The final game of the NFL season was a THRILLER! Two Canton-bound multi-time MVPs going touchdown for touchdown in the waning moments of the season, their playoff hopes on the line. Back-and-forth lead changes! Drama! What has to be the first instance of a Hall of Fame-level HEAD COACH looking directly into the camera and doing a little dance!

And so I have decided to focus on …. a missed field goal.

– Rodger Sherman

The Ravens missed the playoffs because rookie kicker Tyler Loop missed a 44-yard field goal as the clock expired. It was the most decisive miss possible. If Loop hits it, Baltimore wins 27-26, wins the AFC North, and makes the postseason. But he missed, so the Ravens lost 26-24, and the Steelers won the AFC North and the opportunity to face the Texans in the Wild Card round.

Loop’s miss came right after Steelers kicker Chris Boswell missed an extra point, despite going 42-for-42 up to that point in the season.

Sunday night’s shank-off made me wonder: In the Age of the Superkicker, how often do we see kickers miss with the game in the balance?

Not often! NFL kickers attempted 37 “last-second” field goals this season, hitting 32. (For the purposes of this exercise, we’re looking at kicks in the last 10 seconds of the fourth quarter.) Two of those misses were from 61 and 64 yards, which are tough by any standard. From under 60 yards, kickers went 32-for-35 on last-second kicks. And one of those three misses was due to a block, when the Eagles’ man-mountain combo of Jordan Davis and Jalen Carter crashed through the Rams’ line, and Davis returned the kick for a touchdown.

So on kicks under 60 yards that weren’t blocked, kickers went 32-for-34 — a 94.1 percent success rate. One of the misses was by Younghoe Koo back in Week 1, and the Falcons cut him afterwards. (He’d go on to have an embarrassing stint with the Giants, including an attemp in which he missed the football entirely.)

The other miss was by Loop on Sunday night. It was his first miss from under 50 yards all season. He’d been 29-for-29 beforehand.

In the past, game-losing, season-defining missed kicks were commonplace. Just ask the Steelers, who won games in the 2004 and 2005 NFL Playoffs thanks to last-second missed kicks by the Jets and Colts. (No, I’m not bitter at all.)

The type of back-and-forth thrillfest we saw Sunday night was way more common in 2026 than the missed kick that ended it. Hell, I can think of multiple big-time games that ended with teams trading tuddies down the stretch from December and January alone: Niners-Bears, Rams-Seahawks, Bills-Pats. Meanwhile, we virtually never saw kickers blow games all season.

That’s for the best. The near-perfect kickers help us to focus on the fun aspects of football, like dueling quarterbacks. When kickers do screw up, it’s a shock to the football senses.

There’s an old-timey football saying: “There are three things that can happen when you pass the ball, and two of them are bad.” TBH, not the most logically sound statement. There could be a pass interference penalty! Couldn’t you count “touchdowns” as a fourth thing? There’s a pretty big difference between different types of pass — we should factor that in!

The person who coined that statement also never considered the possibility of a defense as bad as the New York Jets. Against the 2026 Jets, only two things could happen when you passed the ball, and only one of them was bad. That’s because they just went an entire season without intercepting a pass.

Think about that! An entire season, without intercepting a pass. You’d think they’d get one just by chance. A quarterback losing his grip while throwing; a tipped ball that fluttered into a defender’s waiting hands; a Hail Mary at the end of the first half. Nope! Zero interceptions, for a whole season.

Let’s break down the futility:

The coup de grace for the Jets was Sunday’s game against Bills backup Mitchell Trubisky, one of the most interception-curious quarterbacks in the NFL, in his first action of the year. Didn’t matter! Trubisky torched the Jets for four touchdowns and (of course) no interceptions in one of the best games of his career.

Some of the Jet’s defensive futility was to be expected: After trading away All-Pro cornerback Sauce Gardner to the Colts midway through the season, they were left with a comically weak defense with the lowest cap hit in the NFL by more than $15 million. On Sunday, only one of the Jets’ five starters in the secondary had started the season with the team — Malachi Moore, a rookie drafted in the fourth round. Three of the starters were signed off the practice squad down the stretch.

The record was set partly due to luck. The Jets didn’t have the worst defense in the NFL this season. The Cowboys allowed more points per game and more yards per attempt. The Jets also had 67 passes defended. About 18 percent of passes defended turn into interceptions. With as many breakups as they had, the Jets probably should’ve had 10 picks. Instead, they had none!

The Jets were also victims of the way football was played in 2025. Teams threw only 0.7 interceptions per game this season, the second-fewest in league history behind 2024.

But whatever the circumstances, this is an embarrassing record for the Jets. Their head coach is Aaron Glenn, a former cornerback who started his career and made multiple Pro Bowls with the Jets. He rose through the coaching ranks as a defensive backs coach. HIS TEAM SHOULD BE GOOD AT DEFENSE! SPECIFICALLY PASS DEFENSE! WHICH THEY WERE THE WORST AT OF ALL TIME!!!!!!

These are my Jets. Their humiliations are historic and even their best ideas bust. The good news is after a pick-less season, they’re guaranteed a slew of picks in the upcoming NFL Draft. Can’t wait to see how we mess those up, too.

I’m a college football fan, so I’m used to arbitrary tiebreakers, arcane rules, and laughable processes. But the NFL is supposed to be professional — sensible, rational, mainstream. They’re supposed to have this all figured out.

But then came the Saga of the NFC South.

Starting from the top: Saturday night’s game between the 8-8 Panthers and the 7-9 Buccaneers was billed as a winner-take-all showdown to win the NFC South. Sure, both teams had negative point differentials, but so did everybody else in their division. And by winning, the Panthers could have a plus-.500 record and look somewhat respectable on the way to their first postseason since the Cam Newton era.

But the game was a hideous slopfest in the Florida rain. I have two picks for play of the game: This backwards pass that was initially ruled a forward pass, and eventually blown dead by the officials because it “went out of bounds” when it clearly did not go out of bounds at all; or this flea flicker in the Buccaneers’ red zone in which Rico Dowdle slipped and botched the pitch back to Bryce Young. I think I’m going with #2, which probably cost the Panthers three points in a game they lost by two.

After the game, the Bucs and Panthers had tied records atop the division at 8-9. They also tied on a series of tiebreaker — they split their head-to-head matchups, and both were exactly .500 against the division and the rest of the NFC. But because the Bucs had a slightly better record against the two teams’ common opponents, they had the edge to go to the postseason.

But NOT SO FAST! On Sunday, the 7-9 Falcons played the 6-10 Saints. And if the Falcons won, they would enter into a three-way tie for first place in the NFC South at 8-9, and therefore rejigger all the tiebreakers. Although Carolina and Tampa Bay were tied in a two-team head-to-head record comparison, the Panthers went 2-0 against the Falcons while the Bucs went 1-1, giving the Panthers the best record in a three-team head-to-head record comparison, despite having the worst point differential in the group.

This meant that on Sunday afternoon, the Falcons and Saints played a game to decide whether Panthers or Bucs made the playoffs. Luckily, both teams played their starting lineups, because Falcons-Saints is maybe the hateful rivalry in the NFL. (Another element of college football in this NFL story.) We got Instagram updates of Baker Mayfield sitting at home watching the game that would decide his team’s season:

Atlanta only scored one touchdown, moments after blocking a punt, but held on for a 19-17 win that sent the 8-9 Panthers to the postseason. And how did the Falcons celebrate their role in shaping the playoff picture? By firing head coach Raheem Morris and general manager Terry Fontenot.

To summarize: The Falcons and Panthers both finished 8-9. The Panthers, who lost their final two games of the regular season, will get to host a playoff game, while the Falcons, who ended the season on a four-game win streak, fired everybody responsible for being as bad as a team that made the playoffs.

And now, to bring the newsletter home: The Falcons were also one of the teams that lost on a last-second field goal like the Ravens, and they were also were one of three teams that lost to the Jets, the team that failed to record an interception all season long. If either of those things weren’t true, they would be in the playoffs instead of the Panthers, and they probably don’t fire their coaches!

🤎 Myles Garrett finally got his NFL record 23rd sack in the closing moments of the Browns’ season-ending win over the Bengals.

To me, the real highlight is Garrett’s teammate, Shelby Harris, deciding that the referee was coming over to high-five him in celebration.

🎶 Week 18 is always Third-String QB Week in the NFL, and after reviewing all of the performances, the guy who played the worst was … PACKERS QUARTERBACK CLAYTON TUNE! Tune, filling in for Jordan Love with Malik Willis injured, went 6-for-11 for 34 yards, but also lost 41 yards on sacks to end the game with minus-7 net passing yards on the day. He was only 500-ish yards short of pulling a Matt Flynn.

⁉️ A true Week 18 classic: Raiders-Chiefs finished with a 14-12 final score … and no touchdowns! Each team kicked four field goals, and the Raiders sacked Chiefs third-stringer Chris Oladokun in the end zone for a safety. It was the highest-scoring NFL game ever with no touchdowns!