NFL Week 18 Winners and Losers: The NFC South ends like only it can

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NFL Week 18 Winners and Losers: The NFC South ends like only it can

Troy Finnegan, ClutchPoints · ClutchPoints

Wed, Jan 7, 2026 ·

8 min read

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The regular season is in the books, and now it's playoff time! Before turning our attention to the postseason, it's time to take a last look at a Week 18 slate that had a couple of consequential results mixed in with a lot of slop.

On Saturday, the Panthers and Buccaneers played football (more on that in a minute) before the Seahawks secured the top seed in the NFC with a win over the 49ers . After a sleepy Sunday slate that featured a lot of backup quarterbacks and sloppy football, the Ravens and the Steelers capped off the regular season with an epic that sent Pittsburgh to the playoffs.

We get into all of that on this week's winners and losers.

Winner: Seahawks make a playoff statement

The Seahawks and 49ers played one of the most high-stakes games of the week on Saturday night, with the NFC West title and the No. 1 seed in the conference on the line. San Francisco came into the game as one of the hottest offenses in the league after hanging more than 40 points against both the Colts and Bears in its previous two games.

On Saturday night in front of their home crowd, the 49ers had no solutions for the Seahawks defense . San Francisco mustered just three points and nine first downs in a 13-3 loss in Week 18 as the Seahawks had the answers for everything Kyle Shanahan and company tried to do.

San Francisco went three-and-out on its first two drives and struggled to run the ball all night. It's only real drive, late in the second half, was finished by a Drake Thomas interception inside the 10-yard line.

Brock Purdy has been one of the most efficient quarterbacks in the NFL this season when he has been healthy, but he had one of the worst nights of his career in this game. Purdy finished with a -0.51 EPA per dropback, the fourth-worst mark in the NFL in a week where a ton of backups played, and was sacked a season-high three times.

The Seahawks were physical up front, got after the passer, tackled in open space very well and didn't allow the 49ers to do much after the catch. Heading into the playoffs, this Seattle defense may be the best unit in the league heading into the postseason.

Loser: The NFC South ends like only the NFC South can

The NFC South has been a truly disastrous division all season, one that is barely worthy of having any representative in the playoffs. Still, coming into Week 18, a game between the Panthers and the Buccaneers on Saturday looked like it would decide the champion and the No. 4 seed in the NFC playoffs.

However, the Atlanta Falcons threw a major wrinkle into things with a Week 17 upset of the Los Angeles Rams . That allowed the Falcons to potentially get into a tie for the division lead with a win over the Saints in Week 18.

The Panthers-Bucs derby was fitting of the rest of the NFC South all season; it was terrible. The game was played in a sideways rainstorm in Tampa Bay, and players on both sides were slipping all over the place.

The officiating was as bad as you'll ever see in an NFL game. In the third quarter, a tacky offensive pass interference was called on Tetairoa McMillan that killed a promising Carolina drive and an egregious facemark penalty was missed on the Buccaneers. At one point, the officials somehow blew a backward pass dead and then said it went out of bounds after Panthers running back Rico Dowdle picked up the ball in the field of play, a ruling that I have to imagine was just made up.

The play from each team wasn't much better. The Panthers, normally a pretty good running team, could only manage 19 rushing yards on 14 attempts against a lackluster Bucs defense. Carolina turned the ball over three times, including on a puzzling flea flicker call that killed a drive, and still only lost by two points because Tampa Bay failed to take advantage of those chances.

With both teams then tied at 8-9, the attention turned to Sunday's Saints-Falcons clash with a playoff spot on the line… just not for either of them. A Falcons win would send Carolina to the postseason, while a Saints win would have helped the Bucs qualify. Kirk Cousins and company did just enough to get the victory.

So, the Panthers lost the de facto play-in game to the Buccaneers, but still beat out Tampa Bay for the final play-in spot because the Falcons forced a three-way tie at 8-9. Carolina's 3-1 record against Atlanta and Tampa Bay got it in.

What a circus, right? That is the lasting legacy of the 2025 NFC South, deservedly so.

Winner: Aaron Rodgers is back in the playoffs, maybe for the final time

Sunday night was an NFL fan's dream. A renewal of the sport's best rivalry in the 21st century, in the final game of the regular season, with a division title and a spot in the playoffs on the line.

The first half was a bit of a snoozer, highlighted by a Ravens touchdown drive to start and a goal-line stand to finish, but Aaron Rodgers and the Pittsburgh offense came alive in the second half. The Steelers put together three touchdown drives, including an eventual game-winner from Aaron Rodgers to Calvin Austin .

Coming in, this was potentially Rodgers' final game of his career. Nobody knows what the legendary quarterback is going to do, but retirement is almost certainly at least on the table for the 41-year-old.

For a minute, it looked like the future Hall-of-Famer's career was going to end on the bench, while his defense and special teams let him down one last time. It would have been a fitting end for him, but instead his clutch fourth quarter earns him at least one more week this season against the Texans in the wild card.

Loser: Tyler Loop , the face of the latest wild Ravens exit

On the other side of this, there is the Baltimore Ravens . The Ravens have had it all over the last few years. Lamar Jackson has two MVP awards and has become one of the best players in the NFL, and Baltimore added Derrick Henry to form a formidable duo on the ground. The defense has usually been fine at the end of the season, with Kyle Hamilton starring.

However, Baltimore has found some of the most bizarre ways to get bounced out of the playoffs during Jackson's time with the Ravens. His pick-six in Buffalo in 2020 comes to mind. So does the Ravens, after dominating the 2019 regular season and earning the No. 1 seed, laying an egg against the Titans at home. So does Tyler Huntley 's goal-line fumble and Sam Hubbard 's 100-yard return against the Bengals in 2022. What about Zay Flowers fumbling through the end zone in the 2023 AFC Championship Game? Or Mark Andrews dropping the game-tying pass in the end zone in the 2024 Divisional Round?

In 2025, the Ravens were victimized by those kinds of losses during a season from hell that saw Jackson manage injuries to seemingly every part of his lower body, and his back. There was the blown 15-point lead in the final four minutes against the Bills in Week 1. There was the puzzling Thanksgiving Day loss to the Bengals. there was the loss to Pittsburgh the following week after Isaiah Likely 's overturned touchdown catch. There was the blown 11-point fourth quarter lead against the Patriots.

All of it led to Sunday night in Pittsburgh, with a chance to get a win over their most hated rival and still sneak into the playoffs with a puncher's chance. Even after Hamilton went out with a concussion, Jackson found his MVP form in the second half with a number of crazy plays to keep the Ravens alive. Even when Chidobe Awuzie got beat on a double move by Calvin Austin for the go-ahead touchdown, Jackson found one more heroic fourth-down connection to Likely to set up a game-winning field goal.

Enter Tyler Loop, a rookie kicker who had done a pretty nice job for the Ravens this season, staring down a 44-yard kick to send the Steelers home and the Ravens to the playoffs. In a movie-like finish to this mess of a season in Baltimore, Loop pushed the kick wide right. By the time the camera cut back to him, his head was already in his hands and every Ravens fan had already flashed back to Billy Cundiff .

In a way, I feel for Loop. This Ravens season wasn't supposed to come down to a rookie kicker in Week 18. These were the Super Bowl favorites, it was Lamar Jackson 's year, his time to finally get over the hump. Instead, the Ravens Ravens'd away game after game all season long, and now the rookie's name will join the list of Jackson-era losses: Flowers' fumble, Andrews' drop, Loop's kick.

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