What happened to the NFL's elite?
The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL
The Athletic
4.6 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 4 December 2025
⏱️ 85 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
Chiefs, Ravens, Eagles and Lions; Chiefs, Ravens, Eagles and Lions. Look back over the last half-decade of the NFL, and you'll see those four teams at the top of the league, year in and year out. They're all such constants, in fact, that it seems we just chisel their names in stone into the playoff picture in August. But this year, the Eagles are sputtering their way into December, and the Chiefs, Ravens and Lions all could easily miss the playoffs. So, what happened to these assumed powerhouses? On this episode of The Athletic Football Show, Diante Lee from The Ringer hops on with Robert Mays to cover the issues for the Ravens, Eagles and Lions, and then former Chiefs offensive lineman Mitch Schwartz joins Robert to break down the problems for his old team, and whether they can come back from them this season.
Rundown (timestamps are approximate)
8:26 Detroit Lions
24:33 Philadelphia Eagles
36:34 Baltimore Ravens
48:06 Any overarching lessons?
59:40 Kansas City Chiefs
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Host: Robert Mays
With: Diante Lee and Mitch Schwartz
Executive Producer: Michael Beller
Video Producer: Katy Duffy
Audio Producer: Michael Beller
Social Producer: Scott Krinch
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Athletic Football Show. I'm Robert Mays. It's been a weird year in the NFL, to say the least. |
| 0:09.4 | Four of the six teams that had the best Super Bowl odds heading into the season are either in some form of disarray or in serious danger of missing the playoffs. |
| 0:19.1 | The teams that I have in mind, the Lions, the Eagles, the Ravens and the Chiefs. The Lions and the Chiefs seriously might not make it. If you look at the playoff odds that we have on the Athletic Playoff Simulator, they are below 40% for each of those teams. The Ravens are going to make the playoffs, but they're going to make the playoffs in an awful AFC North, it's almost by default. |
| 0:37.9 | The Eagles, there's like open mutiny going on with the state of the Philadelphia Eagles. |
| 0:42.7 | It really does feel like this year specifically, the teams we expected to be elite just haven't been. |
| 0:49.0 | The mainstays, the things we can rely on, haven't been quite as reliable. |
| 0:53.1 | And so today, I invited both Deonté Lee and |
| 0:55.9 | our frontal friend Mitchell Schwartz, former Chiefs' offensive tackle on, to talk about why this |
| 1:00.4 | has happened. Why have these teams fallen short this year? Why have they been disappointing? |
| 1:05.5 | And what can we learn from it? With Deonté, we hit the lions, the Eagles, and the Ravens, |
| 1:10.1 | and then we really dug into the Chiefs with Mitch. And with Deontesé, we hit the lions, the Eagles, and the Ravens, and then we really dug into |
| 1:11.3 | the Chiefs with Mitch. And with Deontes specifically, we tried to find some throughlines, some lessons, |
| 1:16.6 | some bigger picture takeaways that we might be able to land down from these teams being a little |
| 1:22.1 | bit disappointing and just taking a step back compared to what we're used to from them. So let's get |
| 1:27.1 | to that conversation with Deontay right now. |
| 1:35.5 | Joining us now, it is our old friend from The Ringer, our buddy Deonté Lee. |
| 1:40.9 | Dei, Dei, how are you doing, man? |
| 1:42.0 | I'm doing well, man. |
| 1:43.0 | Glad to be on the show, as always. |
| 1:44.7 | I see, we got a little less mustache now than I think the last time we were on. I think it's just that I have more beard. That's the only reason. We might be balancing it out. The distribution is a little more equal. That's more a matter of laziness than anything else. I'll tell you that right now. It snowed this weekend intensely in Chicago. And so I have that like first bout of winter depression. And so I just decided not to take care of myself over the last five days. And so that's why I've let it get to this place. There's nothing I can do but empathize because at my home, we are talking about how we can't regulate temperature when it drops below 60 degrees. So that says a lot about California versus the Midwest. |
| 2:23.4 | We're going to have our own depressing conversation on this show today. You and I were going to do something different. |
| 2:27.8 | And I was just kind of sitting with it on my 20-hour drive home from Florida as I was thinking about the Eagles and that lost to the |
... |
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