NFL winners and losers: Matt LaFleur isn’t a bad coach, but he plays a terrible one on TV

There are two games left in Wild Card weekend, but the story of the weekend was the Green Bay collapse, and the ensuing cheese grating in Chicago. Perhaps it’s time to think about a new direction when a coach has been with a There are two games left in Wild Card weekend, but the story of the weekend was the Green Bay collapse and the ensuing cheese grating in Chicago. It’s time to think about a new direction when you’ve been with a team for seven seasons and there’s no appreciable improvement. A reality is setting in where Matt LaFleur might be a great regular season coach, but when it comes down to matching head-to-head strategically, devising a game plan, and countering an opponent in the playoffs, he just doesn’t have it.

We can certainly point to the absence of Micah Parsons as a significant reason the Packers lost, but Parsons wasn’t on the field during the passage of play that decided this game. We can note that field goal kickers should be able to make 44-yard kicks, but that’s another excuse. With 3:38 left in regular, the bleeding for Green Bay had begun, but nothing was set in stone. Up by three points there was one objective for the offense: Take as much time as possible off the clock. Instead LaFleur’s game plan was greedy to the point of hubris, and Chicago made them pay.

Largely bailed out on the opening set of downs, Romeo Doubs gained 34 yards on a play that put everything in the Packers’ hands. The game had reached a point where Chicago would have to start burning time outs to stay alive.

• 1st and 10, 3:19 — A zero yard run, Bears timeout

Then instead of attacking the middle of the field, LaFleur and Love called an out route on 2nd down. The Packers picked up the first, but it ensured Chicago didn’t need to burn a timeout.

• 1st and 10, 3:11 — A zero yard run, Bears timeout

It’s now 2nd down with just over three minutes left on the clock. The obvious call here is to run the ball or make a short completion, which would then cause Chicago to burn their final timeout — lest they allow Green Bay to run the clock down close to the two minute warning. Of course, the timeout could and should have been gone by this point if the Packers didn’t throw a 12-yard out.

• 2nd and 10, 3:07 — Love incomplete pass deep left to Luke Musgrave

The ethos of the Packers play calling in this game can best be described as “YOLO.” For the most part this somehow managed to work, with Love ripping the ball around the field and finding open areas in the Bears’ Cover-3 zone — but as we approached the fourth quarter the plan had changed. All Chicago was trying to do was prevent deep throws, and the Packers kept assuming they could beat them. Hell, the Bears were basically in prevent during this drive hoping to bend but not break, but even bending should have sealed the game.

This incompletion meant Chicago didn’t need to use another time out.

Now it’s 3rd and 10. False start.

• 3rd and 15, 3:02 — Love incomplete pass deep right to Romeo Doubs

When one knockout blow doesn’t work, why not try another? The core issue is that this eight play drive started with 4:12 left on the clock. It should have bled at least two minutes and all three of Chicago’s time outs. Instead it only took off 1:27 and left the Bears with a time out. It was rushed stupidity, when the team needed a modicum of poise. It reeked of an inexperienced coach desperate to get the TD so he didn’t need to be stressed about the final Chicago drive, rather than someone who was comfortable with the basic tenets of clock management and making the Bears truly earn their win. Instead he made life easy for them.

The season is over for Green Bay. The problem is that there isn’t a great path forward. The Packers would be hard-pressed to find a better coach this cycle. In all seriousness, who do you want if you advocate for LaFleur to get fired? John Harbaugh? That’s the guy who was axed in Baltimore for his own postseason failings, and if he can’t win with Lamar Jackson, then he sure as hell can’t win with Jordan Love.

What this team needs is another offensive voice in the room. Green Bay is in dire need of someone to come in and take LaFleur away from his worst tendencies as a coach, handle the play calling, and perhaps even take an assistant head coach role, just to support the in-game decision making. It would be shortsighted to throw away a solid coach when smaller moves can be made to just prop him up. At least, that’s my take on all this.

And now more winners and losers from the Wild Card Playoff round …

Winner: Caleb Williams

If the Bears can ever figure out how to make Caleb Williams perform in the first half the way he does in the second, watch out. A horrific start that looked like the Bears were going home early gave way to a stunning comeback that wasn’t nearly as simple as people had billed.

Yes, the Packers secondary was a mess — but there were so many big boy throws that Williams made in the second half of Sunday’s game that he deserves all the credit in the world. There isn’t a quarterback in the league who is better at making the complicated look difficult, and the impossible seem simple. The off-platform, out-of-structure frozen ropes that Caleb was throwing at the end of that game are throws that you just can’t teach a player. There’s obviously efficiency work to be done inside this Ben Johnson passing offense, but

Winner: Colston Loveland

I don’t think we’ve really appreciated just how insanely good the Bears’ rookie tight end has been this season. There was always the expectation that Loveland could be really good in a Ben Johnson offense, but the level in which he lifted his game made all the difference against the Packers.

Finishing with 8 catches for 137 yards, Green Bay didn’t have an answer for his athleticism when matched up against linebackers. It’s for this reason that Loveland was the right choice for Chicago over Ty Warren. Both tight ends at the top of the 2025 class were fantastic, but Loveland offered more in the receiving department — which is what Johnson was looking for.

This is critical in these playoffs, because outside of the Seahawks there isn’t really a team with the linebacker group capable of stopping a pass catching TE like Colston Loveland. Truthfully, if he was seeing the same amount of usage earlier in the season there would have been very real OROY buzz over the Bears TE.

Winner: Bryce Young

Carolina lost, but Saturday was a defining moment in the career of the Panthers’ quarterback. The biggest criticism of Bryce Young in 2025 was a lack of consistency, which came about as an amalgam of uneven play, questionable play calling, and unreliable receivers. In order to prove he can still be the face of the franchise, Young needed to show he could command an offense in the playoffs, and did just that.

We still saw some uneven moments. Young’s ball placement is dicey on quick outs and Bang 8s. The receivers had some bad moments like Jalen Coker failing to run through an in-route, which resulted in an interception — or Jimmy Horn Jr. dropping the game-saving fourth down pass. The play calling late in the game was too aggressive for the distance needed, with Dave Canales trying to go for the knockout blow with three time outs in hand, rather than simply trying to move the chains.

These are all the lumps that come with a young, inexperienced team and a coach still finding his footing in the NFL. Young has functionally only completed his second season in the NFL with real guidance, after his first year in the league with Franck Reich was an abject disaster. Nobody knows if he can develop into a top tier QB, but there are enough sparks there that he’s worth continuing to develop. Saturday proved as much.

Winner: Kyle Shanahan

If Kyle Shanahan doesn’t win coach of the year then I don’t understand why we have this award. The amount of success this man is able to squeeze from a team without any of its most important stars is a lesson in coaching brilliance.

Winner: John Harbaugh

We all know that Harbaugh was going to get paid regardless of what happened this weekend, but the Packers and Eagles could very well throw their hats in the ring now in the hopes that he will be a steadying force during uncertain times. Not that either team should or even will court Harbaugh, but those two losses drove up his price on the open market significantly.

Loser: Nick Sirianni

The Eagles lost and it’s all Nick Sirianni’s fault. This is a lesson in why you don’t promote friends to the most important jobs on your coaching staff. Kevin Patullo has no business as an NFL offensive coordinator, and only Sirianni would ever think to promote him to the role. It cost the Eagles this entire season, and turned Philadelphia into a laughing stock as a result.

Cap off all that with a public, weird fight with A.J. Brown that seemingly blamed the star WR for the struggles on offense and you have nothing but bad vibes in Philly. They’re at home now, and the coach is the reason.

Loser: Everyone who was waiting all week for Sunday night

Chargers vs. Patriots was the letdown of the weekend. I know they can’t all be winners, but goodness that game stunk compared to the playoff football the rest of the NFL gave us. This wasn’t even a case of two brilliant defenses butting heads, but instead we got an answer to the question: “What happens to a stoppable force when it meets a moveable object?”

Congrats to the Patriots. Please be more entertaining next week.