These NFL teams got booted out of the Wild Card round — what will it take to bring them success in 2025?

Let’s examine the future of the teams who didn’t advance beyond the first round of the NFL Playoffs.

Los Angeles Chargers: Add offensive talent

No matter how the season ended, the 2024 campaign was a successful one for the new Chargers brass. That’s not to absolve Justin Herbert of a poor showing in the postseason but one loss doesn’t negate the good foundation laid by Jim Harbaugh and his staff in Year 1. This is a team that exceeded expectations and Harbaugh looks like a coach still capable of masking flaws and getting the most out of his roster.

One of the most impressive feats of the Harbaugh contingent was successfully rewiring Herbert to get him out of some bad habits that had crept into his game. Herbert had become too risk-averse and cautious as a passer in the final two years of the Brandon Staley era. Harbaugh and co. quickly empowered Herbert to let it rip and play with more reckless abandon. Herbert responded with the best season of his NFL life from an efficiency standpoint while averaging a career-high 8.6 air yards per attempt and checking in with 311 yards on scrambles, also a career-best mark.

Herbert made his share of mistakes with misfires and poor decisions on Saturday in the Wild Card loss, falling on the wrong side of the margin for error in the pursuit of aggressive play. However, if you’re not keeping the context of the Chargers’ offensive roster talent in mind, you’re being completely disingenuous.

Playoff games don’t just make talent gaps apparent; they make them impossible to ignore.

The Texans’ defensive line and the amount of stunts and games they run (fifth-most sacks off stunts in the regular season, per Fantasy Points Data) against the Los Angeles interior line, and Houston’s cornerback duo of Dererk Stingley Jr. and Kamari Lassiter, who has been playing lights-out football, vs. the Chargers non-Ladd McConkey wideouts, proved too much to bare.

GM Joe Hortiz and the Chargers front office knocked this draft out of the park. The combination of Joe Alt in Round 1 and Ladd McConkey in Round 2 was the exact remodel this team needed. Both guys look like future superstars. The problem is that the Chargers roster was in such bad shape after the sins of the previous regime the house needed a full-scale teardown and rebuild, not a mere refurbishing of a couple of bathrooms.

Per Next Gen Stats, Herbert faced 11 quick pressures (30.6% of dropbacks), including five unblocked pressures against Houston. Overall, it was the highest quick pressure rate he has faced in any career regular or postseason game. When you’re getting pressure in under 2.5 seconds, much less completely unblocked pressure on key downs, and only one receiver is getting open, you can’t run a functional offense. Add in pass-catchers like Quentin Johnston failing at the catch point on a routine basis and Will Dissly passing the ball off for pick-sixes, a losing effort turns into a nightmare.

The problem for the Los Angeles Chargers is that guys who were maximized into being solid role players like Johnston and Dissly are overcast as main target-earners in this offense. You can win in the regular season pushing guys to their talent limit. Postseason success is another story.

The Chargers took the first step in the successful rebuild. They completed a bookend tackle tandem, acquired an obvious No. 1 receiver and began to fill gaps on the defense. However, there is still a significant amount of work to be done to catch the rest of the roster up, especially on offense. We’ll be keeping a close eye on what wide receivers and tight ends end up on the Chargers’ radar to work behind Ladd McConkey, who I would take in Round 2 of a fantasy football draft without a moment’s second-guessing. Saturday’s game only confirmed his do-it-all skill set.

Pittsburgh Steelers: Stare into the abyss

I don’t say that to be faux dramatic. It feels like this is an extremely heavy offseason for the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Mike Tomlin is famous for saying, “The standard is the standard.” After the Steelers season ended exactly as it always does in recent years, one has to wonder precisely what the standard is.

Every Steelers season since 2018 has followed what’s becoming an all-too-familiar refrain. Pittsburgh has won the AFC North just once in this span and has hovered somewhere between eight to 10 wins in every other year — sufficient to cling to the “no losing seasons” line but not nearly good enough to ever be a needle-mover in the conference.

When they do make the playoffs, the Steelers are quickly bounced by one of the AFC’s Big Boy teams. The Steelers have lost their last three Wild Card playoff games to the Ravens, Bills and Chiefs by a combined 49 points. It doesn’t matter who is at quarterback either, as they had different passers in all three of those games. Russell Wilson, Mason Rudolph in for a benched Kenny Pickett and Ben Roethlisberger were at the helm for the last three postseason contests.

Lackluster, double-digit one-and-done playoff losses … that’s been the standard of the Steelers in recent seasons.

At different times, it felt like things could be different for the 2024 iteration of the franchise. The defense looked menacing at times this year, and an offense that’s typically lacked a clear vision leaned into an identity that suited their veteran starting quarterback who got off to a hot start once he entered the lineup in Week 7.

By mid-December, cracks in support beams holding up a shaky foundation began to splinter beyond repair. The team lost four straight to end the regular season when the competition got tougher and finished with the 26th-ranked offense by success rate. Making matters more troubling, they got some of the worst performances of the season from some guys who should rank among their best players as the games got tougher. George Pickens had a miserable stretch of games between Weeks 16 and 17 where his effort again came under fire, Minkah Fitzpatrick became a big problem in the secondary and even T.J. Watt barely registered a whisper of impact on the field.

It’s essentially the same season with the same ending, and it looks like nothing significant will change. Tomlin will be back and unless someone like Arthur Smith gets a head coaching gig in this cycle, I’d imagine the vast majority of the staff returns, too. This is where the Steelers have to stare into the abyss and ponder how they can avoid becoming the definition of insanity by running back the same product and expecting a different result in an AFC that’s not getting any weaker.

Pittsburgh has ranked an average of 24th in offensive success rate the last four seasons. Its offensive product has been woefully behind the rest of the actual contenders in the AFC. Missing on Kenny Pickett in the 2022 NFL Draft looms large, especially since it seems like he was only identified as their guy because he was right down the road at the University of Pittsburgh. As usual, with teams that bust out on a Round 1 quarterback that quickly, there isn’t an easy path forward.

The final five games of this season should end the idea that Russell Wilson is the answer to the problem. He might be back on some kind of stopgap deal but he has to slice off a pretty significant piece of the blame pie for how limited this team felt down the stretch. The issue is that he may end up as one of the two best available free-agent passers, and it’s a weak draft class for quarterbacks.

The murky path forward at quarterback is not an easy problem to solve. But as Tomlin said this season, he’s “well compensated,” and solving complex issues like this one is what the money is for: figure this out or risk running the hampster wheel of slightly better than average once more.

I’m not here to call for Tomlin’s job but if we don’t see major investments on the offensive side of the football by the Steelers, I’ll be the first to sound the alarm. If you can’t make up the gap at quarterback, you have to at least make the offensive ecosystem a strength. If they run back a mid-level unit captained by a stopgap quarterback supported by a run game that doesn’t provide an edge and a pass-catching corps that has a severe lack of difference-makers … prepare for the same result 365 days from now, at best.

Denver Broncos: Hone the offense around Bo Nix

Denver’s offense outkicked my expectations this season. With the rough results in 2023, the on-paper talent at the skill-position spots and a rookie quarterback under center, I projected that this could look like a bottom-10 unit.

I was wrong. Denver finished 16th in offensive success rate and 18th in EPA per play.

Sean Payton enjoying a renaissance season, Bo Nix wildly outkicking expectations and an offensive line that created a fortress of pass protection elevated this scoring unit. Still, they were just above or right around a league-average offense. And the talent gap at the skill-position spots — not that I was in love with Payton’s play-calling on Sunday — is a big reason their playoff journey ended after one contest.

This offseason should see Denver hone in on improving the playmakers around Nix. The Broncos should strongly consider beginning that journey at the running back position.

At times this season, the Denver ground game has been an efficient attack. Despite never getting consistent play from one back, the Broncos as a collective ranked 13th this season in success rate on running backs carries. That says more about the overall ecosystem and offensive line play than it does about the backs. Denver ranked 11th in yards before contact per rush by running backs and 28th in yards after contact.

Look no further than some of the teams that won this weekend for proof of concept in taking extremely gifted backs and dropping them into healthy rushing ecosystems. Derrick Henry and Saquon Barkley took already efficient run games and weaponized them with their presence. Denver should be on the lookout for such a talent, likely in the NFL Draft.

The pass-catcher corps has a number of interesting role players in Courtland Sutton’s orbit, and several of them were key contributors down the stretch. Devaughn Vele looks like a keeper as a power slot and Marvin Mims emerged as a significant cog in the machine as an explosive receiver on designed touches. This offense could benefit from one more wideout, or better yet a well-rounded tight end who can carry more of a consistent workload. Nix showed a real affinity for working the middle of the field and getting another body with route running chops in that area would be a needle-mover.

Overall, the Broncos offense is heading in the right direction. They are a sound schematic unit that can throw layers of role players at opposing defenses. Upping the high-end talent in the backfield and pass-catcher corps is the next step as Nix develops.

Green Bay Packers: Grapple with the offensive ceiling

Packers tight end Tucker Kraft said during locker room cleanout day Monday morning that “you could feel what was brewing for us,” in relation to the Packers’ early playoff exit based on how the final chapters of the season played out. The breakout second-year player went on to say the team needs to “wake up” and “walk the walk” in living out the high expectations this team brought into the 2024 season.

Poignant comments from Kraft and yet, ones that I felt weren’t just entirely in bounds but dead-on accurate regarding how much this offense was lacking against good teams down the stretch.

The Packers weren’t a bad offense by any stretch of the imagination. They ranked eighth in EPA per play on the season and 11th in success rate in games Jordan Love started. The problem is, that’s a slight dropoff from 2023 when they ranked 5th and 8th in those respective metrics. Maybe we’re splitting hairs with slight gaps in rankings and perhaps Love’s myriad injuries throughout the year make it impossible to get a clean sample. But even if you’re not willing to argue that the offense, particularly in the passing game, took a step back in 2024, you have to concede almost no one in the unit got markedly better in Love’s second full season as the starter.

That’s best expressed through the wide receiver room. It was a fascinating collection of players to debate and discuss because it was a group of second- and third-year players who were all good to some degree but lacked a true alpha receiver.

That’s about what we got in 2024; a spread-out room full of good players with something missing at the top. Dontayvion Wicks led the team in targets (76), Jayden Reed in catches and yards (55 for 857), Romeo Doubs in route participation when active (76.7%) and Christian Watson in yards per reception (21.4). Cherry on top: tight end Tucker Kraft led the team with seven receiving touchdowns. They all took turns passing off a case of the dropsies.

Everyone rotated and filled their specific role valiantly. Yet, the fact that none of these guys stepped up to become the clear lead dog in the room and impact the way defenses played the Packers offense grew to be a burden against good teams. Defenses like the Lions and Vikings outright disrespected the Packers’ passing game with the man coverage and pressure packages they threw out in Weeks 14 and 17, respectively. It was an issue again in the postseason against another top-level stop unit, as Love completed just 27% of his throws of 10-plus air yards for 58 yards and all three of his interceptions in Philadelphia.

The lack of a true No. 1 receiver doesn’t excuse Love’s mistakes, which have become a problem in big moments. The first of the three picks was his first turnover since Week 12, but those symptoms were always present even when the mistakes didn’t get into the stat sheet. Love’s accuracy has come and gone too often this season and he’s left plays on the field due to his desire to drift in the pocket and throw off his back foot.

That can create highlight-reel moments. It can just as quickly kill drives and leave open receivers without a chance to bring in the football.

All of this does intersect back at the coaching staff. Matt LaFleur is one of my favorite play-callers and offensive designers in the sport. Still, Love’s mechanical volatility and the constant receiver rotation put a hard cap on this team’s offensive ceiling. Both issues come back to coaching.

LaFleur has intended to deploy this wide receiver by committee approach since the offseason. At some point, you have to wonder if they sacrificed the development of some members of the room for the sake of rotation. Reed is a man-coverage beating receiver and has the route chops to be a leading wideout but he was strangely minimized in big games as the season went along. Love clearly needs an easy button in this passing attack and I still argue the Packers offense was at its most dangerous when Reed was prioritized as the layup target down the stretch of 2023.

The Packers do not often make big swings on veteran pass-catchers. No. 1 receivers don’t hit the open market as it is. Perhaps Green Bay takes a Round 1 wideout but that hypothetical rookie would just end up sliding into the mix of “good but not great” players, at least in 2025. Green Bay is still a young team that is developing on offense. Its best bet is to continue to empower a guy like Reed and hope they get improvement from someone like Wicks on the perimeter. Otherwise, it’ll likely run into some of the same issues that capped its ceiling this season.

Tampa Bay Buccaneers: Keep Liam Coen in the building

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers exited the 2024 season exactly as they lived throughout it: a strong offensive team let down by its defense and the game-management of the head coach.

Yes, we can pick some high-leverage late-game moments where offensive mistakes gave Washington openings. For example, if rookie center Graham Barton, who has been fantastic all season, doesn’t mess up the snap count and hike the ball to Baker Mayfield too early late in the fourth quarter, the Bucs may walk into the end zone and we’re talking about a completely different ball game. However, for the most part, Tampa Bay’s offense was good enough to win that contest.

The problem is that they lost precious time to a Washington team that the Bucs’ defense couldn’t get off the field. The Commanders held the ball for 35 minutes and 26 seconds of game time, compared to 24 minutes and 34 seconds for Tampa Bay. The gap can be explained by the Bucs’ inability to beat Jayden Daniels on late downs.

Tampa Bay got Daniels to throw incomplete a handful of times on blitzes but didn’t force him into any big mistakes. His 0.44 EPA per dropback on blitzes was fourth-best among quarterbacks in the Saturday and Sunday games. Daniels was outright dynamic on late downs, going nine of 15 for 108 yards and two scores on third and fourth down. Per Next Gen Stats, Daniels threw past the sticks on 80% of those passes. The rookie passer felt he had a clear picture and was completely unafraid of the Bucs’ pass coverage, for good reason.

The lack of pushback by the defense, the unit that Bowles calls and oversees, only makes his timeout management and painfully conservative fourth-down decision-making that much more problematic.

It’s easy to sit here as an outsider and suggest that the Bucs move on from Bowles to promote Coen to the head coaching gig. I have no idea if Coen has what it takes to be the figurehead atop the organization, nor do we have any inkling about his in-game management skills.

However, there are two things I know to my core. First, the odds are extremely low that the Bucs will be able to find a third needle-moving offensive coordinator in as many seasons. Most teams flounder when they lose their play-caller. Meanwhile, Tampa Bay actually upgraded, replacing Dave Canales with Liam Coen. There is next to no shot they get that lucky again. The candidate pool just isn’t that deep. Secondly, the second-fastest path to becoming a contending football team, beyond having an elite quarterback, is employing a difference-making play-caller. The Bucs’ success in the last two seasons with Mayfield under center has been a bit of direct proof.

Maybe Bowles doesn’t need to be pushed out and perhaps Coen won’t even end up being offered a head coaching gig in this cycle. But if push comes to shove, there is no way the Bucs can allow Coen to leave the building. If it takes a promotion or a highly bloated salary, they have to pay the iron price. Tampa Bay is an offensive-first team littered with young players we should want to bet on going into the future. Coen leaving would put all of that on shaky ground.

Minnesota Vikings: Get J.J. McCarthy ready

It’s wild to think that the scene of Vikings players hoisting Sam Darnold onto their shoulders coming off a decisive and ultra-productive victory over the division rival Packers was just over two weeks ago.

Everything for the Vikings has fallen apart since that moment, as both the Lions and Rams blew them off the field in back-to-back weeks following that win. In reality, it feels as if their season ended in Week 17 with that scene in the locker room amid Darnold’s triumph. If only every story had a happy ending. The true conclusion of the 2024 Vikings’ campaign got extremely bleak painfully quickly.

The initial reaction to this game will be to thrust the entire blame onto Darnold’s shoulders. I’m sure there will be a loud minority that will rush to tell you Kevin O’Connell was out-coached for the second week in a row. Neither man covered themselves in glory in this loss and this is an article about eliminated teams, so we should acknowledge their failures on the most meaningful stage.

However, we’d be foolish to not give the Rams a healthy amount of credit for what might be the most impressive win of the season so far given the quality of their opponent, the circumstances this team was dealt surrounding the Los Angeles wildfires that forced them to play in Arizona and the dominant nature of the victory.

With the most inexpensive salaried defense in the league and a first-year defensive coordinator in Chris Shula, this stop unit dominated the day against a top-rated Vikings offense. This should not be viewed as a fluke, either. The Rams have allowed point totals of 6, 9, 9 (30 with their top defensive linemen playing 20% of the snaps on average in Week 18) and 9, since Week 15.

Once again, Los Angeles proved why they are one of the premier operations in the sport from a roster management and coaching talent standpoint. Sean McVay, Les Snead and co., take yet another bow.

The Vikings can still stake a claim to the tier below that. Neither O’Connell nor Brian Flores came out of this game looking their best, but they only participated in this contest because those two took a roster with holes on both sides of the ball featuring significant flaws to the playoffs. As is the case in the postseason, those flaws burned brightest at the worst possible moment. Luckily, because this front office and particularly GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah have done a great job getting the team into a healthy cap situation, they will have money to spend to cover up some of those holes this offseason.

My guess is that they’ll go down that road without Sam Darnold in the fold.

In his postgame presser, O’Connell certainly sounded like a coach already in the midst of writing his breakup letter to his quarterback, not a man ready to run this thing back one more time.

Did Darnold play himself out of the Vikings’ future plans on Monday night? I’m not so sure about that.

Obviously, the results were as bad as they could possibly get for a quarterback, to the point I felt physically uncomfortable viewing the experience. Darnold was eating sacks like it was closing time at the buffet on the way to a historic performance, and not the kind you want.

The vast majority of his nine sacks came on plays that lasted over 3.0 seconds. Two of them lasted over 5.0, per TruMedia. You can’t do that as a quarterback. This wasn’t a situation like what we watched with Justin Herbert on Saturday, where waves of quick pressure destroyed the quarterback’s ability to run an offense. At some point, you just have to get rid of the ball to fight another down.

At the same time, this was an offensive line that was without its star left tackle and filled that spot with a stopgap midseason trade. The interior has quietly been a problem all along and is an area that needs serious care in the offseason. Protection has been spotty between the guards and the run game has withered behind that interior throughout the course of the season. Ultimately, the Rams schemed to exploit what the Vikings were as a team with a weak front five and were susceptible to defensive-back blitzes because of their condensed formations. They also continued to neglect boring “meat and potatoes” quick-game concepts in favor of deep-developing downfield plays. O’Connell didn’t do enough to adjust in the face of a young and fast defense that had his offense’s number.

Darnold endured a meltdown game as he predictably couldn’t withstand the heat and crumbled under the weight of the eroding circumstances. But that is who Darnold is. He didn’t change at some point in the last 15 days. We all knew he was never as good as the statistical results of his circumstances, but he’s not as bad as the player we’ve watched for the last two weeks. He exists somewhere in the middle and can be elevated in the right environment and dismantled in the wrong one.

Look across the league; someone will be willing to pay to simply reach that middle Darnold fluctuates around. An NFL franchise walked into this season with Aidan O’Connell and Gardner Minshew at quarterback. I don’t think the Vikings will be willing to pay to be that team, not when they need the cap space they’ve worked so hard to cultivate in order to refurbish the interior line and figure out what to do with a cornerback corps that will all be walking toward free agency. They almost certainly won’t be willing to entertain the financial burden of keeping Darnold on the roster when they just gave up significant resources to acquire J.J. McCarthy last year.

Darnold didn’t play himself out of the Vikings’ future plans with his performance on Monday night. However, he didn’t do anything to stop the agenda that was already well in motion before and throughout his enjoyable run with the 2024 Vikings. The sole focus of the 2025 Vikings will turn to make sure McCarthy is up to speed to give them at least 85% of the output Darnold provided — a realistic goal if they can keep up the health of the ecosystem and McCarthy is recovered from a knee injury — while Darnold’s will shift to finding a landing spot willing to shell out a multi-year contract and can provide an environment even in the neighborhood of what he experienced in Minnesota.

There’s a chance it can work out for both parties, even if their journey together is at an end.

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