AFC Championship Game

I was expecting this to be a top five unit.

I thought that Jesse Minter was kind of going to be the Ravens correction from losing Mike McDonald when they didn't make him the head coach after they lost to the Chiefs in the AFC Championship a few years ago.

But it turns out maybe Jesse Minter might be a great value brand version of Mike McDonald.

He's a good defensive mind, but he's not a savant, a student of the game.

Maybe it was Joe Flacco.

In the 2012 AFC Championship game, they were down 7-6 at halftime, and One of the great things is they had Harbaugh mic'd up for that game, and he's basically telling the offensive coordinator, we need to open it up in the second half, whatever it takes.

And then all of a sudden, they came out with Joe Flacco and Shotgun in the second half of the game.

They won the second half 21-0 and never looked back.

We are home of the Denver Broncos, multi-Super Bowl champions.

They were in the AFC championship game a year ago.

We have an Avalanche team that won a cup just a few years ago.

We have a Nuggets team that won an NBA championship just a few years ago.

Still a lot of room for improvement, but way better in those situations.

But, again, I think Stoke and I's expectations, your expectation coming into this thing was championship or bust.

Like, we got to the AFC Championship last year.

We expected just to grow.

First, we'll do the Dream Fighters poll question.

Here are the four teams that you think, which one of these four do you think will be in the AFC Championship game? You can only pick one.

Kansas City, Buffalo, Denver, Cincinnati.

Those are the four that I chose.

It might be surprising for me when I say that Like 100%, this is the team I wouldn't want to play in the AFC.

It's not like I can't go, well, 50%, 30%, 20%.

No, no, there's one team 100% more than the others that I don't want to play in the AFC championship game.

Yeah, I think I know who it is.

When was that? It was about 2016, over 10 years ago.

We lost in the AFC Championship.

I threw a party on the cruise.

It was called the Grand Cruise.

The fire Zach Taylor pitchforks were out.

But then in the second half, They finally had the performance that really demonstrated that this was the team that was going to contend in the AFC Championship and go into the Super Bowl.

That they finally looked the part.

This is what we've been waiting for.

Yeah, I mean— I totally agree with you that that game, it not just looks different from the first matchup, but the significance of it looks different than it did just 24 hours earlier because the Chiefs had played statistically the easiest schedule in NFL through the first six weeks of the season.

Their next 10 games, starting with this game in Seattle that we just covered, those 10 games feature both Super Bowl participants It features the losers of the NFC Championship and AFC Championship games.

So all four teams that played in championship games last year in this 10-week stretch.

It features a team that started 6-0 with the 49ers.

I mean, really, I have.

I mean, you haven't seen an AFC championship game since 92.

I was thinking about that.

I was thinking about that last night.

And then Changeli took over in 97, which was my first year actually starting full-time as a quarterback.

And we went to the AFC Championship game.

So all those three-step, five-step, seven-step, bootlegs, we added a few quarterback draws because I was capable of doing it and some sprint outs and things of that nature.

But this wasn't no gimmick, guys.