COOKIES

Snapshots! Summaries! Synopsis! Easy-to-write holiday content with a long shelf life! Call it what you like: here are tasty holiday morsels for all 32 NFL teams.

It’s Christmas Eve day in the Too Deep Zone think tank: a perfect time to get caught up on all of the 2025 NFL storylines and prepare for either the final playoff stretch or a long winter’s nap.

2025 NFL Team-by-Team Year in Review. Sort of.

Arizona Cardinals

The Cardinals stopped trying to win games the moment Dr. Disability Fraud (podiatrist, travel agent, soothsayer) gave Kyler Murray a book of undated sick notes. They rebranded themselves as the nation’s leading provider of back-door overs and fourth-quarter Trey McBride fantasy stats. The few who noticed actually like them a little better this way.

Atlanta Falcons

It has been the most Falcons season to ever Falcons season:

• Doomed development plan for a young quarterback? Check.

• Skill-position stars wasting a productive year? Check.

• Aging quarterback padding his career stats in a string of meaningless late-season games? Check.

• Future sabotaged by a short-sighted decision made before the season even started? Check.

• Creeping dread that nothing will improve until someone tosses a fumigation bomb into team consigliere Rich McKay’s office and smokes him out? Check.

Don’t despair, Falcons fans! Things are sure to get better once Robert Saleh replaces Raheem Morris, Joe Flacco arrives to “mentor” Michael Penix and Kyle Pitts signs a new $80-million contract!

(Note: Falcons fans are never not despairing.)

Baltimore Ravens

The best team in the NFL until approximately 10:30 PM on September 7th.

Then: four months of monitoring the Wednesday injury report to learn why Lamar Jackson didn’t practice (hamstring, knee, ankle, toe, ankle, illness, carpal tunnel syndrome, he practiced this week, j/k LOL he only watched the scout team warm up, ankle, mummy rot), followed by long Sundays of watching defensive linemen crash into their blockers and fall down.

Buffalo Bills

Porous run defense. Zero wide receivers. Inept play calling. A persistent habit of spotting opponents early leads. The Bills often look like the background extras in a superhero movie, milling around and waiting for Josh Allen to blow the CGI budget to save them. As of Christmas Eve, they are +850 to win the Super Bowl.

Carolina Panthers

Good. Bad. Good. Bad. Rico! Bad. Rams win. Saints loss. A Bucs win that could lock up the Southland Conference automatic tournament bid.

Any Panthers playoff game should be broadcast on Wednesday night on TruTV.

Bryce Young is Gardner Minshew with a fourth-down stats boost.

Chicago Bears

Ben Johnson had one job: fix Caleb Williams. Johnson fixed everything else instead – offensive line, play calling, defense – and Williams suddenly looks much better given outstanding structure, even if he still rolls to his right out of a clean pocket and rockets the ball out of bounds about twice per quarter. Also, Williams’ dad no longer blows up Seth Wickersham’s phone with customer service complaints.

The Bears are a playoff team with a rugged, old-school style. Fans in Gary, Indiana are gonna positively adore them.

Cincinnati Bengals

Joe Burrow is living through Aaron Rodgers’ supervillain origin story.

Cleveland Browns

Formerly the Factory of Sadness. Now the Factory of Dreary, Perfunctory Shedeur Sanders Takes By People Who Didn’t Watch the Game.

Dallas Cowboys

Explosive offensive. Repulsive defense.

Jerrah sacrificed the 2025 season by trading Micah Parsons for draft picks, which he will use to replace George Pickens, who will leave as a free agent in 2026, after Jerrah traded draft picks for him.

Brian Schottenheimer inherited Jason Garrett’s Cloak of Inconspicuousness and will keep his job by remaining invisible while nudging defensive coordinator Matt Eberflus into oncoming traffic.

Dak Prescott had an MVP-caliber season, yet no one even baked him a cake.

Denver Broncos

The Broncos schedule was soft, though not as fluffy as the Patriots schedule. They were heavily reliant on late-game comebacks, though not as reliant as the NFC South pretenders. Theie defense is nasty, but not Texans nasty.

Bo Nix is not nearly an MVP candidate like Drake Maye or on the upswing like Caleb Williams, though he’s not a smoldering disaster-in-process like J.J. McCarthy, Michael Penix or the voided-warranty version of Jayden Daniels.

The Broncos offensive line has allowed just 19 sacks. The defense alone has committed a whopping 50 penalties for 560 yards, often arranging bunches of them into elaborate bouquets. The Broncos don’t try to win by producing the most big plays, but by trying to make the fewest mistakes. The whole Broncos season has felt like one long low-scoring victory decided by one or two completions or penalties late in the fourth quarter.

The Broncos are too fundamentally-sound and successful to make fun of, yet too ordinary to place any faith in.

Detroit Lions

OBSERVERS, FROM FEBRUARY THROUGH SEPTEMBER: Golly, this team looks swell. But the defense appears to be one edge rusher short of the Super Bowl, and your play calling can be counterproductively aggressive at times.

BRAD HOLMES: Silence, knaves.

DAN CAMPBELL: I’m the Juggernaut, b****es.

OBSERVERS, AROUND THE TRADE DEADLINE: That 5-2 start was impressive! But injuries are mounting on defense. There are edge rushers like Jaelan Phillips on the discount trading block. And it sometimes looks like we are leaving points on the board by not settling for easy field goals against vulnerable opponents.

HOLMES: Why, I am so confident in the guys we have that I would trade players away if I could! And Marcus Davenport is healthy for the first time since 2017. He will surely provide a sack!

DAN CAMPBELL: Imma take over playcalling and go 0-for-November on fourth downs.

OBSERVERS, WEEK 16: Are you happy now, you obstinate know-it-alls? What’s left of the defense cannot stop anyone. We lost to the Eagles and Packers because of fourth-down screwups. The Lions have taken a step backward for the second straight year!

HOLMES: This calls for decisive action! I will draft another tight end and comb the waiver wire for leftovers from the 2021 Eagles secondary.

CAMPBELL: I will guzzle 60 ounces of espresso and try to figure out why we seem to be so jumpy and aggressive.

Green Bay Packers

Micah Parsons really did bring the Packers one step closer to the Super Bowl before getting hurt. But injuries elsewhere, offensive brownouts, red-zone miscues and a penchant for coming up small in big moments dragged them two steps further away. The Packers will tumble into the playoffs battered, bewildered and vulnerable, if they don’t somehow tumble out of them.

Who is to blame? Matt LaFleur? Jordan Love? The receiver-by-committee philosophy that results in no one stepping up when the chips are down? Cruel fate? The fault lies with everyone, and no one.

Houston Texans

Outstanding cornerbacks. Outstanding edge rushers. An offensive line cobbled together from anything that was lying around in the garage.

Three close early-season losses that looked like the Texas Regional Penalty and Blown Block Expo. An injury rash that left C.J. Stroud with no one to throw to except the Iowa State Alumni Team, then claimed Stroud. A defensive shark attack that turned even Josh Allen into chum so Davis Mills could manufacture a few wins.

Stroud and his receivers returned. The offense only improved a little. But that was fine, because defense, defense, grrrr, chomp, nom-nom-nom, defense.

Indianapolis Colts

The “2025: 8-2 Before Everything Went to Absolute S**t and we Signed Hume Cronyn at Quarterback” banner will hang proudly from the Lukas Oil Stadium rafters proudly forever.

(I know. That one was hacky and obvious. It’s hard to write 32 of these suckers.)

Jacksonville Jaguars

This may be the greatest Jaguars team of the 21st century. Yet they started the season as self-destructive bumblers. What changed?

• Their offensive line reduced its penalty rate from one per possession to a more reasonable one per quarter.

• The Travis Hunter experiment ended the way we probably should have expected it to: with the first two-way player since Deion Sanders (for a few weeks, 30 years ago) learning neither position properly, then getting injured.

• Brian Thomas stopped dropping passes. Jakobi Meyers arrived in a trade and started catching them.

• Trevor Lawrence watched a Five Likely Offseason Trade Destinations for Trevor Lawrence TikTok, saw the Jets at the top of the list, and realized it was time to get his shit together.

• They spent a few weeks facing third-string quarterbacks. It’s amazing what that can do for a team. It’s like a refreshing mini-staycation.

The Jaguars end the season against the Colts with Earl Morrall at quarterback, then the Titans. And we dare to rip the Patriots for their schedule!

Kansas City Chiefs

Would you like to reboot in safe mode? Checking for software updates. Please wait. Defragmenting hard drive. Please wait. Over 2847 viruses detected. Clearing web cache. Purging unused programs and overpaid veterans. 1% complete. 2% complete. You might want to go do something else and check back in 2026. Possibly around mid-October.

Las Vegas Raiders

Remember when the Raiders beat the Patriots in Week 1? Remember thinking, “these teams made some offseason upgrades, so they will probably both hang around the bottom of the Wild Card picture all year”?

Remember believing that Geno Smith had anything left in the tank? That Chip Kelly deserved a second chance in the NFL? That Pete Carroll still had something to offer as a head coach besides a pained “Why am I still doing this” sideline scowl? That Tom Brady was just an investor, not a cross between a dilettante part-time GM and an organized crime boss using the Raiders as a patronage gig for his cronies?

It’s been a long year. At least Ashton Jeanty has started producing fantasy stats. After you were eliminated or traded/benched him.

Los Angeles Chargers

Building an entire offense out of excuses for why Justin Herbert is so disappointing somehow made Herbert no longer disappointing at all.

Los Angeles Rams

A delightful, devastating retro-chic offense. A rugged defensive front. A quarterback with the ideal experience-to-ability ratio. A kicking game bad enough to make a brilliant young coach want to take a 10-year sabbatical to play with his newborn child. And a superstar wide receiver everyone loved until seven days ago, when we discovered that he was the 12-year old who gets sent to the middle school vice principal’s offense for a long talk about the dangers of repeating every stupid thing he hears on a livestream.

Miami Dolphins

Weeks 1-7: Nihilism is sexy. Trying is for boomers.

Weeks 8-14: Dad is gonna cut off our allowance! Everyone do your chores!

Weeks 15-Present: Dad paid our 2026 term bill. Let’s throw Tua out a window for funzies!

Mike McDaniel is like the student who blows off an entire semester, shows up on the last day of the marking period begging for makeup work, half-asses enough essays and worksheets to pass with a D-minus, then spends the next two months cutting class to stay home and play Fortnite. Enjoy 2026, Dolphins fans: it will be exactly like 2025!

Minnesota Vikings

Trapped in a toxic codependency, desperately burning resources and emotional bandwidth to make a relationship work while a much-younger partner does his own thing, clinging to hollow excuses (He’s hurt! He’s still figuring things out! He’s hurt again!) and brief glimmers of hope (We had fun on that weekend getaway to Dallas!), making even more foolish mistakes during self-esteem troughs (Max Brosmer! Carson Wentz!) and generally getting so used to riding an exhausting emotional roller coaster that they forget that there is a better way to live. The Vikings don’t need a new coach or general manager. They need a marriage counselor, a divorce lawyer, and a tub of rocky road ice cream.

New England Patriots

Drake Maye has evolved into a buffed-up Madden Create-a-Player. Mike Vrabel looks more like Peak Belichick than any of the many Fake Belichicks, perhaps because he never actually coached under the increasingly-embarrassing old horny toad and therefore avoided whatever parasitic toxin turns his proteges into raving paranoics. The veteran-heavy defense and rookie-laden offensive line both gelled quickly after rocky starts.

The Patriots are as impressive as a team that didn’t have to face the Rams, Seahawks, 49ers, Packers, Lions, Bears, Eagles, Broncos, Chargers, Chiefs, Texans, Jaguars or even the freakin’ early-season Colts or Joe Burrow Bengals can be.

New Orleans Saints

The Saints benched Spencer Rattler, purged their offense of luxury items (Rashid Shaheed, Brandon Cooks, the quasi-useful Trevor Penning), and looked ready to quietly tank in the name of credit repair. The NFC South had other plans, however, and Kellen Moore learned that if he ordered Tyler Shough to stand perfectly still and do nothing, opponents like the Panthers, Buccaneers and Jets would beat themselves.

General manager Mickey Loomis, whose job is safe so long as owner Gayle Benson’s beignets are properly powdered, is sure to take all the wrong lessons away from the Saints’ late-season hot streak. Shough is the Quarterback of the Future, assuming it’s a future of further salary cap malpractice and third-place finishes in the Glorified ACC.

New York Giants

The 2025 Giants were the football equivalent of unwrapping a shiny new toy on Christmas morning, immediately playing too hard with it, breaking it, throwing such an epic tantrum that you break all your other toys, getting sent to your room for the day before grandma even comes over for hot-cocoa breakfast, then sniffling in bed all day when you realize that you will have nothing to play with for the next year except all of your broken toys.

New York Jets

The Jets reportedly plan to retain Aaron Glenn, who spent the season firing assistants, cutting players who fumbled, sneering at the media and finding ways to make a terrible quarterback situation worse. Per the reports, the Jets planned all along to make 2025 a nightmare on purpose, and remain committed to a long-range philosophy that has proven to be utterly catastrophic in the past. They might as well throw in some coffee tariffs while they’re at it.

The nationwide Free Isaiah Williams! rally is scheduled for January 10th.

Philadelphia Eagles

Who Eagles Fans Think They Are: A Dark Mirror version of the 2023 team, which started the season 10-1 before succumbing to ergot bread fungus mass hysteria in December, opening up an emotional wound in Philly which will never, ever heal.

Who They Really Are: The same darn team as last year’s Super Bowl champions, but with a much harder schedule. Seriously. Look who the Eagles beat in 2024. Look at how narrowly they beat them.

OK, Saquon Barkley is providing fewer explosive plays, and kickoff returns have been misadventures all year. But it’s almost the same team. And Saquon is revving back up in time for Lane Johnson’s return. So have some eggnog and relax, you insufferable doomers.

Pittsburgh Steelers

Getting better – and more unlikeable – every week.

San Francisco 49ers

Remember folks: Brock Purdy stinks. Even when throwing eight touchdown passes in two weeks in the heat of the playoff chase, he stinks. Even when leading victories for a team whose defense can barely muster one sack per week and was in danger of getting picked apart by Father Time on Monday night, he stinks. It’s all Purdy’s supporting cast, even if much of that supporting cast is hurt, got traded last February or is the subject of a nationwide manhunt. Mac Jones is probably better, as evidenced by his weaker stats and the 49ers’ poorer record when he was a starter.

Yes, Purdy stinks. And when the 49ers lose in the playoffs, it won’t be because two perennial All Pro defenders have been injured for months or the NFC West is stacked with superteams. It will be because of Purdy’s contract.

Though the 49ers could beat the Seahawks, because …

Seattle Seahawks

Week 1: Nick Bosa strip-sacks Sam Darnold to preserve a win for the not-yet-injury-ravaged 49ers over the Seahawks.

LITERALLY EVERYONE: The Seahawks aren’t going anywhere with Sam Darnold at quarterback.

Weeks 2-through-4: Solid wins, some over very good teams.

Week 5: Lavonte David intercepts Darnold, who already led a fourth-quarter comeback, to give the Buccaneers a narrow victory over the Seahawks.

LITERALLY EVERYONE: The Seahawks aren’t going anywhere with Sam Darnold at quarterback.

Weeks 5-through-10: Solid wins, some over very good teams.

Week 11: Darnold throws four interceptions, but also leads a fourth quarter touchdown drive, then takes the Seahawks offense from their own 1-yard line to the edge of field goal range in the final 1:41 to nearly upset the Rams.

LITERALLY EVERYONE: Case closed for all eternity.

Weeks 12-to-15: Three absolute blowouts, followed by a close call in an unusual game against an opponent fighting for their playoff life.

LITERALLY EVERYONE: OMG Sam Darnold almost lost to Philip Rivers. Which is somehow worse than actually losing to Rivers!

Week 16: Darnold throws two interceptions as the Rams cruise out to a 16-point fourth-quarter lead.

12TH MAN SEAHAWKS FANS, WHO I AM TOLD ARE THE BEST IN THE NFL, UNLIKE IGGLES JERKWADS: Boooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

Still Week 16: Darnold throws two late touchdowns and two-point conversions for an overtime comeback that moves them into position to clinch homefield advantage throughout the playoffs.

LITERALLY EVERYONE: The Seahawks aren’t going anywhere with Sam Darnold at quarterback. Caleb Williams? Now there’s a quarterback you can set your watch to!

ME, EVERY TIME I WRITE AND EDIT TOO QUICKLY: The Seahawks aren’t going anywhere with Sam Bradford at quarterback.

Tampa Bay Buccaneers

Weeks 1-6: Non-stop last-second comeback victories. “We’re clutch! We’re battle-tested veterans! Baker Mayfield for MVP!”

Weeks 7-13: Mostly losses to quality opponents. “We’re injured! Just wait until our playmakers are healthy and our Pancake Conference schedule begins!”

Weeks 14-Present: Three straight losses to Pancake Conference opponents, despite healthy playmakers. “Maybe holding on to all the 2020 Super Bowl veterans forever wasn’t such a shrewd move. Oh, no. We have become the Saints, haven’t we? PLEASE TELL US WE HAVE NOT BECOME THE SAINTS.”

Tennessee Titans

Cam Ward (DYAR through Week 16: -530) wants to help select the next Titans head coach. That’s a little like letting your toddler choose your next romantic partner. Then again, the last guy forgot how timeouts and field goals worked in Week 3, so why not?

Jeffery Simmons plans to spend the offseason standing outside Mike Vrabel’s bedroom window holding up a boom box.

Washington Commanders

Near-champions in January.

All-in come February.

Still confident in September.

Battered but hopeful in October.

Panicky in November.

Hopeless and regretful in December.

Anticipating some sort of purge come January.

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

Then you may just be Josh Harris;

Which is better than being Stephen Ross.

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate! See you on Monday morning!