The NFL playoffs are officially underway, and what a show we were treated to on wildcard weekend. The first round of the postseason is considered by many to be the best weekend of the year to be a football fan, and January 2026 certainly helped with that narrative. We saw Josh Allen drag the Buffalo Bills kicking and screaming past the hard-done-by Jacksonville Jaguars, while there were dominant wins for both the New England Patriots and the Houston Texans.
Over in the NFC, the Chicago Bears pulled off arguably the greatest playoff comeback ever, rallying to overturn a 15-point fourth-quarter deficit to down their rival Green Bay Packers at Soldier Field. The San Francisco 49ers took full advantage of an impotent Philadelphia Eagles offence to dump out the reigning champions, while the much-fancied Los Angeles Rams survived a scare to narrowly pip the Carolina Panthers in Charlotte.
Now, we head into the Divisional Round, and it’s the NFC that the eyes of online betting sites are on. The latest odds from the upstart Lucky Rebel sportsbook make the conference’s top seed Seattle Seahawks a +285 favorite to win Super Bowl LX, with the aforementioned Rams hot on their heels at +315. But what of the players that didn’t even make it to the postseason? Let’s take a look at three players who more than deserved playoff football, only to end up disappointed.
Myles Garrett
Twenty-three sacks.
Let me say that again for the people in the back—twenty-three sacks in a single season. Myles Garrett didn’t just have a great year; he obliterated the NFL’s single-season sack record and dragged Cleveland’s corpse to five measly wins doing it. Five. The man posted 43 solo tackles, forced three fumbles, and routinely beat double teams designed by offensive coordinators who spent entire weeks game-planning around him. Film breakdowns showed him collapsing pockets against chip blocks, tight end help, and running back delays. Didn’t matter. He still got home.
His reward for a record-breaking year? Watching Wild Card Weekend from his living room because Cleveland’s offense couldn’t score if you spotted them twenty points. The Browns went through stretches—long, painful, unwatchable stretches—where they scored seventeen or fewer in eleven consecutive games. Seventeen! You can’t win in today’s NFL if you’re averaging less than twenty points, I don’t care if Lawrence Taylor himself is playing edge for you. Garrett’s defense gave up 379 points, which sounds terrible until you realize they were constantly defending short fields because the offense went three-and-out more often than a metronome.
Here’s what truly hurts, though—if you drop Garrett onto a team with even a mediocre offense, we’re talking division titles. Super Bowl contender. Instead, he spent Sundays keeping scores semi-respectable while whatever quarterback Cleveland was trotting out that week imploded. The league’s most dominant pass-rusher in a generation, and he’s sitting home because management couldn’t figure out the offense.
Jonathan Taylor
Somebody needs to check on Jonathan Taylor because we genuinely don’t know how you rush for 1,585 yards on 323 carries with eighteen touchdowns and still miss the playoffs. Indianapolis stormed out of the blocks, winning eight of its first ten games. They looked like the feel-good story of the year: Daniel Jones getting his redemption arc after escaping the Giants, Taylor pounding defenses into submission week after week. The Colts were so convinced they had lightning in a bottle, they shipped two first-round picks to the Jets for Sauce Gardner at the deadline.
Then it all collapsed like a house of cards in a hurricane. Gardner got hurt three games into his Indy tenure. Jones tore his Achilles. The Colts signed forty-four-year-old Philip Rivers out of retirement—I’m not making this up—and proceeded to lose five straight to close the season. They became the first team in thirty years to miss the playoffs after an 8-2 start.
But lost in all that hand-wringing about draft picks and what-ifs is this: Taylor was spectacular. He carried twenty-plus times per game down the stretch, churned out nearly a hundred yards per contest, and defenses knew exactly what was coming every single snap. Irrelevant. He still produced. The man is twenty-five years old, in his absolute physical prime, posting numbers that would’ve made Hall of Fame voters weep two decades ago. And he’s at home. Sitting on his couch. While Indy’s front office counts the cost of their gamble and wonders how they blew two firsts on a corner who played three healthy games.
Ja’Marr Chase
You want to know what insanity looks like? It’s Ja’Marr Chase catching 125 passes for 1,412 yards and eight touchdowns while Cincinnati’s defense lets every opposing offense look like the Greatest Show on Turf. That’s insanity. Coming off a 2024 triple-crown season where he led the entire NFL in receptions, yards, and scores, Chase somehow got better. He’s making forty million per year as the highest-paid non-quarterback in league history, and here’s the thing—he’s worth every penny.
The man put up sixteen catches for 162 yards against Pittsburgh. Multiple hundred-yard games against defenses built specifically to neutralize him. He’s must-see television, the kind of receiver who makes defensive coordinators wake up in cold sweats. And yet, somehow, the Bengals are home in January because their defense couldn’t stop a nosebleed.
Cincy has the worst defence in the league at the moment, and maybe the worst of all time. Through significant stretches of the season, Cincinnati generated eleven sacks. Eleven! Advanced metrics showed them missing tackles on explosive runs, blowing fourth-quarter leads like they were trying to set records. The Jets game, the Bears collapse—the Bengals scored eighty combined points in those two games and lost them both. Joe Burrow—when healthy—and Chase were putting up thirty, forty points per contest, and Cincinnati was still finding ways to lose because their defense made every opposing quarterback look like prime Peyton Manning.
If you transplant Chase onto a team with even a competent pass rush—not elite, just competent—he’s catching playoff touchdowns right now. Instead, he’s another victim of organizational incompetence.
