Key takeaways
- The conference championships are settled: Super Bowl LX is New England vs. Seattle. The Patriots won the AFC 10-7 in Denver and the Seahawks won the NFC 31-27 over the Rams.
- The AFC Championship was a genuine slog. Seventeen combined points is one of the lowest-scoring conference title games in recent memory, and New England was fine with that.
- The NFC Championship was the opposite. Seattle 31, Los Angeles 27, and the Rams got there as a 5-seed on the back of two straight road wins.
- Mike Vrabel took a first-year job to a Super Bowl. New England went 14-3 in his debut season after finishing ten games worse the year before.
- Pick'em angle: a 14-3 team beat a 14-3 team 10-7 and a 14-3 team beat a 12-5 team by four. Two months of this league should have taught everyone that the seed line means less than the number.
The conference championships are done and the matchup is set: New England and Seattle in Super Bowl LX at Levi's Stadium on February 8. Two 14-3 teams, two No. 1 and No. 2 seeds that earned it, and two completely different routes to get there.
Sunday gave us the two games at opposite ends of the football spectrum. The AFC title game was a 10-7 defensive knife fight in Denver that felt like it was being played in 1974. The NFC title game was a 31-27 shootout that stayed live until the end. If you had both under and over on the same slate, congratulations, you had a normal Sunday in the 2025 season.
Here is how both games actually went, how these two teams got here, and what it means for the two weeks ahead.
AFC Championship: New England 10, Denver 7
Seventeen points. Total. In a game between the two best teams in the AFC, both of whom finished 14-3.
Denver had the No. 1 seed and home field, and it did not matter, because neither offense could get out of its own way. The Patriots scored ten points and that was enough. That sentence should look absurd next to a conference championship, and it is exactly what happened.
Games like this are usually decided by whichever team is more comfortable with them, and New England was clearly more comfortable. When a game turns into field position and third downs and one drive that has to matter, you find out fast which team was built for the moment and which one was hoping for a different kind of afternoon.
A 10-7 conference championship is not an accident of weather or bad luck. It is two defenses winning the argument, and the team that expected the argument tends to win it.
Denver's postseason also cost them Bo Nix, who fractured his ankle in the playoffs. The Broncos were a legitimately excellent football team this year, top seed in the AFC at 14-3, and their season ends in a game where they scored seven points at home. That is a brutal way to go out.
NFC Championship: Seattle 31, LA Rams 27
Everything the AFC game was not.
Seattle got the win 31-27, but the Rams made them earn every bit of it, and that is remarkable given where Los Angeles started this postseason. They were the 5-seed. They went 12-5, which is more than good enough to be a division winner in most years, and they finished behind a 14-3 Seattle team in the same division.
So they went on the road and won at Carolina 34-31 in the wild card round, then went on the road again and beat Chicago 20-17 in overtime in the divisional round, then went on the road a third time to play a 14-3 Seahawks team for the conference. They lost by four. Matthew Stafford led the entire NFL in passing yards with 4,707 and in touchdown passes with 46, and his season ends on the wrong end of a four-point game in Seattle.
The Rams' run is the strongest argument of the whole postseason against reading too much into seeding. A 5-seed that has to win three road games is not a weaker team, it is a team that got sorted into an unlucky bracket by a division rival. We flagged that in the regular season wrap and the bracket proved it out.
How both teams reached Super Bowl LX
Two very different paths.
New England, the 2-seed: a first-round bye was not on the table, so they started in the wild card round and dismantled the Chargers 16-3. Then they beat Houston 28-16 in the divisional round. Then 10-7 in Denver. Three playoff games, 26 points allowed across all three, and the most they gave up in any one of them was 16.
Seattle, the 1-seed: they took San Francisco apart 41-6 in the divisional round, which is not a football score so much as a statement, and then held on 31-27 against the Rams. Two games, one blowout, one grinder.
And the rest of the bracket was chaos, which is what made this postseason so much fun to watch and so miserable to pick. Both 3-seeds lost at home in the wild card round: Jacksonville went 13-4 and lost to a 6-seed Buffalo team 27-24, and Philadelphia lost to a 6-seed San Francisco 23-19. Pittsburgh got run out of its own building 30-6 by Houston. We covered how strange that opening weekend was when it happened, and the two weeks since have not made it look any more orderly.
Super Bowl LX preview: what the conference championships showed
The obvious frame is New England's defense against Seattle's offense, and the obvious frame is probably right.
The Patriots have now played three playoff games and allowed 3, 16 and 7 points. That is not a hot streak, that is an identity. Meanwhile Seattle put 41 on San Francisco and 31 on the Rams, and Jaxon Smith-Njigba led the NFL in receiving yards this season with 1,793 and ten touchdowns. Something has to give, and there is no third option.
Two other things worth holding onto for the next two weeks:
- Drake Maye against a defense that gets to sit and study for fourteen days. Maye finished as the QB2 in fantasy scoring with 35 total touchdowns in his breakout year, which we walked through in our fantasy season awards. He has been excellent. He has not seen a two-week scouting report yet.
- Sam Darnold in a Super Bowl. Say that out loud. Seattle's quarterback has taken a 14-3 team to a title game and won it, and the narrative around him has almost nothing to do with how the season actually went.
And a coaching note that deserves more attention than it is getting: Mike Vrabel took over New England and went 14-3 in his first season, a ten-game improvement. That is not a rebuild. That is a demolition and a rebuild in the same calendar year.
The number that frames the game: New England has allowed 26 points in three playoff games. Seattle has scored 72 in two. One of those trends is about to break, and how it breaks is the entire Super Bowl.
The pick'em angle: two weeks with only one game
Survivor is over, your season-long pool is settled, and what is left is the strangest pick'em week of the year — one game, fourteen days of noise, and a market that has more time to move than it has information to move on.
The thing to remember from this postseason is that the favorites kept losing and the games kept landing in a narrow band. Both 3-seeds went out at home. A 5-seed won two road games. The top seed in the AFC lost at home scoring seven. If your instinct after two weeks of buildup is to talk yourself into a comfortable double-digit outcome, look back at the actual scores from this January before you commit to it.
The other honest note about Super Bowl pools: they are a different game. Prop grids, squares boards and one-off pick'em cards reward familiarity with the format far more than football knowledge, and everyone in your pool has the same fourteen days of analysis you do. The edge is smaller than it is in Week 7. Play accordingly, and get your card in early on the picks page rather than in a panic on Sunday afternoon.
What happens next
Two weeks of hype, a healthy amount of it deserved. New England is trying to finish a season that started with a first-year head coach and no reasonable expectation of this. Seattle is trying to finish a 14-3 year in the Bay Area, in the home stadium of the San Francisco team it beat 41-6 three weeks earlier.
Whoever wins, the 2025 season already gave us a top seed losing at home 10-7, a 5-seed winning three straight elimination games on the road, and a wild card weekend that broke both 3-seeds. February 8 has a lot to live up to. It probably will.