Let’s overreact to NFL Week 16: Which of these six teams is a Super Bowl contender and which is a pretender?
- Joined ESPN in 2011
- New Jersey native and author of two published novels
FOXBOROUGH, Mass. — We are getting to the end of it now. Once Monday Night Football is complete, there will be just two weeks left in the 2021 NFL regular season. If we want to overreact to stuff we saw this week, you really can’t blame us, can you?
So let’s start here, with the crucial AFC East matchup I covered Sunday at Gillette Stadium. The Bills rebounded from their windy, frustrating loss three weeks earlier to defeat New England 33-21 and take over first place in the division they won a season ago.
It hasn’t been the easiest campaign for the Bills, and it wasn’t the easiest week. They put two important wide receivers and a couple of offensive lineman on the COVID-19/reserve list and lost another offensive lineman, Ike Boettger, to an Achilles injury in the second half against the Patriots. But the Bills overcame all of that to win their most important game of the season. So it’s worth asking if there’s still a chance we end up seeing the Super Bowl contender we expected to see in this Bills team back when this season began.
In fact, it’s worth devoting the entire Week 16 overreactions column to contender/pretender questions. We can’t hit them all, and we made a conscious choice to exclude the Chiefs and Buccaneers, who won easily on Sunday and played in last season’s Super Bowl, and the Packers, who have the league’s best record.
Let’s take a look at teams that have more question marks around them, for whatever reason, and where they stand after Week 16’s action:
The Bills are a legitimate Super Bowl contender
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