Saturday will be for the AFC North in Week 18.
The NFL has placed the two divisional matchups between the Browns and Ravens along with the Bengals and Steelers on Saturday for the last weekend of the season.
The Browns and Ravens will lead things off on ESPN and ABC at 4:30 p.m. ET on Saturday. The Bengals and Steelers will follow at 8 p.m. ET on the same networks.
Both Baltimore and Pittsburgh have already clinched a playoff spot at 11-5 and 10-6, respectively, but the division is still up for grabs.
If the Ravens defeat the Browns, then they’ll win the AFC North. Though Baltimore lost to Cleveland earlier in the season, the Browns have struggled mightily on offense since Dorian Thompson-Robinson took over at quarterback.
The Bengals will be particularly motivated to win on Saturday night because they’re still alive to be the AFC’s No. 7 seed. But even if they win, they’ll need both the Broncos and Dolphins to lose on Sunday in order to make the postseason. If Pittsburgh wins, Cincinnati will be eliminated from postseason contention.
Denver will play at Kansas City and Miami will visit the Jets in Week 18. Kickoff for both games will be at 4:25 p.m. ET on Sunday.
Ravens cornerback Marlon Humphrey’s game-clinching pick-six against the Steelers was capped by an uncalled taunting foul. And despite his best effort to explain that it wasn’t a taunt, the NFL didn’t buy it.
Humphrey was fined $11,255 for taunting.
“I want to make this, like, pretty clear,” Humphrey said after the Week 16 win. “When I was running with the football I saw [linebacker] David Ojabo, a really great teammate of mine, and I was trying to pitch him the football. So some people brought up to me that it looked like taunting, or something. But I was trying to pitch him the football and there was no taunting there at all. I just want to make that very clear.”
Humphrey will have the right to appeal the fine. And he presumably will.
Still, it’s hard to watch the play and see it as anything other than a taunt. Yes, he initially seemed to be considering a Christmas gift for Ojabo in the form of a touchdown. But Humphrey eventually pivoted to sticking the ball out to Steelers receiver Calvin Austin III as Humphrey carried the ball into the end zone.
Steelers receiver George Pickens has shown high-end ability during nearly three seasons in the NFL. He also has flashed just enough frustration and anger to make some wonder how much of a problem he’d be without the influence of coach Mike Tomlin.
When Pickens crashed the post-game interview of Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes and Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce to hand out a pair of Christmas hugs, my first reaction was that, in the immediate aftermath of not beating them, Pickens was sending a message that he’d like to join them.
Whatever happens, Pickens becomes eligible for his second contract after Pittsburgh’s Week 18 game. Due to make only $1.625 million in 2025, Pickens might be looking for a financial reward ASAFP. (He might even want it before the wild-card round.)
He also might want to move on. And the Steelers might be at the point where they’re willing to move on from him.
Pittsburgh has shown that it has the ability to scout and to acquire talented receivers in the draft. They can find a new Pickens, in theory.
The better approach would be to find a way to work things out. Through three seasons, however, Tomlin hasn’t been able to get the situation completely under control.
So it’s entirely possible that Pickens has had enough of the Steelers, and/or that the Steelers have had enough of Pickens. It could come to a head as soon as the looming offseason. If not sooner.
When the numbers for the two Christmas games on Netflix emerged on Thursday, we passed along only the figures that meshed with the ordinary process for measuring TV viewership — average per minute audience.
For Chiefs-Steelers and Ravens-Texans, the numbers were great for streaming, but much lower than last year’s audience metrics from a trio of Christmas games on broadcast networks. Indeed, the average audience of 24.2 million for two 2024 Christmas games is nearly 15 percent lower than the three-letter average for three 2023 Christmas games.
The NFL and Netflix also pushed a non-traditional number, aimed at creating the impression that the audience was bigger than it was. And many passed it along without context or scrutiny.
Here’s one quote from a prominent media member who might get pissy (again) if called out by name: “Netflix Christmas Gameday reached 65 million viewers, per Nielsen.”
Fox executive Michael Mulvihill has provided the context for that number. Last year, the reach was 81.4 million.
Apart from the fact that many regurgitated the 65 million number without even stopping to consider that it might not be relevant, the NFL’s press release was misleading. Here’s the first line: “Christmas was a record-breaking day for Netflix and the NFL, with an unduplicated audience of nearly 65 million U.S. viewers according to Nielsen.”
While the captive-audience Christmas Day games set a streaming record, the games did not set a reach record.
It’s not the first time the league and a streaming partner pushed disingenuous numbers. In 2015, the first-ever streaming game was characterized as having many more viewers than it did.
The moral of the story is maybe the broadcast networks should start releasing their reach numbers, too. The P.R. game is simple. Find a way to come up with a number that is bigger than any other number, lead with that one, and hope that enough subservient members of the media will swallow the hook.
The NFL and Netflix are doing a justified victory lap after the Christmas Day streaming doubleheader. First and foremost, the stream worked. Second, the NFL pocketed $150 million. Third, the NFL has lured another major player to the table for the next round of broadcast negotiations.
It nevertheless came with a cost. While 24.1 million watched Chiefs-Steelers and 24.3 million tuned in for Ravens-Texans, how much larger would the audience have been on a traditional network?
In 2023, 28.68 million viewers watched Raiders-Chiefs on CBS. Giants-Eagles attracted 29.02 million on Fox. And Ravens-49ers drew 27.61 million on ABC/ESPN.
Would the 2024 Christmas games have cracked 30 million? Maybe. For the league, however, it made more sense to grab a $150 million windfall — and to add another potential broadcast partner to the mix. It’s a multibillion-dollar game of musical chairs, and it always helps the league to have one more interested network than available packages.
With an early-morning European package inevitable, someone will be plunking down huge money for that. Current packages could be reshuffled. It will continue to be a blend of broadcast, cable, and streaming.
And it will continue to mean many monies for the men and women who own NFL teams.
They say there are five stages of grief. NBA legend LeBron James is stuck in denial.
James said of the NBA that “Christmas is our day.”
It used to be. Now? Definitely not.
The NFL has announced that a Nielsen-measured audience of 24.1 million watched Chiefs-Steelers on Netflix. The Ravens-Texans game generated 24.3 million viewers.
In contrast, the NBA’s games averaged 5.25 million viewers.
So, yeah, Christmas football is here to stay — regardless of the weekday on which December 25 lands.
That raises a question that won’t be answered until 2033: What will the NFL do the next time Christmas lands on a Sunday?
In past years, the NFL shifted the bulk of the Sunday slate to Saturday, when December 25 fell on Sunday. Maybe, nine years from now, the NFL will fully embrace the day and stage a full slate of games.
Complete with a European game to kick things off at 9:30 a.m. ET.
On Wednesday, Netflix streamed a pair of NFL games, for the first time ever. It was part of the league’s ongoing effort to steal Christmas from the NBA.
It was successful, relative to the lack of complaints regarding buffering, outages, and blurred images. Eventually, we’ll find out whether it was successful, relative to the audiences that would have been generated for Chiefs-Steelers and Ravens-Texans if the games had been broadcast by a three-letter network.
From the league’s perspective, it was a success the moment the contract was signed. For an extra $150 million, the league peeled a couple of games away from the Sunday slate and sold them not to an existing broadcast partner, but to a new kid on the block that might be looking to box out one of the established NFL TV outlets when the rights are auctioned later this decade.
For now, Netflix has announced that it was the second-most-streamed live sports event on the platform, after the Mike Tyson-Jake Paul fight. And while some in the media have taken that number and trumpeted it without context, it means nothing.
Netflix doesn’t have a robust history of streaming live sports events. If the NFL games hadn’t come in second to the Tyson-Paul fight, that would have counted as a massive failure.
It’s already a failure, in one sense. The NFL is the biggest bully on the sports block, but it couldn’t beat the latest iteration of Jake Paul’s real-life boxing fantasy camp?
We’ll get the true viewing numbers soon enough. And plenty will pass along whatever is in the Netflix release, without analysis or skepticism.
The Steelers lost their third game in a row on Wednesday and frustration has started to boil over.
Longtime defensive lineman Cameron Heyward was blunt in his assessment of the team’s recent failures.
“The last three weeks we played like shit,” Heyward said, via Brooke Pryor of ESPN. “Simple as that. I own that. Every player’s got [to own that]. Can’t squander opportunities, whether it’s turnovers, whether it’s getting off the field, whether it’s scoring touchdowns, it’s a multitude of things, and it has reared its big head.
“My confidence is never going to lack in the group. It’s just from an execution standpoint, it’s just dumbfounding. We have to get it done on those plays. We sit up in meetings, we take it out to the field. That means nothing if you don’t do it in the game.”
Heyward added that there were communication breakdowns that cannot happen.
“We talk about execution, we talk about communicating,” Heyward said, via Chris Adamski of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. “If there’s somebody free — 10 guys do their job and one guy doesn’t, we’re screwed.”
Heyward also noted that players shouldn’t complain about the schedule with so many games in so few days, since he didn’t see folks from the Chiefs doing that.
While the defense has its issues, Pittsburgh has also put up just 13, 17, and 10 points over the last three games. The Steelers will look to right the ship when they play the Bengals to end the regular season.
Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin didn’t try to sugarcoat anything when it came to assessing his team’s play against the Chiefs on Christmas.
Tomlin said “that sucked” when discussing the 29-10 loss that continued the team’s downward spiral. The Steelers were 10-3, but they’ve been blown out in three straight games and now find themselves looking up at the Ravens in AFC North heading into the final week of the regular season.
Sunday’s loss featured costly turnovers, untimely penalties, shaky special teams play, and a defense that couldn’t sack Patrick Mahomes as he picked them apart on four touchdown drives. That kind of combination has been a through line in the losing streak and Tomlin said the team has to find ways to change what they are doing in a hurry.
“You can look at it from a lot of angles. The bottom line is junior varsity is not good enough,” Tomlin said, via the team’s website. “We’ve got to own that. But we’ve also got to look at what it is we need to do different. We’re not going to continue to do the same things and hope for a different result. That doesn’t seem sharp to me. So we’re going to take a hard look at this. We’ve got a couple extra days before we get back into it. We’re going to take a look at it and make whatever necessary changes we need to make in the totality of this thing, because again, that doesn’t feel good. It doesn’t look good. That’s just the truth and reality of it.”
The Steelers are in the playoffs regardless of what happens against the Bengals in Week 18, but Tomlin’s words make it clear that they won’t be there for long if they keep putting up the kinds of performances we’ve seen the last three weeks.
The Chiefs won’t play another meaningful football game for quite a while.
After three quarters of tight action, the Chiefs used a pair of fourth quarter scores to turn their game against the Steelers into a 29-10 blowout win. The victory moved the Chiefs to 15-1 on the season and it clinched the top seed in the AFC playoffs for head coach Andy Reid’s team.
That means Week 18’s game against the Broncos won’t matter to them and they will also get the Wild Card weekend off before hosting a divisional round game on January 18 and 19. That’s good news for injured players like defensive tackle Chris Jones, left tackle D.J. Humphries, and running back Isiah Pacheco. Jones and Humphries did not play on Wednesday while Pacheco injured his wrist in the win.
Reid will face questions about playing time for the rest of the team, but everyone will benefit from the extended break that the two teams will enjoy before their Week 18 game.
Patrick Mahomes threw three touchdowns in the win, including one to tight end Travis Kelce that accounted for the team’s final score. It was the 77th touchdown catch of Kelce’s career, which makes him the franchise’s all-time leader in that category. Kelce also became the 15th player in NFL history with 1,000 catches and he ended the day with eight catches for 84 yards.
Mahomes was 29-of-38 for 320 yards overall and his other touchdowns went to wide receivers Xavier Worthy and Justin Watson. Worthy had eight catches for 79 yards to continue a strong rookie season and running back Kareem Hunt scored the team’s fourth touchdown of the day.
The Steelers kept it a one-score game through three quarters, but Hunt’s touchdown on the first play of the fourth quarter was followed by a fumble by tight end Pat Freiermuth that led to Kelce’s score. Russell Wilson threw an interception in the end zone and took five sacks in addition to running for Pittsburgh’s only touchdown of the day.
It’s the third straight lopsided loss for the Steelers, but they will still head into Week 18 with a shot at winning the AFC North. A Ravens win against the Texans later on Wednesday will give them the inside track in the division and the Steelers have a lot to sort out on both sides of the ball if they want to have an extended playoff stay at any seed.
