With five of the six NFL wild-card games in the books, let's break down one big question from the losing teams that popped up during or after their defeats, and what each team might do to solve those concerns moving forward.
Most of these games didn't come down to one play or one sequence, which means that correcting a single thing wouldn't have swung a winner into a loser and vice versa. The big questions for these teams, however, all revolve around something that could help them make a deeper playoff run in 2025.
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I'll go chronologically from the games, which means this trip around the postseason starts in Houston. While the collapse of the Chargers wasn't as disastrous or obvious as it was two years ago, Saturday's loss felt a lot more like the old Chargers than the team which seemed to grow in mental toughness during Jim Harbaugh's first season at the helm. And that loss focused the attention on a player who hasn't quite lived up to the loftiest of expectation so far:
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Chargers: Is this Justin Herbert's ceiling?
Wild-card weekend result: Lost 32-12 to the Texans
What seemed like a wildly successful season for the Chargers before Saturday quickly turned into the sort of existential crisis the franchise has been dealing with for years. Herbert became the first player in league history with 150 regular-season pass attempts to throw more interceptions in a playoff game than he did during the season, as the 26-year-old followed a three-interception regular season with a four-interception game against Houston.
Making this even more painful for the Chargers is that this game was there for the taking. They marched downfield with ease on the opening drive before getting stuffed on third-and-1 and kicking a field goal. The Texans turned the ball over on their first snap, but tight end Will Dissly dropped a potential second-and-19 conversion, and the Chargers settled for three more. They dropped a would-be interception from Houston QB C.J. Stroud on the next drive for what could have been another short field. And after managing to pick off Stroud in the second quarter for another possession in plus territory, Herbert threw the ball right back to Houston on the next snap. Stroud recovered a bouncing snap and hit Xavier Hutchinson on a third-and-16 for 34 yards to lead the Texans to their first points. While the Chargers had their chances in the second half, the spell they had on the Texans' offense mostly disappeared.