A once chaotic division has turned into a bastion of consistency.
Do you remember the days of the NFC South where you could never predict the winner? When everyone said with a sort of pride that the same team had never won the division in consecutive seasons? When the teams were mostly kinda good? Those days are long in the past now.
The new NFC South is this:
- The Panthers range from very bad to a little bad
- The Saints and Falcons are usually slightly less bad
- The Bucs are the least bad but usually aren’t good
- The Bucs win the division
The Bucs eked out a 10 win season to win the division for the fourth consecutive season. It’s the first time an NFC South team has reached 10 wins since 2021. They’re actually a pretty good this season, but I don’t think they’re good enough to make any real noise in the playoffs.
At the bottom of the NFC South once again were your Carolina Panthers, though it feels like the arrow is actually trending up this time. They finished by eliminating postseason contenders in two of their last three games and preceded those wins with some competitive showings against good teams. Bryce Young might actually be good, and Dave Canales might be a good coach.
In between those two are the Saints and Falcons, who are in different stages of flux. The Falcons have their usual bevy of high powered weapons on offense, but they’ve struggled to find the quarterback to harness those since the end of the Matt Ryan era. There was brief flicker of Kirk Cousins maybe being that guy, but flame was quickly snuffed out. Rookie Michael Penix is the next hope, and to his credit, he looked pretty good in his three starts to end the season. Maybe it all comes together in year two of Raheem Morris with Penix as the starter from the get go, but right now the Falcons are just kind of blah.
And then there are the Saints. Oh how far they’ve fallen since the Sean Payton and Drew Brees days. They tried the continuity route by making Payton’s defensive coordinator Dennis Allen the head coach, but that failed spectacularly. Allen’s tenure came to an end midseason after a loss to the Panthers. Now they’re looking for a new head coach, no one knows what they’re doing at quarterback, they have a relative dearth of young talent, and they go into the offseason about $50 million over the salary cap. It seems like things are going to get worse before they get better, and I don’t know what head coach is going to pick the Saints over literally any other vacancy. Their options for next season are to either move a bunch of salary around to get cap compliant just to make another run at mediocrity, or release basically every high paid player on the roster and completely bottom out next season. Sounds fun.
The NFC South looks like it’ll be up for the taking again next season, not because there are multiple good teams, but rather because no team is good enough to clearly separate themselves. That’s promising for the Panthers, who showed enough at the end of the season and have enough assets to use in the offseason to feel like they could elevate themselves into that tier of just not bad enough to compete for the division title.