Could we see a Tampa Bay-Carolina championship tilt? Are last season’s Super Bowl teams cooked? We overreact to Week 13, plus fantasy football takes.
— The beautiful thing about Week 13 is that you can do the bulk of your overreacting before the weekend. Three games Thursday. One more Friday. All won by underdogs, with major impact on the standings and the playoff races. First-place teams wobbling, upstarts . uh . upstarting? Plenty of overreaction fodder on the plate before Sunday even got here.
We will have five weeks left in the 2025 NFL regular season after Monday night’s game, and some of the races that didn’t look like they were going to be races have tightened up. Some teams we take for granted as playoff teams are going to have to fight their way in. Fact is, some of the things we thought were overreactions a month or so ago are turning out not to be.
Yeah, this is the good time of year, when the weather starts to get colder and every turnover seems like it can swing a team’s entire season. As we try to figure out which overreactions might hold up and which ones are mirages, they carry a little more weight at this time of year because, again . we’re at the point where they might not be overreactions.
Jump to:
Panthers, Bucs set for Week 18 showdown?
Could AFC North winner finish below .500?
Neither Super Bowl LIX team will make it this year?
Ravens should hold off on new Jackson extension?
Cowboys are going to make the playoffs?
Fantasy-related overreactions
The first-place Buccaneers got a much-needed victory over Arizona to stop a three-game losing streak and improve to 7-5. This was important, because in Charlotte, the second-place Panthers pulled one of the biggest upsets of the season, knocking off the red-hot Rams in a game that saw Carolina run the ball 40 times and force three Matthew Stafford turnovers.
The Rams should be fine — everybody is entitled to a tough day. But this was a massive win for the Panthers heading into their very late bye week. They improved to 7-6, which means they’re only a half game behind the four-time defending division champion Bucs with five weeks left.
Carolina is the definition of an up-and-down team. It hasn’t won or lost two games in a row since mid-October. But the Panthers were ready for the Rams, who came in on a six-game winning streak with Stafford pulling away in the MVP race, and that’s enough to make you believe they’ll be ready for the Bucs.
Verdict: NOT AN OVERREACTION
The Panthers and the Bucs play twice in the final three weeks. Tampa Bay gets home games against the Saints and the Falcons in the next two weeks, which it will surely be favored to win, then plays at Carolina in Week 16, at Miami in Week 17 and home against Carolina in Week 18. The Panthers are off next week, then play the last-place Saints in Week 15 before finishing with a tough Bucs-Seahawks-Bucs stretch.
Let’s say for the sake of this argument that the Bucs go into the Week 16 matchup at 9-5 and the Panthers are 8-6. If the Panthers win that game at home, the division race will be tied with two weeks to go, which means Week 18 will almost certainly settle things. The Buccaneers are starting to get healthier, and once they do, they should be scary. But no team looked scarier than the Rams did coming into Week 13, and the Panthers knocked them off with a tough, physical run game and an undermanned but opportunistic defense. There’s no reason to think they’re going away.
Currently, no team in the AFC North is above .500. Week 13 in the black-and-blue division began with Cincinnati upsetting the Ravens in Baltimore to improve to 4-8 in Joe Burrow’s first game back from injury. That dropped the Ravens to 6-6 and left the Steelers alone in first place until they laid an absolute egg in Sunday’s home loss to the Bills and fell to 6-6 themselves.
Pittsburgh has lost five of its past seven games after a 4-1 start and looked hopeless on both sides of the ball throughout the entire second half Sunday. So the Steelers and Ravens, who play each other next week in Baltimore and again in Week 18 in Pittsburgh, are tied for first place at 6-6 with the Bengals only two games behind at 4-8.
Verdict: NOT AN OVERREACTION
Download the ESPN app and enable Adam Schefter’s news alerts to receive push notifications for the latest updates first. Opt in by tapping the alerts bell in the top right corner. For more information, click here.
We all know Mike Tomlin’s Steelers have never finished a season with a losing record, so this is a tough call to make. But my goodness, did they stink Sunday. They had 90 total yards of offense through three quarters. They ran for only 58 yards against a Bills team that was allowing 148.9 rushing yards per game (third worst in the league) going into Sunday. The Steelers‘ defense allowed Buffalo, which was playing without its two starting offensive tackles, to rush for 249 yards. Down by 16 points, Pittsburgh turned the ball over on downs at the Buffalo 9-yard line with 10:11 left in the game and didn’t get it back until it was down by 19 with 1:03 left.
