2025 NFL Season 🏈 Weekly Discussion Thread – Week 17

Your Carolina fan here...

This week was weird. Last week, I confidently espoused that the Bucs would beat the Dolphins. They completely flubbed it and lost, which opened the window! ...Then Carolina promptly ignored it because they lost to Seattle. To be fair, Seattle is one of the best teams in the league AND we hung with them through most of the game. Honestly, without the untimely (and undisciplined) Jaycee Horn facemask penalty, we have a good shot of winning that game. It's wild seeing a single penalty just suck the air out of the stadium like that. At that moment, we all knew the game was over and it most definitely was. This team surely has more to go in growing and learning how to win against great teams.

That being said, there was one playoff scenario that I honestly though was too out there to even talk about last week. I mean, first of all it did involve the Bucs losing to the Dolphins, but now it ALSO needed the Falcons to somehow manage a win against the Rams. ...which they did. Despite trying their best to return to their roots and give the game away from a massive early lead. I have three takeaways from this game:

1. Next year, the Falcons are going to be a menace. Between Bijan on offense and Pierce on defense, they have a solid core forming. In fact, this whole division will be a bloodbath with the Saints recent resurgence with Shough as their QB. Even if we do manage to win the division (I like our chances now) I think we will find it hard pressed to repeat.
2. The only saving grace from them being a menace is that if they end next week with a win, they will have won 4 games in a row and likely keep their HC for at least another year. This will handicap them greatly and waste another year of performance.
3. Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstien did a great documentary series on why being a Falcons fan is suffering and watching last nights game, trying to root for the Falcons (as disgusting as that felt) reminded me of that fact. They quickly got to a 21 point lead, and then did their absolute best to squander every single point of that lead, requiring them to have a game winning field goal at the end and EVEN THEN, they were barely able to keep it together where Puca almost made the catch of the year to at least tie the game and bring it into OT.

So why do I care about how the Falcons are doing so much? Since they now are tied with the Bucs and one game behind the Panthers, there is a scenario where all three teams end up with an 8-9 record. If this happens (Where Carolina loses, but Atlanta wins next week) then there will be a three way tie that results in Carolina winning the division (3+ tiebreakers get interesting)

So now we're in a position where we can beat Tampa and secure it for ourselves (Which is doable) OR if we fail to do that, Atlanta could beat the Saints and give us that safety blanket.

What weird scenario for the end of the season.

I'm down by ~9 points in our two week championship round for Fantasy. I have far-and-away the best record in the league, but my crown is undeserved: I've had the lowest points scored against me by 2-300 compared to second place.

That all being said, I'm suffering this week in my deficit because the Patriots benched Maye mid-way through the 3rd quarter whilst destroying the Jets.

My suffering is immense.