The AFC's Reckoning: Why Mahomes and Jackson Will Return, and Which "Contenders" Are About to Learn a Harsh 2026 Lesson

There is something clarifying about missing the playoffs. In a league where the regular season is only seventeen games long, where every team is separated from postseason contention by the thinnest of margins, falling short of the dance forces a franchise to confront uncomfortable truths about itself. The 2025 AFC season delivered exactly this kind of reckoning to two of the greatest quarterbacks in modern football history, and it has set up one of the most fascinating competitive arcs we could possibly hope for heading into 2026.

Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs missed the playoffs for the first time in nearly a decade. Lamar Jackson and the Baltimore Ravens failed to make the cut in a season when both seemed positioned to compete for championships. These were not second-tier talents facing the cold reality that the league had passed them by. These were generational players, MVP-caliber competitors, stumbling at a moment when absolutely everything had to break right just to stay afloat. Now, as we look toward 2026, the question is not whether Mahomes and Jackson will return to prominence. The real question is whether the AFC teams that squeaked into the playoffs last season have any business being favored to stay there.

Let us start with what happened in 2025, because the narrative matters here. The Chiefs and Ravens did not miss the playoffs because they were poorly constructed rosters. Kansas City won a Super Bowl as recently as February 2024 with largely the same collection of players that fell short in 2025. Baltimore has been building one of the most balanced offensive and defensive systems in football under John Harbaugh. What happened was stranger and more instructive. They fell victim to what scouts and executives call "parity volatility," the cruel mathematics of a league where fifteen to twenty teams have legitimate playoff chances in any given year. One bad stretch. A key injury at the wrong time. A divisional rival catching lightning in a bottle. These things compound across seventeen games in ways that seem almost capricious from the outside, but which reveal themselves as entirely predictable once you study the tape and understand roster construction.

The 2026 AFC is going to look drastically different from the 2025 version that made it to the postseason. This is not a prophecy born of mere optimism about star power, though Mahomes and Jackson are undeniably star power in its purest form. This is an assessment based on how salary cap management, draft history, and the natural maturation cycle of NFL rosters interact with one another. The teams that squeaked in last year did so often because they caught favorable schedules, benefited from injury luck, or rode the extraordinarily specific performance window of a young quarterback in his first or second year as a starter. None of these things are repeatable in any reliable way.

Consider the structural advantages that the Chiefs bring to any rebuild conversation. Andy Reid is still there. Patrick Mahomes is still there. Travis Kelce, whatever his age, is still producing at a historic level. The offensive line that struggled in 2025 can be addressed through free agency and the draft. The secondary, which was permeable in ways that a Reid-coached defense simply should not be, can be tightened. Most importantly, Kansas City understands something that many AFC teams are only beginning to learn: championships in the modern NFL require institutional stability and the kind of quarterback performance that simply cannot be replicated. You do not get a second Patrick Mahomes. When you have one, you bend the entire organization around him in the way that Reid has always understood, even when it seems wasteful in the moment.

The Ravens present a similar but subtly different case study. Baltimore has built a system predicated on elite defense, a power running game, and efficient quarterback play from Lamar Jackson. When that system works, it is nearly unstoppable because it is so difficult to prepare for and even more difficult to execute against. The Ravens lost more games in 2025 because of execution failure and bad luck than because of fundamental structural problems with their roster construction. A team with that kind of philosophical coherence typically bounces back with remarkable force, especially when it still has elite talent at quarterback, running back, and the defensive line.

Now let us examine who is going to fall. The AFC made the playoffs in 2025 with some teams that have absolutely no business being favored to remain competitive in 2026. I am not going to name specific teams here, because that feels cheap and because the market will do that work for us soon enough. What I will say is this: the league is absolutely full of teams built around second-year quarterbacks having career seasons, or solid but unspectacular rosters that caught a favorable schedule, or defensive units that had one year of extraordinary health and are now aging and expensive. These teams are going to regress with the kind of predictability that should make every analytical mind in football sit up straight.

The quarterback situation is paramount here. Young quarterbacks sometimes have career years because they are truly special. Much more often, they have career years because they are in perfect systems, facing second-string defenses for a portion of the season, or because their offensive lines held up better than expected. When those things normalize, and they always do, young quarterbacks can look shockingly pedestrian. The 2026 AFC is going to have several teams discover this truth the hard way. They are going to have front offices that spent 2025 convinced they had found their franchise quarterback, only to watch that same player take a significant step backward because the supporting cast deteriorated or the schedule got tougher or, most likely, opposing defensive coordinators finally got decent tape on him.

This is not pessimism about young talent in the NFL. It is realism about the margins. In a league where the difference between a twelve-win and a nine-win team is often three or four plays across seventeen games, tiny factors compound into catastrophic results. A team that won the AFC East or AFC South in 2025 with a 10-7 record did not do so because it was ten percent better than the other teams in that division. It did so because it caught the right breaks. That team is now projected to win that division again in 2026, but history tells us that the odds of the same team catching those breaks twice in a row are remarkably small.

The path back for Kansas City and Baltimore is actually quite clear. Both teams need to make decisive moves in free agency to shore up their weakest areas. Both teams need to hit on their first two draft picks in a way that immediately impacts the 2026 season. Both teams need good injury luck, which no team can control. But most importantly, both teams have the two things that the AFC teams that squeaked into the playoffs last year may not have going forward: a legitimate franchise quarterback and an organizational understanding of what it takes to win at the highest level.

Patrick Mahomes is going to put together one of the greatest quarterback seasons of his already legendary career in 2026. He will have learned from 2025, hungry in a way that only comes from missing the playoffs. Lamar Jackson will similarly return with something to prove, driving the Ravens back to the AFC Championship conversation with the kind of sustained excellence that has defined his career. Meanwhile, the other teams that made the playoffs in 2025 are going to spend the offseason wondering how their rosters deteriorated so dramatically, not realizing that their rosters did not deteriorate at all. What happened is that they returned to normal.

This is the way the NFL actually works, stripped of narrative noise and reduced to its mathematical fundamentals. The great players and great organizations resurface because they have the structural advantages that allow them to weather volatility. The others fade because they never had what it took to begin with, only the good fortune to appear as though they did. In 2026, we are going to see that dynamic play out across the AFC with extraordinary clarity.