Raiders’ Maxx Crosby Gives Bad News to Drake Maye, Patrick Mahomes

Halfway through November, the NFL decided we’d waited long enough for a holiday treat. Snow is falling, temperatures are dropping and Week 11 delivers the league’s best grouping of games so far this season.

With the playoff picture beginning to take shape, the power rankings have followed suit, neatly filtering teams into tiers of contention based on legitimacy. This week’s lineup synced up like a dream, pitting teams from each ranking level against one another to further refine the hierarchy.

Below is your Christmas-come-early slate, ranked by contender class:

Tier 1: Kings of the Moment

Seahawks at Rams

The NFC West finally gets a proper title fight, and it could not come at a better time. Teams ebb and flow throughout a season, but the Seattle Seahawks and Los Angeles Rams have synchronized their peaks perfectly, and the result is a division-defining clash between the two best teams in the NFL at present.

With the vagaries of this season so far, defining who’s strongest came down to a simple process: Judge teams by their best wins and worst losses.

At their best, both the Seahawks and Rams have demonstrated they have the horses to run another NFL team off the field in a blowout.

At their worst, they have four combined losses. The total margin of defeat in those losses is 17 points, six of which were on a superfluous TD return of a blocked kick.

Every other team in the league has at least one fight they lost by knockout, whereas these two have yet to get so much as a black eye.

Matthew Stafford and Davante Adams have unlocked every level of the Sean McVay dream scheme, and the result is a Rams offense that’s just as dangerous operating from under center as they are spreading the field. Their defense is ferocious on the interior, and is the NFL’s best against the deep ball, allowing -.32 EPA per pass over 20 yards.

Seattle comes in as the gold standard for how the play-action pass game should work, with Sam Darnold and Jaxon Smith-Njigba operating like a two-man hive mind. Their defense is just as complete as L.A.’s, and where the Rams have the edge defending the pass, Seattle has it against the run.

If the Super Bowl were held this week, this would be it. As it stands, it’s the measuring stick for every other team with February hopes.

Tier 2: Best of the rest

Lions at Eagles

The Detroit Lions and Philadelphia Eagles represent the business class — not all the way in the front of the plane, but still better than everything else. They are two teams that specialize in the art of demoralization, but whose approaches have exposed fatal vulnerabilities. Week 11 pits the Lions’ heady, gun-and-gash offense against the Eagles’ numbingly patient steamroller style of play, in a game where pace will almost certainly define the day.

If you’ve ever watched a dog when someone throws four balls at once, then you’ve seen what Detroit can do to an opposing defense. The combination of speed, scheme and mistake-free play puts defenders in spots where there are too many targets to pursue, and each one is equally dangerous. An inch given is a mile lost, as demonstrated by Jared Goff having the sixth-lowest air yards per attempt (6.6) but the ninth-most passing yards. The Lions are a yards-after-catch (YAC) machine, and if the running game keeps opponents off balance, the machine is unstoppable.

But if disrupted, it’s proven challenging to get jump-started again. The Packers broke the machine in Week 1, the Chiefs did it in Week 6 and the Vikings did it two weeks ago. In those losses, Goff was sacked 10 times, and the Lions had negative EPA per rush. Two of the three losses were their two worst rushing performances of the season, and exposed the weakness at the offensive line’s interior.

The Eagles are particularly well-suited for this type of disruption, as Vic Fangio’s blitz packages have reached near-perfection. Despite sending the seventh-fewest blitzes in the league, Philly is top three in defensive success rate when sending extra rushers. They’ve allowed the ninth-fewest yards after the catch, and the third-fewest YAC when blitzing.

The Eagles crush opponents like a vice. Their smothering defense and steady, inexorable offensive marches can make them both the unstoppable force and the immovable object, and when it works, all they need to win is for the clock to tick.

Detroit will spend Sunday trying to force the steamroller into a drag race, hoping to push an offense that operates best on its own time into a come-from-behind pace. If the clock is an enemy and Jalen Hurts must throw, his struggles against zone defense offer an avenue to undo the Eagles. Detroit at top gear can beat the defending champs. If Philly dictates the speed limit, fortune favors the inevitable.

Tier 3: We want to believe

Chiefs at Broncos

If you want dichotomy, here it is. The Kansas City Chiefs are 5-4, but remain among the league’s elite because everything other than their record says so. They are healthy, dangerous and experienced. Their offense is exciting again, their defense is solid and they have X-factors like elite speed and the best quarterback on the planet.

Conversely, if you saw nothing of the Denver Broncos but their week-to-week game performance, you’d be shocked to learn they’re 8-2. They’ve reached this tier by virtue of record, and the record was achieved by virtue of defense. Their receivers are good but not great, their running game is a tandem of an oft-injured veteran and a rookie receiving back and their quarterback’s weaknesses include downfield passes and throwing against pressure. Bo Nix is a weapon on the run and has engineered some truly spellbinding fourth-quarter rallies, but he’s functionally no further along than he was coming into the season, which was not far enough to lead a team to a ring.

Yet here we are in Week 11, with records dictating that Kansas City is in a far more precarious position despite the obvious roster gap. If the Chiefs lose to Denver this week or to Indianapolis next week, every subsequent game becomes a must-win. Their Super Bowl odds give an implied likelihood of 15 percent compared to Denver’s 5 percent, but they need to, you know, make the playoffs for that to work. Currently, the Chiefs are at a 75 percent chance to do that.

The Broncos, meanwhile, have a 92 percent playoff likelihood. You are what your record says you are, and 8-2 says the Broncos are comfortably a contender. Whereas, 5-4 says if the Chiefs slip once in November, they likely miss out on February, despite all their talent.

Buccaneers at Bills

Here, the Buffalo Bills are the underperformers, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are playing the overachievers. The Bucs’ roster is packed with talent, but getting it all on the field simultaneously is a Herculean task. If it ever comes together, they’d slot in closer to the Eagles and Lions. As it stands, they’re a 6-3 team that won two-thirds of its games on last-second heroics. They require Baker Mayfield to be perfect every week, and he’s working behind a patchwork offensive line with a rookie wide receiver as his only target.

This would be the type of game they’re just not healthy enough to win, were it not for the Bills looking absolutely outclassed by the Miami Dolphins just a few days ago. Yes, that’s in the past, but in this case, the past informs the future. Miami is a deeply flawed team and has been especially bad at stopping the run for most of the year. Yet they managed to erase James Cook and highlighted that, without a ground threat, the Bills’ offense is reduced to, “Josh, please save us.”

The Bucs are a considerably better run-stopping unit than the one that just swallowed Cook, and the Bills have demonstrated all season that they lack the playmakers to help Allen when he’s forced to play Fix-It Felix for four quarters.

Don’t expect the defense to help much either. Tampa is still without Bucky Irving, but Week 11 will be one of the few weeks the Bucs should confidently run the ball. There are Walmart greeters who are tougher to get past than the Bills’ defensive interior, and given Buffalo’s bottom-10 rankings against deep passes and play-action, even moderate rushing success will set Mayfield and company up to do downfield damage.

The Bills have bounced back from ugly performances plenty, and are still 5.5-point home favorites, but their flaws make them a lot more gettable for a battered Tampa Bay roster than they should be.

Ravens at Browns

They may be 4-5, but anyone watching the Baltimore Ravens would put their playoff odds at roughly 110 percent at the moment. They’ve scored 27 or more in three straight games, and their defense has ranked 11th, second and 10th in EPA per play allowed the last three weeks. Lamar Jackson is again MVP-caliber, and Derrick Henry is back from his hiatus in the Swamps of Sadness. The only reason they aren’t higher is that their 1-5 start left no room for them to be mortal. Their schedule is soft the rest of the way, but they’ll be the trophy every bad team is hunting. Any stumble could bring it all down, and Week 11’s matchup in Cleveland is the type that can go sideways in a hurry.

Tier 4: We’re having fun, but it’s almost time to go

Bears at Vikings

Both of these teams are still a ways from legitimacy, but the rematch serves as a measuring stick for their budding offenses. J.J. McCarthy has the NFL’s highest deep pass percentage (18.5 percent), and despite his flaws, has shown a knack for big throws when the movement demands them. The Bears’ secondary functions primarily as a getaway for receivers — somewhere they can find some space and not be bothered — so McCarthy can rifle the ball downfield with abandon.

Whether the Bears can keep pace comes down to Caleb Williams continuing to be Brian Flores’ Moby Dick. Of the 47 dropbacks where Flores sent blitzers after Williams, the Vikings have managed to sack him just twice. The 4.3-percent sack rate is one-third of Williams’ rate against all other opponents, and if he keeps it up, the Bears’ growing offensive confidence could keep them in the game.

They may not be ready for the big show, but a Week 11 game where both these teams have playoff stakes on the table is a pretty promising result for both.

Packers at Giants

“Green Bay is better than this,” you say, but how many more chances do they get? The Green Bay Packers are -350 to make the playoffs and +1500 to win the Super Bowl, but their week-to-week performance doesn’t scream “take me seriously.” They’re 5-3-1 because they couldn’t beat the Cowboys (something the Bears, Panthers and Cardinals managed to do), and their last three wins were holding off a Joe Flacco comeback attempt, a fourth-quarter rally to beat the Cardinals and a fourth-quarter rally to beat the Steelers.

They just lost back-to-back games in which they scored a combined 20 points, and one of those was against Carolina.

Green Bay is good. If they want more serious consideration than that, they need to earn it.

Bengals at Steelers

Do you remember the episode of “Seinfeld”  in which George decides he’s going to apply Jerry’s stand-up comedy move of closing the set on a high note to his own life? This is that moment for Aaron Rodgers and the Steelers. It’s been a fun ride, and cosplaying as a division leader was an exciting way to spend 10 weeks, but the Ravens will take it from here.

Beat the Bengals in front of a raucous home crowd, spend one more Sunday as kings, then: