. He will compete again to be the QB1 overall next season, no matter who is around him.
Allen is a talent-elevator and Buffalo has plenty of competent-to-good passing-game pieces in his orbit. With that as the setup alongside an excellent run game, we’ve seen the level this team can reach and how high Allen can fly from a production standpoint. Yet, we all know there’s another threshold in reach for both.
Identifying that is easy; finding the solution in an offseason that presents an aging free-agent receiver crop and a draft class rumored to lack the talent of the previous few years, is quite a bit more complicated.
