One of the most telling moments of the shifting AFC landscape occurred as the New England Patriots returned home to Gillette Stadium following a win over the New York Jets on Dec. 28. Players huddled together on the team buses, scanning their cell phones as the Buffalo Bills battled the Philadelphia Eagles. A Bills loss meant the AFC East title would go to the Patriots and the anticipation increased as the seconds ticked off. A few minutes later, the New England players erupted, hugging each other and exchanging fist bumps, knowing they had completed an incredible turnaround after winning just four games a year before.
It would've been predictable for the Patriots to spend a few hours exulting in such success once they reached their home stadium that night. Instead, they streamed off the buses, picked up their championship hats and T-shirts -- which team staffers had arranged on tables outside the stadium entrance -- and organized a team picture. Head coach Mike Vrabel estimated that the entire process took roughly 15 minutes to complete.
"Other than that," Vrabel told reporters the next day. "It was back to work."
Vrabel understood the Patriots didn't have time to dwell on one crucial step in their pursuit of a championship. There were many more challenges that awaited them if they wanted to reach their current stature, as the reigning AFC champion heading into a matchup with the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl LX. Winning the division was important. Continuing to cultivate a mindset that none of this should be surprising meant just as much to what the Patriots had built.
New England's rise to the top of the AFC is yet one more example of how much things are changing within that conference. It had largely been the playground of the Kansas City Chiefs for the last seven years -- that team had appeared in five of the previous six Super Bowls, winning three championships -- while the Buffalo Bills and Baltimore Ravens had been the primary threats to that dynasty. That wasn't the case this season. This year belonged to teams like New England, Denver and Jacksonville, franchises that were going nowhere not too long ago and established themselves as real forces in the NFL.
It would be one thing for one of those teams to develop into a championship contender in a season like this. For all three to take a major leap, while squads like the Los Angeles Chargers and Houston Texans returned to the postseason as well, begs the question of how much the AFC is changing moving forward.
"A lot of those teams over there had great years," said one NFC personnel director. "The key is whether they can keep doing that. You need to have a better plan in Years 2, 3 and 4 than you had in that first year of success. It's always much harder being the hunted then the hunter."
This NFL season has been far from what we've become accustomed to in recent years. Before the Chiefs embarked on their dynastic run, the Patriots were the league's resident bully. Bill Belichick and Tom Brady racked up six Super Bowl wins and won three other AFC championships over their 20 seasons together. This was the year when we remembered what parity is supposed to look like in pro football.
Even though Kansas City failed in its attempt to win three consecutive Super Bowls last season, it felt like teams no longer feared them in the AFC. Broncos head coach Sean Payton indicated as much at the end of that 2024 season, when he told reporters he “felt real good” about a possible matchup with the Chiefs in the playoffs despite Denver having just lost to Buffalo in the Wild Card Round. Like Vrabel, Payton also didn't have much interest in an extensive celebration of the Broncos' AFC West title this year, which ended Kansas City's nine-year streak atop that division. When team equipment manager Chris Valenti asked Payton what to do with the championship hats and T-shirts after a Texans victory over the Chargers clinched the title, Payton said to just leave them in the players' lockers.
Since the players weren't around -- the Broncos had beaten the Chiefs on Christmas Day two days earlier -- Payton didn't see the point of making a big deal about the achievement. "We actually didn't even talk about it," he said.
The message Payton was trying to send on that day is the same one Vrabel and every other AFC coach with a strong roster and big dreams tried to instill this season: The conference was up for grabs again. Elite quarterbacks were dealing with their struggles, with Kansas City's Patrick Mahomes, Baltimore's Lamar Jackson and Cincinnati's Joe Burrow all missing the postseason. The pressure to win a Super Bowl in places like Buffalo and Baltimore also grew so intense that Sean McDermott and John Harbaugh both lost their head coaching jobs.
Bills owner Terry Pegula admitted he felt compelled to act after his team suffered another heartbreaking playoff defeat for the sixth straight season. After walking into the locker room and seeing a crowd of crestfallen players after Buffalo's 33-30 overtime loss to Denver in the Divisional Round -- and quarterback Josh Allen sobbing -- Pegula believed something had to change.
"I saw the pain in Josh's face at his presser, and I felt his pain," Pegula told reporters at this press conference after announcing the decision on McDermott. "I know we can do better, and I know we will get better."
The question facing teams like Buffalo is whether they will do better in a stacked AFC. The conference is sitting in such an intriguing position because money is affecting plenty of franchises. Those elite quarterbacks previously mentioned all are playing on lucrative deals that represent major chunks of their team's salary caps. Meanwhile, three of the four signal-callers playing in this year's Divisional Round are all still on their rookie contracts (New England's Drake Maye, Denver's Bo Nix and Houston's C.J. Stroud).
It's not hard to understand that those teams with younger quarterbacks had the flexibility to build better rosters around their players. The Philadelphia Eagles did the same thing with Jalen Hurts on their way to two Super Bowls -- and won last year's championship -- without his own contract being a major strain (he only accounted for 5.2 percent of Philadelphia's salary cap in 2024 despite signing a five-year, $255 million extension a year earlier). The Patriots are in a great position because Maye, like Tom Brady when he won his first championship, is only in his second year. They also have a coach in Vrabel who understands what it takes to sustain success.
The Patriots certainly benefitted from playing a weaker schedule after finishing last in the AFC East in 2024. Their ability to keep growing depends on not forgetting how they thrived.
"When you're in a situation like (New England's), it's important that everyone understands you won as a team, just as you lost as a team," said former Cincinnati Bengals head coach Marvin Lewis, who turned around that moribund franchise in the early 2000's. "The biggest thing I learned in Cincinnati is that you don't get to start the next year where you left off the season before. I saw (Chicago Bears head coach) Ben Johnson say that when they lost. You build credibility as a staff because now they believe. But then you have to come back and grind all over again."
Cincinnati reached the postseason seven times in Lewis' 16 seasons, but his teams also were competing against Brady's Patriots and Peyton Manning with the Colts and Broncos along with Ben Roethlisberger in Pittsburgh. The hurdles then are the same ones as this year's upstarts face, which is grasping that beating great quarterbacks is easier when a team believes in commitment and sacrifice. It's much harder when essential players start earning more money or failing to meet expectations.
Lewis specifically referenced the difficulty in keeping younger receivers like Marvin Jones or Mohamed Sanu when Cincinnati had an All-Pro talent at the position in A.J. Green. Lewis also watched the current Bengals go from being a team that reached the Super Bowl in the 2021 season to one that has missed the playoffs in each of the last three years.
"You look at Cincinnati and Joe Burrow is upset now because he wants them to get some defensive players," Lewis said. "But the model there was set up to outscore people. They put a lot of money into four or five guys on that offense, and you end up trying to put some electrical tape onto the rest of the roster. That's the stuff that catches up to you."
The real test for this new group of contenders in the AFC will be making those hard choices about their rosters once those cheap quarterbacks cost more money.
"If you want to sustain success, you need to know that besides your quarterback, you can only pay three or four other guys big money," said Doug Whaley, a former general manager of the Bills who also worked in the Pittsburgh Steelers front office and currently serves as general manager of the United Football League. "That's when you sit down with your head coach and ask him which top three positions need to be paid outside of the quarterback to win a Super Bowl. Other than those moves and drafting well, you're looking at those guys at the back end of the roster who don't cost much to contribute. That's how you keep it going."
Of all the teams that surprised this season, New England might be in the best position to keep winning moving forward. Along with Maye -- who played at an MVP level -- the Patriots received contributions from their 2025 draft class (like running back TreVeyon Henderson, left tackle Will Campbell and left guard Jared Wilson) and their free agent acquisitions (including wide receiver Stefon Diggs, defensive end Milton Williams, linebacker Robert Spillane and cornerback Carlton Davis). It was far from a team flush with star power. Instead, it thrived off a blue-collar attitude and tremendous buy-in to Vrabel's messaging.
Vrabel made it clear early on that he expected to contend for the division. All coaches say that, but his team accepted the challenge. When talking to local media in the final weeks of the season, Vrabel said, "There's a lot of ways to win football games in this league with a lot of different players, a lot of different lineups, a lot of different schemes and however we need to do to win football games, but that was going to be the goal. Making sure that they all understood that, making sure that they knew that this was the priority and that's what we've tried to do."
The Patriots have been so successful in building a strong chemistry that they haven't lost a road game all season. They also realize they aren't the only team that thinks this is the start of something special. When Jaguars head coach Liam Coen and general manager James Gladstone met with their media after a wild-card loss to Buffalo, they mentioned how few people in Jacksonville knew much about either man at this time last year. Now the Jaguars are coming off a 13-4 season that included the AFC South title and the team's leadership has an entire offseason to build on their vision.
Jaguars linebacker Foye Oluokun told local reporters that same day that he remembered what it was after last season ended. He was cleaning out his locker at that point, lamenting all the changes coming after a four-win season. Now he can think about the substantial growth that came over the past few months. As Oluokon said, "We were a great team. We just weren't good enough."
That was surely a familiar sentiment around the AFC this past month. The Texans had the league's most dominant defense and couldn't advance past the Divisional Round for the third straight season. The Broncos earned the first-round bye, but a broken ankle kept quarterback Bo Nix from playing in the AFC championship loss to New England. There's also that mounting frustration in places like Buffalo and Baltimore, where, as Whaley said, "every year that goes by without winning a championship with one of those elite quarterbacks is another year that they're getting older."
Vrabel was fortunate to be a key member of that Patriots dynasty when it started. He helped New England win three Super Bowls between 2001-04, and he knows what kept that machine rolling. The players didn't think about doing historic things. They worried about improving every day and making the most of the opportunities presented to them.
That's always the first step in creating a winning culture -- selling everyone on the idea that great things can happen by taking care of small details. The fresh faces on the AFC scene did masterful jobs of believing they could beat anybody at any time. The challenge moving forward is determining whether they really are a built to last, especially in a league where those elite quarterbacks always will be chasing the same dreams.
"You look at all these young teams and they are great stories," Lewis said. "But they also will have to go through the same things that you've seen happen in places where the quarterbacks are making a lot of money. They're going to face the same experiment. I went through it in Cincinnati and couldn't get there. Buffalo has been doing it the last few years and can't get over the hump. It's hard enough to get up the mountain. But every year you have to start on the bottom and then climb your way back up."
