Having already written about the Broncos’ big win over the Chiefs and Bears CB Nahshon Wright’s tribute to his former coach, let’s now put a wrap on our Week 11 coverage with the takeaways. Let’s dive in …
Los Angeles Rams
The Rams might be the NFL’s most complete team. Don’t believe me? Ask second-year star Jared Verse. He’ll tell you.
“I don’t think we have any ceiling,” the outside linebacker told me late Sunday after beating the Seahawks. “I know a lot of people say that. I don’t know where ours is. We had a good game today. We held them to a lot of field goals, but we could’ve gotten off the field. We could’ve avoided all that. The touchdown they had, we could’ve avoided that. There are things we could’ve done to stop them. I don’t think there’s no ceiling. We could have shut them out completely, beat them 21-zip.”
The actual final on Sunday from SoFi was Rams 21, Seahawks 19, but that didn’t make Verse’s point any less relevant. L.A. found a way, even on an imperfect afternoon, to show Seattle and everyone else how many different ways it could win a ballgame.
Any story on the Rams’ season coming into Sunday centered on Matthew Stafford, who, at 37, might have the best shot he’s ever had at winning league MVP. And he was fine against an excellent Seattle defense. But the fact that he threw for only 130 yards and an 89.9 rating was a vivid illustration that the Rams have a lot more than No. 9 in their bag.
The run game piled up 119 yards at 5.4 yards per carry, with lead back Kyren Williams slicing through the Seahawks’ defense for 91 and a touchdown.
The defense, meanwhile, picked off Sam Darnold four times, and did it by forcing him to get the ball out faster than he usually does. That happened through a team approach that, as Verse explains, meaning stars subjugating their egos.
“I told B.Y. [Byron Young] before the game, I’m gonna play for you today. You’re making plays, not for yourself, but for the guy next to you,” Verse said. “It feels like a college team, with a true brotherhood. I know a lot of NFL teams don’t have that brotherhood. But we do.”
And that showed up at the most critical time. With the Seahawks trailing and five seconds left, Verse said to defensive coordinator Chris Shula, “Lemme run through somebody, lemme prove a point.” Shula declined, telling Verse he was dropping all 11 defenders on the play, a strategy that clogged the area underneath where Seattle wanted to throw to set up the winning field goal.
As a result, Seattle settled for a 61-yard try that failed.
“You run that ball, it will get stopped. You pass it, we will get in your face. They were only able to get, what, 50 yards with the time they had left?” Verse said. “They were able to get it off quick, so we wouldn’t get sacks, but all that matters is we were able to pull off the win. That’s all that matters to us.”
It sure looks like they’re going to keep doing plenty of it.
Buffalo Bills
What I like about the Bills’ win on Sunday is how alarming the first half was. The team’s run defense has been problematic all year, and turnovers have become an underlying issue, as well. Sure enough, with a quality opponent in Orchard Park on Sunday, both trouble spots reared their head almost right away.
At halftime, with Buffalo clinging to a 21–20 lead, the Buccaneers had rushed for 136 yards, and Allen had two picks. Then, the Bills went three-and-out to start the second half, got a stop, fumbled a punt and Tampa went up 26–21.
“These guys are resilient,” coach Sean McDermott told me, just after the game. “You felt it a little bit. It was like, We’re not gonna let this happen. [The Bucs] were doing a good job, so give them credit. But it was, How strong is our will? And that’s what I believe showed up.”
Indeed, the Bills outscored the Bucs 23–6 the rest of the way, securing a 44–32 win. In the fourth quarter, they took over, holding Tampa to 10 rushing yards, winning the turnover battle 1–0, and tripling up Tampa (165–55) in total yards.
“One, the players played better,” McDermott said. “And then two, we made some subtle adjustments, some tweaks to things. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out exactly what needs to be adjusted. Coaches did a good job. [Coordinator] Bobby Babich and the defensive staff did a real good job, and the players executed.”
So the Bills recovered from last week’s no-show in Miami, with momentum from wins over the Panthers and Chiefs restored. Still, things won’t get any easier. They play Houston on Thursday, followed by the Steelers, Bengals and Patriots, with every opponent seeing a game against Josh Allen’s crew as a shot at validation in the AFC.
“That probably happens because we’ve been successful, the AFC championship game last year and we’ve got the reigning MVP. It’s an easy one to have circled on your calendar, “ the coach said, with his 100th win (regular season and playoffs) in Buffalo in the books.
Baltimore Ravens
The Ravens had the best play of the day—a fake Tush Push that Mark Andrews took around end for a 35-yard touchdown. The play, as Andrews explained it to me, gave him the option to sneak if the middle was open (he was lined up under center at quarterback), or go around right end, where fullback Pat Ricard and tight end Charlie Kolar worked to seal off the edge. Andrews saw the Browns crowding the middle, and the rest is history.
FAKE TUSH PUSH TD @Ravens 🚨
— NFL on CBS 🏈 (@NFLonCBS) November 17, 2025
Mark Andrews scores his first career rush TD 🤯 pic.twitter.com/kezU6hjwba
“Schematically, having a play on a critical down is something that we are always paying attention to—credit to the coaches for seeing that type of thing,” Andrews said. “Credit to all the guys up front, obviously Pat, Charlie making big-time blocks on the edge. From there, it was just making the right play and getting to the end zone. That was awesome.”
Even better, those wound up being the winning points in the Ravens’ fourth consecutive victory. The 23–16 final was closer than many folks expected. But Cleveland’s defense is stout, it’s a division game and the win gets the Ravens back to .500 at 5–5.
Considering that a wounded Baltimore team went into its bye at 1–5 a little over a month ago, just getting back to level ground this fast is meaningful.
“I think the resiliency of this team, obviously, there was so much hype, and we played some good football to start, being able to claw our way out of that hole we’ve been in, and to come back to 5–5, sitting where we are right now is just a credit to everyone in this organization,” Andrews said. “How hard they’ve worked, staying humble and keeping the course, and just looking to take it week to week. That’s what we are striving to do.”
San Francisco 49ers
The Niners are back, too. Brock Purdy returned to the lineup Sunday, and it quickly felt like old times for San Francisco in Arizona. Skyy Moore returned the opening kickoff to the Cardinals’ 1-yard line, and Christian McCaffrey scored on the next play. After the defense got a stop, the Niners drove another 70 yards in five plays, making it 13–0 on a 30-yard touchdown strike from Purdy to George Kittle.
Now, a lot of folks have already thrown dirt on the 2025 Niners. I can understand that. Nick Bosa and Fred Warner are out and not returning, Brandon Aiyuk still hasn’t returned, and San Francisco plays in a rugged division.
That said, they’re 7–4, and have the Panthers and Browns between now and their Week 14 bye, and then the Titans in Week 15. So the playoffs are very much in sight.
“No secret, we’ve had guys step up on defense, and have to play, whether they’re young guys or backups,” Purdy told me postgame. “That’s part of it. They’ve done a great job. We’ve found ways to win. Offensively, we are getting healthier and getting back to our original starting roster, which feels great. We are confident in that. I think, as a whole, we have to find ways to win and play complementary football. When the defense gets stops, we have to go score as an offense. It can be done. I still really do believe we have everyone in the right spot for us to make a run and achieve our goals.”
We all know where the Niners’ goals routinely sit.
So Purdy saying that is really saying something.
Chicago Bears
The Bears are right there with the Colts and Patriots as wildly surprising teams. After Caleb Williams’s seam throw to Colston Loveland to beat the Bengals, and his big runs to beat the Giants, there’s a belief in Chicago at the end of games. And this week, it even rubbed off on the Bears’ special teams, with return man Devin Duvernay taking the final kickoff of the game back 56 yards to set up Cairo Santos’s 48-yard game-winner against the Vikings.
Chicago—that’s right, Chicago—has won seven of eight.
The Bears are all alone in first place in the NFC North, 11 weeks into the season.
“I think we’re in a great place,” said corner Nahshon Wright, after we discussed his personal story from Sunday, remembering his former coach, Last Chance U star John Beam (check it out here). “From the time I got here in OTAs, we talked about winning—yeah, really just winning. I think we put ourselves in a good spot to control our destiny at this point. It was great to get the first division win. We’ve got three more [division games], so we’ve got a lot of work to be done. But like I said, we control our destiny. And I like where we’re sitting. I think we all do.”
The Bears, for what it’s worth, rushed for 140 yards, and held the Vikings to 265 total yards, controlled the ball for nearly 37 minutes, and kept J.J. McCarthy to a passer rating of 47.7.
Generally, these things are sustainable. We’ll see if they are in this case.
Philadelphia Eagles
Speaking of sustainable, here are the Eagles again, winning in a different way, but at the same clip they always have. Philly is 8–2 after beating the Lions on Sunday Night Football, and in possession of the NFC’s No. 1 seed, over the Rams on tiebreakers. Do they have drama? Yup. Is the run game dramatically different? Sure. Will any of that matter?
That’s the million-dollar question.
For now, though, the Eagles look more than O.K., winning these games behind Vic Fangio’s defense, which throttled the Packers and Lions in consecutive weeks. Philly held Detroit to 317 total yards and nine points, six days after holding the Packers to 261 yards and seven points.
And Fangio can take a bow for all that, too. He lost five starters from last year’s unit, and his ability to develop young guys like rookie Jihaad Campbell and integrate new pieces like Jaelan Phillips have transformed the group, and raised the ceiling significantly.
That isn’t, for what it’s worth, to say that the Eagles don’t need Saquon Barkley. Or that Jalen Hurts won’t have to make big plays in January.
But it does mean they have to keep chasing their 2024 form, while knowing they might not need quite as much this time.
New York Jets vs. New England Patriots
The Jets-Patriots Thursday nighter was instructive in a couple of ways. And interesting in that the team on the wrong end of that one, New York, was pretty intrigued by the idea of hiring the coach that the team on the right side of Thursday wound up bringing in.
Maybe Mike Vrabel was always returning to Foxborough. Maybe Aaron Glenn was always going back to the Jets. But the Jets were pretty impressed after interviewing Vrabel in January.
The team’s brass brought Vrabel out to the Capital Grille in Parsippany, N.J., on the final Thursday night of the 2024 regular season, days after the Browns let Vrabel out of his consulting contract. They met with him at their facility the next day. Some of the background work they’d done had Vrabel walking all over people and being divisive in Tennessee. But what they found flew in the face of all that. They thought he came off as smart, thoughtful, caring and having a very clear vision for the program he wanted to build in his second shot.
The feeling coming out of it, from the Jets, was, Why would you fire this guy?
The rest, of course, is history. New England fired Jerod Mayo the following Sunday, sidestepped the Rooney Rule, and quickly honed in on its target from the start, hiring Vrabel before the Jets even started their second round of interviews—which Vrabel would’ve been a part of—as they went through the standard, league-prescribed process. They’d also had eyes on Glenn from the start, before Vrabel came in and blew them away.
Now, the two 2024 cellar-dwellers (the Jets were actually a game better than the Patriots a year ago) couldn’t have much more separation than they do. New England has lost only two games. New York has won just two.
O.K., so where’s all that instructive? When I did my midseason poll of league executives a couple of weeks ago, one trend that a few execs cited as their most impactful thus far in 2025 was the importance of coach and quarterback, which has never been more pronounced. In this case, even though the Jets had way more young talent on hand in January, the lure of Drake Maye vs. the uncertainty at quarterback in New York made the decision academic for Vrabel.
Which is to say that, essentially, the Patriots had the quarterback, and that helped them land the coveted coach. And a lot of the rest has fallen into place as a result of that.
Miami Dolphins
The NFL’s morning game in Spain was grimy and entertainingly ugly, and the Dolphins came out of it with real life. Whether Miami’s good enough to take advantage of that may be a different question. For now, though, the Dolphins are 4–7, and they have the Saints and Jets on the other side of their bye, putting them in position to reach .500 for a mid-December Monday night clash in Pittsburgh.
As far as things I didn’t see coming at this juncture, that’d be high on the list.
Maybe the most important thing is that this surge may affect more than just this year.
As we laid out in the aftermath of GM Chris Grier’s dismissal, the most critical factor for Dolphins coach Mike McDaniel coming out of the shakeup was going to be his ability to keep his hold on the locker room. Ownership believed, at the point when Grier was let go, that McDaniel hadn’t lost the players, contrary to what a lot of other folks thought.
Owner Stephen Ross had heard from enough people that McDaniel would be a great second-chance head coach candidate to consider carefully whether he wanted to pull the plug on the 42-year-old’s first chance at being in charge.
Thus far, Ross looks like he was right on McDaniel’s place with the players, and his patience has been rewarded—first with a blowout win over the Bills and then with the overtime win over the Commanders in Madrid. At the very least, the decisions that follow the one to dismiss Grier are significantly more complicated than they were a few weeks ago.
Upper management will, to be sure, continue its complete assessment of the football operation and how the pieces fit together. That deep dive will include McDaniel, interim GM Champ Kelly and cap chief Brandon Shore (who could emerge in an increased role, perhaps one like Mike Disner’s in Detroit). And, yes, there’s a good chance we get to January, and a new football czar is coming in and finishing the housecleaning that Ross started.
But it doesn’t seem as certain as it did a month ago.
Quick-hitters
Let’s wrap up Week 11 with a few more thoughts …
• The Panthers are 6–5 and a half game back of the Buccaneers in the NFC South. Pretty impressive, especially with Rico Dowdle as one of the lead dogs.
• While we’re there, Derrick Brown remains among the NFL’s most overlooked stars.
• Meanwhile, Atlanta is 3–7, Michael Penix Jr. looks like he’s regressed and Raheem Morris has some work to do on the back end of this season.
• The Jaguars routed the Chargers, 35–6, keyed by a 192–42 edge in rushing yards, which only supports the notion that Joe Alt and Rashawn Slater are two of the most significant injury losses any team has sustained in 2025.
• Shoutout to the Steelers’ defense for scoring twice, and allowing Mason Rudolph plenty of margin for error as he entered the lineup for Aaron Rodgers.
• Can the Bengals stay alive long enough so we can get one relevant Joe Burrow game? Please?
• Speaking of survivors, here come the Texans, with two consecutive wins behind Davis Mills.
• I don’t think less of the Seahawks today. They did fight tooth and nail.
• Christian Watson’s game-winning catch didn’t get the shine it deserved. Also, the Packers’ offense looked miles better on Sunday than it did last Monday night. Now, they need some good news on Josh Jacobs’s knee injury.
• It should be an emotional night for the Cowboys, in their first game back since the death of Marshawn Kneeland. Hard to say how a team that’s been through something like that will respond. But certainly, I hope people give them some grace as they deal with this tragedy.
More NFL on Sports Illustrated
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Week 11 NFL Takeaways: Why the Rams Don’t ‘Have Any Ceiling’.
