With three weeks left in the 2025 regular season, the NFL’s balance of power is shifting again. After another chaotic slate of games, the latest NFL.com Power Rankings for Week 15 show two AFC mainstays — the Buffalo Bills and Pittsburgh Steelers — charging back toward contender status, while the defending champion Philadelphia Eagles and the Indianapolis Colts are plummeting at the worst possible time. The updated ladder, compiled by NFL.com’s Eric Edholm, highlights how narrow the margins have become across the league, particularly in one-score games, and underscores how quickly momentum can flip for teams once viewed as secure playoff bets.
The Buffalo Bills’ midseason wobble now looks more like a brief detour than a full-blown crisis. After a statement win over the Cincinnati Bengals in Week 14, Buffalo climbed back into the AFC’s top tier and rose in the Week 15 Power Rankings, reflecting an 9–4 record and a seventh straight winning season under head coach Sean McDermott. That victory reinforced the Bills’ status as one of the conference’s most stable operations under the Sean McDermott–Brandon Beane regime, which has produced playoff seasons in six of the previous seven years.
Buffalo’s surge is built, as always, around Josh Allen’s rare combination of arm talent and power running. In 2024, Allen became the first player in modern NFL history to post three passing touchdowns and three rushing touchdowns in a single game during a 44–42 shootout loss to the Los Angeles Rams — a statistical outlier that underscored both his ceiling and the razor-thin line between victory and defeat for high-octane offenses. That game was also the first in league history in which both teams scored at least 40 points, committed no turnovers and one of them still lost, a reminder of how volatile shootouts can be even for elite quarterbacks.
Power Rankings are inherently subjective, but they often track closely with underlying efficiency metrics. In its Week 15 breakdown, NFL.com noted that Buffalo’s record in one-score games lagged behind its overall win–loss mark in recent seasons, suggesting a team that might actually be stronger than the raw standings indicated. That trend has continued into 2025, with the Bills pairing a top-tier scoring offense with a defense that, while inconsistent, still ranks among the league’s better units by total DVOA and EPA-based measures on many advanced analytics dashboards.
If Buffalo’s climb feels like a return to a familiar perch, the Pittsburgh Steelers’ resurgence is more of a slow, grinding re-emergence. Under Mike Tomlin, Pittsburgh has famously never endured a losing season, and the 2024 campaign again showcased that resilience: the Steelers finished 10–7, made the postseason and leaned heavily on a defense headlined by edge rusher T.J. Watt and defensive tackle Cameron Heyward. Watt, the team’s 2024 MVP, and Heyward, a first-team All-Pro that season, anchored a unit that kept Pittsburgh competitive even as the offense transitioned to Russell Wilson and new coordinator Arthur Smith.
By the time Week 14 of 2024 wrapped, the Steelers had improved to 10–3 with a 27–14 win over the Cleveland Browns, holding their rival scoreless for nearly two full quarters while stacking 24 unanswered points in the middle of the game. The defense forced multiple turnovers and Pittsburgh extended its dominance at home against Cleveland, winning 21 of its last 22 home meetings in the rivalry — the kind of division muscle that explains why oddsmakers and analysts remain slow to write off this franchise in any given year.
In NFL.com’s previous deep dive on one-score performances during the 2024 season, Pittsburgh’s 6–3 mark in tight contests contrasted with a 10–3 overall record, reflecting a team that consistently found ways to close out games despite offensive inconsistency. That knack for late-game execution has again buoyed the Steelers in 2025, keeping them in the thick of the AFC North race and powering their climb up the Week 15 Power Rankings board.
While the Bills and Steelers are trending up, the Philadelphia Eagles are tumbling at alarming speed. Once entrenched near the top of most power rankings, the reigning Super Bowl champions fell outside the top dozen in NFL.com’s Week 15 list after a third straight loss — this time a gut-punch overtime defeat to the Los Angeles Chargers. Philadelphia’s record now stands at 8–5, a slide that has reopened the NFC East race and raised questions about whether a team loaded with veteran stars has already peaked.
Quarterback Jalen Hurts’ turnover issues are at the center of the decline. Against the Chargers, Hurts threw four interceptions and lost a fumble following one of those picks, short-circuiting multiple drives that began with favorable field position and nullifying a strong effort from a defense that allowed just 3.9 yards per play and zero touchdowns after Los Angeles’ opening series. Saquon Barkley’s electric fourth-quarter touchdown run briefly gave Philadelphia its first lead of the night, but the Eagles went 0-for-2 in the red zone and produced eight empty possessions, a fatal inefficiency for a team built around explosive talent at quarterback and wide receiver.
This isn’t Philadelphia’s first late-season wobble in the Nick Sirianni era. In 2023, the Eagles collapsed down the stretch, losing five of their final six regular-season games while allowing 30.3 points and 383.8 yards per game over the final six weeks — defensive numbers that ranked near the bottom of the league and helped fuel a swift playoff exit. That history looms large now as the 2025 version tries to halt a December skid and reestablish the complementary football that powered its recent title run.
If Philadelphia’s slump is surprising for a reigning champion, the Indianapolis Colts’ descent is a reminder of how fragile momentum can be for emerging clubs. After spending much of the early season hovering near the fringe of the top 10 in various national rankings, Indianapolis has tumbled down the Week 15 board as injuries, defensive breakdowns and erratic quarterback play have eroded its margin for error. In previous seasons, the Colts’ path to contention rested on a top-tier rushing attack and an opportunistic defense, but recent results have exposed how thin that formula becomes when takeaways dry up and the pass rush can’t consistently get home against playoff-caliber offensive lines.
National analysts have repeatedly flagged Indianapolis’ defensive efficiency as a concern. In multiple iterations of advanced defensive rankings this season, the Colts have hovered in the bottom half of the league in points allowed per game and yards per play, a sharp contrast to the AFC’s elite defenses that dominate the upper reaches of the power rankings each week. Without a consistently dominant area — such as the elite pass rushes in Baltimore and Pittsburgh or the explosive quarterback play in Buffalo and Kansas City — Indianapolis faces a steeper climb back into the top tier, even if it remains mathematically alive in the AFC playoff race.
Power rankings are not standings, but they can be useful snapshots of where teams stand relative to expectations, health and underlying performance data. Week 15’s shake-up — Bills and Steelers climbing, Eagles and Colts falling — crystallizes several broader trends as the league barrels toward January.
Quarterback play and turnover margin remain the great equalizers. Buffalo’s ceiling stays high because Allen can swing games both with his arm and his legs, while Hurts’ recent giveaways have dragged a talented roster into coin-flip territory.
Defense still travels in December. Pittsburgh’s physical front seven has once again given it a weekly floor that many AFC peers lack, keeping the Steelers competitive in low-scoring games and helping them close out narrow wins.
Depth and adaptability separate true contenders from fast starts. As injuries mount, the most sustainable teams are those able to adjust schemes and reconfigure game plans, rather than relying on one dominant phase to carry them week after week.
The final three weeks will test whether the Bills and Steelers can convert their Week 15 momentum into seeding advantages — and whether the Eagles and Colts can steady themselves in time to avoid watching the postseason from home. For now, the latest NFL.com Power Rankings offer a clear message: the AFC’s old powers are not going quietly, and even recent champions are only a few bad Sundays away from tumbling down the board.
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