The AFC North: Three Playoff Contenders and Cincinnati

The AFC North has become a very interesting division. The Cleveland Browns being good again will do that. The 2021 NFL season will be the 20th in this current eight-division format, and for most of the AFC North's existence, it has been the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Baltimore Ravens usually battling for division supremacy, while the two Ohio-based teams compete for draft picks--though the Cincinnati Bengals did have their moments. Now, with the Browns' amazing 2020 season, that has changed.

The Cleveland Browns' rise was a slow and steady one. Their return to play in 1999 was welcomed with so many open arms, but it saw a lot of despair, a lot of bad seasons, and a lot of quarterbacks. It also saw only one postseason entering last year (2002), and only one combined win during the 2016 and 2017 seasons. When the Browns started the 2018 season with a tie, Cleveland celebrated. That's how bad it was. It wasn't until the third week of that year that the Browns won their first game since Christmas Eve 2016, and that was the beginning of an uprising that saw the team being picked to actually make the playoffs.

Fast forward to 2020, and the team went 11-5, achieving their first winning season since 2007, and making the playoffs for the first time since 2002. They even reached the Divisional Playoff and nearly beat the Kansas City Chiefs. And remember, this was with Odell Beckham, Jr. out for most of the season. Now he's back. The Browns will definitely be a force in 2021.

A team who was supposed to be a force in 2020 was the Pittsburgh Steelers. We saw how this started: 11 straight wins, the last unbeaten left for weeks. At first, the wins were convincing. Then they were ugly; the ugliest one being a Wednesday outing where they barely survived a Ravens team who was largely decimated due to positive COVID-19 tests. Even so, the Steelers were 11-0 and appeared to be destined for a Super Bowl appearance. Then they ran into the Washington Football team...and lost. Then the losses didn't stop. The Steelers lost four of their final five games, but still won the AFC North. However, their skid allowed both Kansas City and Buffalo to pass them in the overall AFC standings, and regarding the playoffs, they were largely embarrassed at home by the rival Browns.

The Steelers have lost a few key players, but the one constant for nearly two decades, Ben Roethlisberger, remains. This will be his 18th season as the Steelers' starting quarterback; he's 39 years of age, up there with that group of grizzled QBs such as Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, and Ryan Fitzpatrick. He's also in his second season since his shoulder injury that kept him out for the rest of the 2019 campaign, so he's definitely limited as far as mobility. He still has a vast collection of targets in Juju Smith-Schuster, Chase Claypool, and James Washington, but the bottom line: the Steelers need to stop getting in their own way.

The Baltimore Ravens. I just want to say this: I'm a Lamar Jackson fan. Yes, I am. He's amazing. The man is just a phenomenal runner. He's a Fantasy Football owner's dream; a QB who can throw and is good enough to have 1000 rushing yards. That's a dangerous double threat. But here's the thing. Lamar doesn't really have much around him. The Ravens have no receivers. Their only reliable target is tight end Mark Andrews. They also don't really have a running game, and it's worse due to the team letting Mark Ingram II go. Offensively, this team is Lamar and Justin Tucker, the kicker who never seems to miss. Though even Tucker has proven to be human as of late.

Now here's the good news for Lamar: he's young. He's a generational talent who isn't even 25 yet, so the way I see it, the Ravens have at least 10 years to build around him. 2020 saw Lamar Jackson win a playoff game for the first time in his career, and that's with the team he has now. The Ravens are always fun to watch, especially in those rival games. They should be a playoff team again in 2021, maybe AFC North Champions if the Browns and Steelers slip on a proverbial banana peel or two.

And then there's the Cincinnati Bengals, the poor Bengals. With the Browns finally graduating to playoff contender status in 2020, the Bengals stand alone as the sole black sheep of the AFC North. They drafted Joe Burrow at #1 overall in the 2020 NFL Draft, but he ended up out for the year because Cincy's bad O-Line can't protect anything. The Bengals went 4-11-1 in 2020, which was actually an improvement, but still horrendous. They did have their moments; they beat the Tennessee Titans on November 1, 2020. And you know that losing skid that the Steelers went on? Cincy was part of it, a win over Pittsburgh on Monday Night Football. It's going to be more of the same from Cincy, though. They're going to do two things in 2021: play for a good draft pick, and mess up some teams' playoff plans among the way.

Overall, the AFC North will be a truly intriguing division, now that it's a three team race. It will definitely be close between the Steelers, Browns, and Ravens, but each team needs to do two things in order to win the division: don't get in your own way, and don't take the Bengals lightly.

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