With the calendar page turned to December, it's not only time for all of the good boys and girls out there to put together their Christmas lists... it's also time for all of the football analysts out there to begin crafting their list of the most legitimate Super Bowl contenders. With just four weeks left in the regular season after Monday night, we're officially in that range where the contenders begin to separate themselves from the pretenders.
What's been interesting about this season specifically is that the divide between contenders and pretenders doesn't feel as pronounced as it usually does at this point in the calendar. Perhaps it's because there's fresh blood sitting atop the standings in both conferences -- New England, Denver, Chicago and Seattle are the top two seeds in the AFC and NFC as of this writing -- or it could be because the teams occupying Wild Card berths have not yet seperated themselves from the group that's often lumped into the Still in the Hunt category.
Two of those teams that remain in the hunt in the AFC are the three-time defending AFC Champion Kansas City Chiefs (6-6) and the back-to-back AFC South champs, the Houston Texans (7-5), a pair of teams that play on Sunday night in the perfect capper of a day stacked with meaningful football.
Now if one were to look at the Chiefs and decided that, based on their track record alone, they believed Kansas City was actually the most dangerous team in the AFC, I wouldn't be able to put up much of a fight. Their 2025 body of work doesn't necessarily show it, but you can't argue with nearly a decades worth of evidence.
To make a case supporting the Texans as the AFC's most dangerous team, you're doing the opposite of what needs to be done in order to rationalize Kansas City. Sure, the Texans have been the best team in their division each of the previous two years, but back-to-back 10-7 seasons is hardly proof of legitimate championship equity.
However, watch the Texans closely enough this year, and you'll know that despite their 7-5 record and their third place standing in their division right now, Houston's got as much of a case as anyone to come out of the AFC... so long as they crack the top seven in the conference.
This is, it turns out, how former Super Bowl champion quarterback Russell Wilson feels about the Texans as well. While the New York Giants are on a bye week, Russ was laying the groundwork for his post-playing career in the NFL, joining the CBS studio on Sunday afternoon to discuss the upcoming games. This is where Wilson had the platform to echo a point I've been trying to make for weeks... this Texans squad may be far more dangerous than anyone realizes.
"The most dangerous team? I'm actually gonna go with the Texans," Wilson proclaimed. "They may lose tonight, but they're gonna win the rest of them, and they're gonna get back in the playoffs, I think. Find a way to get in, and if they get in, with that defense, they're a problem."
So while the Texans' postseason prospects would certainly take a hit if they were to lose to the Chiefs on Sunday night, it wouldn't necessarily drop Houston out of the Playoff picture altogether, especially if they made good on Wilson's predictions and won their remaining four games after Week 14 to get to 11-6.
But just for good measure, upsetting Kansas City at Arrowhead and delivering a brutal blow to the postseason hopes of the Chiefs would go a long way in sending Houston to the Playoffs.