The battle for the NFC South will come down to a game between the division's top two teams on Saturday …but the title itself might not be decided until Sunday.
The Panthers (8-8) face the Buccaneers (7-9) on Saturday night in Tampa. If the Panthers win, end of story, Carolina takes the division. (More on that in a moment.) If the Bucs win, though, the two teams would be tied at 8-9 … and they'd have to wait until the outcome of Sunday's Falcons-Saints game. If the Falcons win, you'd have three teams tied at 8-9 … and thePantherswould win by a series of tiebreakers.
For any other division in football, this would be a ridiculous, borderline unbelievable turn of events. For the NFC South, it's called "a season."
The NFC South is the point on the NFL map where the border with the college football universe is the thinnest, and consequently a whole lot of SEC crazy tends to seep into the water supply. The four teams that make up the NFC South — Atlanta, Carolina, Tampa Bay and New Orleans — are the most ramshackle collection of weirdos in the NFL.
You don't want to play any NFC South team at any point in the year, because you never quite know how it's going to go (see:Monday night's Rams-Falcons game). These four teams shoot themselves in the foot with numbing regularity, but they might just be standing on your foot when they fire.
Five of the NFL's eight divisions have sent all four members to the Super Bowl. (Sorry, AFC South and AFC/NFC Norths.) No division has sent all four teams to the big game more recently than the NFC South (New Orleans 2009, Carolina 2015, Atlanta 2016, Tampa Bay 2020). And yet, almost every time an NFC South team manages to reach the big game, it faceplants for a few seasons afterward, like a pageant winner ascending the podium and then immediately falling off the back as soon as she receives her crown.
In other words, you must take the NFC South seriously, even though it is a profoundly unserious division.
Consider how this season alone has gone:
The Falcons' backup quarterback is on a $180 million contract. They have one of the game's three best running backs, a vicious pass defense, a young and hungry receiving corps, and yet have lost nine games already this season. They've beaten both the Rams and Bills in prime time … and lost to both the Dolphins and Jets. They might well finish with a record equal to the division winner … and they were eliminated from the playoff picture weeks ago.
The Panthers are the odds-on favorite to win the division — a 78 percent chance, per The Athletic — and yet nobody's quite sure if their quarterback will be around much longer. Bryce Young has engineered six game-winning drives this season, second in the league only to Bo Nix's seven, but the fact that the Panthers have won only eight games total is a sign that this is a team that needs game-winning drives a little too often. And again, Carolina being a division winner with a below-.500 record is very much on the table.
The Bucs are the four-time defending division champs, and after starting the season 5-1, appeared headed to an easy fifth. But they've lost seven of their past eight, including four in a row. They've won exactly one game since before Halloween — and that was a three-point victory over the woeful Arizona Cardinals. Everybody on the entire team is injured, including two separate players since you started reading this sentence.
The Saints somehow built an entire 2025 team and forgot they might need an NFL-caliber starting quarterback. They immediately proceeded to go 1-8 to start the season. But they've swept the season series against the likely division winner, and they're on a four-game winning streak. Of course.
This is the division victimized by 28-3 andthe Minneapolis Miracle, the division where Cam Newton capped an MVP season with an LVP Super Bowl, where a creamsicle-clad team lost its first26games. Sub-.500 teams have won the divisiontwicein the past 11 seasons. So are you at all surprised that the 2025 season might end in a three-way 8-9 tie?
The chaos of the NFC South is glorious to behold, yes. But it might be time to institute some changes. Idea: After this season, relegate the entire division to the SEC and promote some replacements. Bringing Georgia, Alabama, Ole Miss and Texas into the NFL couldn't be any weirder than what we're dealing with now.
