Six weeks into an NFL season is right around the time when we have to stop calling everything an accident. A team that is 4-2 might actually be good. A team that keeps finding ways to win ugly probably deserves more credit than we want to give it. And when the Kansas City Chiefs are still sitting there undefeated while everyone spends another offseason and September predicting their demise, perhaps we should finally acknowledge that Patrick Mahomes and company apparently plan on ruining everyone else’s fun indefinitely.
Week 6 gave us another reminder that the NFL rarely follows the script we wrote for it in August. The Chicago Bears are beginning to look suspiciously like an actual football team, the AFC North has become the football equivalent of four guys fighting over the last chair in a bar, Kansas City continues to treat the regular season like its personal property, and C.J. Stroud may have just performed CPR on the Houston Texans’ season. So, before we convince ourselves we know what’s coming next, here is what we learned from Week 6.
Maybe It’s Time to Take the Chicago Bears Seriously
I understand that this is dangerous territory. Telling NFL fans to trust the Chicago Bears is historically similar to telling someone that this time the used-car salesman really does have their best interests at heart. Bears fans themselves have been trained to approach optimism like there is probably a trap door underneath it. Nevertheless, Chicago went into Atlanta, beat the Falcons 31-23 and improved to 4-2, and at some point we’re going to have to admit that something interesting is happening.
Caleb Williams completed 30 of 36 passes for 305 yards without throwing an interception, and Chicago controlled the football for more than 40 minutes. That’s not winning because somebody slipped on a banana peel with 12 seconds left. That’s taking control of a football game. The Bears ran 73 offensive plays compared with Atlanta’s 50 and built a 31-7 lead before the Falcons made the final score look a little prettier in the fourth quarter. Yes, Chicago committed 12 penalties for 133 yards, which is the kind of thing that usually gets a coach to begin losing hair during the postgame film session, but they were still good enough to overcome all of it.
The important part is that Williams looked like the player Chicago thought it was getting when it made him the face of the franchise. Luther Burden III caught eight passes for 95 yards, Colston Loveland added six catches and a touchdown, and the Bears looked capable of moving the football without requiring divine intervention. Nobody is suggesting we start measuring Michigan Avenue for a Super Bowl parade, but 4-2 is no longer something we can laugh away. Maybe the Bears are not just hanging around. Maybe they actually belong in the NFC conversation, which is a sentence Chicago fans have waited an uncomfortable number of years to hear.
The AFC North Has Become Professional Football’s Version of a Bar Fight
If you enjoy clean, predictable football where the best team establishes itself and everyone politely falls into place behind it, stay far away from the AFC North. This division has decided that standings are boring and chaos is much more entertaining. Cleveland beat Baltimore 13-10 on a field goal as time expired, Pittsburgh escaped Tampa Bay 26-19 in overtime, and we ended Sunday with Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Baltimore all sitting at 4-2.
The Browns-Ravens game was exactly the kind of masterpiece only the AFC North could produce. The two teams combined for 472 yards, which Patrick Mahomes occasionally seems capable of producing during warmups, and Baltimore went the final three quarters without scoring a point. Cleveland trailed 10-0, scratched and clawed its way back into the game, tied it in the fourth quarter and then won it at the gun. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t elegant. It was AFC North football, where style points are considered suspicious and everybody appears to be playing while angry about something.
Meanwhile, Pittsburgh was trailing Tampa Bay 16-3 entering the fourth quarter before apparently remembering that losing to a 1-4 Buccaneers team would make for a very unpleasant flight home. Aaron Rodgers and the Steelers forced overtime and then won it on Rodgers’ touchdown pass to Germie Bernard. Pittsburgh finished with only 300 total yards and averaged 3.9 yards per play, yet somehow walked out with another victory. Mike McCarthy may be the new man running the show in Pittsburgh, but apparently he inherited the franchise’s old instruction manual: make the game as ugly and uncomfortable as humanly possible, hang around until everybody watching has developed high blood pressure, and somehow leave with a win. Different coach, same Steelers.
Trying to pick the AFC North winner right now is pointless. Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Baltimore are all 4-2, Cincinnati is hanging around, and there is a very good chance the division will not make any sense until December. So enjoy it. Somebody is eventually going to win this thing, although based on the first six weeks they may have to settle it with a Royal Rumble.
Stop Waiting for the Kansas City Chiefs to Go Away
Every year we do this. We spend the offseason asking whether Kansas City’s window is closing. We wonder if the rest of the AFC has finally caught Patrick Mahomes. We identify this flaw and that flaw, convince ourselves somebody has finally figured them out, and then look up a few weeks into the season and the Chiefs are sitting there smiling at us like the villain in a horror movie we were certain had been killed 20 minutes earlier.
Kansas City beat the Chargers 22-6 on Sunday and improved to 5-0. The Chiefs piled up 422 yards while holding Los Angeles to 259, and Kenneth Walker III ran for 128 yards and two touchdowns on only 19 carries. Mahomes threw for 272 yards despite not throwing a touchdown pass, which might actually be the most frightening part. Kansas City didn’t need Mahomes to put on a cape and perform some ridiculous fourth-quarter magic trick. They simply controlled the game and beat the Chargers by 16 points.
Meanwhile, Los Angeles fell to 0-6, which means the Chargers have now reached the portion of the season where looking at next year’s draft order becomes healthier than looking at the standings. Justin Herbert threw for 204 yards with no touchdowns, and the Chargers managed only two field goals. Kansas City wasn’t spectacular. It didn’t need to be. That’s what makes this version of the Chiefs dangerous: they can beat you in several different ways, and they no longer require Mahomes to throw for 400 yards and four touchdowns every Sunday.
There are plenty of good teams in the AFC, and Buffalo certainly deserves to be included in any championship discussion. But until somebody actually knocks Kansas City off the mountain, I’m done announcing that somebody is about to. The Chiefs are 5-0. Mahomes is still Mahomes. Andy Reid is still Andy Reid. Arrowhead is still Arrowhead. At this point, predicting the collapse of the Chiefs has become less like football analysis and more like buying a lottery ticket because eventually somebody has to win.
C.J. Stroud May Have Just Brought Houston Back From the Dead
A 1-4 start will cause people to begin composing your obituary, particularly when you’re a team that entered the season expecting to contend. Houston arrived in London desperately needing something to go right, and C.J. Stroud responded by reminding everyone why the Texans believed they had found their franchise quarterback in the first place.
Stroud completed 24 of 34 passes for 312 yards and three touchdowns as Houston beat Jacksonville 34-31 at Wembley Stadium. The Texans produced 426 yards of offense and averaged an impressive 7.2 yards per play against a Jaguars team that entered Sunday at 4-1. Jaylin Noel had 107 receiving yards and a touchdown on only four catches, Nico Collins averaged nearly 25 yards per reception, and Marvin Harrison Jr. contributed three catches in his Houston debut. Most importantly, when Jacksonville tied the game late, Houston didn’t fold. The Texans moved the ball into position for Ka’imi Fairbairn‘s game-winning 49-yard field goal as time expired.
Now, let’s not start printing playoff tickets in Houston quite yet. The Texans are still only 2-4, and digging out of a 1-4 hole isn’t exactly the preferred route to January. But there is a massive difference between 2-4 with your quarterback suddenly playing his best football and 1-5 wondering whether the season is already over. Houston also just beat the division-leading Jaguars head-to-head, which makes the AFC South considerably more interesting than it would have been had Jacksonville opened a massive gap.
Stroud looked confident, aggressive and willing to push the football downfield, and that changes everything for Houston. The Texans don’t need to become unbeatable overnight. They just need to survive long enough to get themselves back into the race. If this version of Stroud sticks around, the team everybody was preparing to bury after five weeks may not be quite ready for the funeral.
Week 6’s Biggest Lesson: We Still Don’t Know Anything
Maybe that’s the real lesson six weeks into the season. Every time the NFL appears to be sorting itself out, it throws another handful of results at us that scramble everything again. Chicago might actually be good. Cleveland might be a real AFC North contender. Pittsburgh continues winning games that frequently look like they should be losing. Houston may have found its offense just in time to save its season. And the Kansas City Chiefs remain undefeated because apparently some things in this universe truly are permanent.
There is still a lot of football left, and several of these conclusions could look ridiculous a month from now. That’s part of the fun. But we’re reaching the point where records begin to mean something. Four-and-two isn’t an accident anymore. Five-and-oh definitely isn’t. And when a supposedly dead team walks into London and knocks off a division leader, it deserves our attention.
The first few weeks tell us what teams hope to become. By Week 6, teams start showing us what they actually are. Unfortunately for the rest of the AFC, the Chiefs still look like the Chiefs. Fortunately for the rest of us, just about everything else remains wonderfully, hilariously unpredictable.
