• Defense dominates in the playoffs: Following Super Bowl LX, the PFF passing grade for the 2025 playoffs officially reads 57.1 — the lowest we have seen since the 2015 postseason.
• Quarterback deterioration: The simplest explanation remains the most accurate one: quarterbacks have just been worse. Not unlucky, or uniquely overmatched by some historic wave of defensive innovation. They’ve just been overly inaccurate, reckless with the football, and unable to string together efficient passing performances over the course of this postseason. 
• 2026 NFL Draft season is here: Try the best-in-class PFF Mock Draft Simulator and learn about 2026’s top prospects while trading and drafting for your favorite NFL team. Get 25% off your PFF+ annual subscription with code PFFFANTASYPODCAST25.

Estimated Reading Time: 11 minutes

Prepare for the 2026 NFL Draft with PFF+

Your complete draft preparation toolkit

Subscribe

The 2025 NFL playoffs have done an excellent job of exemplifying the modern power balance in football between offense and defense.

Following a regular season highlighted by elite defensive performances from the Denver Broncos, Houston Texans and now Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks, the playoffs followed a largely similar script.

Save for a few standout games where quarterbacks found a rhythm and restored the natural order of the past decade, this postseason will be remembered for elite defensive play capitalizing on quarterbacks who were out of their depth. 

While defensive coordinators are certainly drawing up more elaborate schemes than ever before to blur the picture for quarterbacks, the data doesn’t necessarily suggest that defenses are rushing the passer or covering receivers markedly better than they have already been doing over the past five years. 

PFF’s data points towards a tangible dip in quarterback play during this postseason, independent of defensive quality around the league. 

We will dive deep into various metrics to quantify this falloff in quarterback play, but the overarching decline is most noticeable when taking a look at the league-wide postseason PFF passing grade. 

Following Super Bowl LX, the PFF passing grade for the 2025 playoffs officially reads 57.1 — the lowest we have seen since the 2015 postseason.

The intervening years don’t come close to this level of quarterback play. The next lowest passing grade over the last decade of playoff action was 2018’s respectable 75.4 overall grade. Bear in mind, we’ve seen this grade reach elite heights of 89.4 and 87.0 in the 2016 and 2020 playoff campaigns, respectively. 

NFL passing summary by postseason

When looking at the raw numbers, these grades are clearly justified. Yards per attempt is down by over a full yard from 7.8 last postseason to 6.7 this year. Meanwhile, the overall completion percentage has dipped below 60% for the first time since the 2008 playoffs. 

Improved defensive coverage obviously plays a role here, but that doesn’t change the fact that for the first time since PFF started charting throw accuracy a decade ago, over a quarter of all pass attempts this postseason have been deemed both inaccurate and uncatchable. 

This decline isn’t just a byproduct of quarterbacks keeping the football out of harm’s way, either. Things don’t look any better on the ball security front; quarterbacks doubled the postseason interception haul from two years ago. 

The 26 interceptions thrown during these playoffs are the most of any postseason in the last 17 years, albeit with two additional playoff games than the seasons prior to 2020. 

This heavy turnover tally cannot simply be chalked up to bad turnover luck, either. The 5.1% turnover-worthy-play rate over the course of these playoffs is the second-highest of any postseason in the PFF era. 

Leading the way here, unsurprisingly, is Texans quarterback C.J. Stroud. His 10 turnover-worthy plays this postseason are the second most PFF has ever recorded for one player in a playoff run, behind Carson Palmer’s 13 as the Cardinals signal-caller a decade ago. Drake Maye also finished with nine turnover-worthy plays. 

While the average playoff quarterback’s tendency to put the ball in danger has been high, you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that some of these risks have paid dividends during this playoff campaign. 

Big-time throws — essentially PFF’s inverse to turnover-worthy plays — are occurring at a decade-long high this postseason. The current big-time throw rate for the 2025 playoffs is 6.3%, third all-time. 

The 2011 postseason saw a startling 9.4% big-time throw rate and may never be ousted from the top spot, but these playoffs have proved that quarterbacks believe the payoff for completing incredible throws is well worth the incurred risk.

This is further proven by the 2.86-second average time-to-throw in the 2025 regular season, growing to 2.98 seconds in the postseason, which also correlates to the fairly substantial jump in average depth of target from 8.2 yards in the regular season to 9.7 yards in the postseason. 

Playoff quarterbacks are undoubtedly pushing the ball downfield more than we typically see from September to December, but it doesn’t change the data-backed facts that they just haven’t been playing well. 

You can argue it’s due to the talent that qualified for this postseason, or more specifically, the stars who missed out. The absence of elite AFC quarterbacks Patrick Mahomes, Lamar Jackson and Joe Burrow has certainly taken its toll on the standard of playoff quarterbacking. 

Defensive enthusiasts will sing the praises of their side of the ball, attributing this dip in offensive standard to how Mike Macdonald, DeMeco Ryans and many other creative defensive minds have managed to tilt the scales, which had been leaning in favor of quarterbacks for practically an entire decade. 

However, the statistics indicate defenses haven’t necessarily punished poor quarterbacking play as much as we think. The league-wide PFF coverage grade for the 2025 postseason sits at a fairly average 59.7 — ranking 12th out of PFF’s 20 postseasons. 

The 12.0% overall forced incompletion percentage ranks fourth out of the past ten postseasons; it is a significant improvement from the 9.2% observed during the regular season.  

Defenses have faced more drops and off-target incompletions during these playoffs than any of the previous four years, and did so even before the Seahawks and Patriots took to the field on Sunday. 

Sure, a newfound wave of coverage ambiguity can lead to quarterbacks and receivers getting their wires crossed, leading to these mistakes, but they ultimately remain an offense-dependent metric.  

The other way in which defenses can heavily impact the passing game is with their rush up front. However, defenses aren’t showing any significant leaps in quality in this area either. 

While Drake Maye became the most-sacked quarterback in a single postseason, these playoffs still came up nine sacks short of the overall tally achieved last postseason. Despite the aforementioned increase in time-to-throw, the league-wide pressure rate is also down 2% from last year.

That being said, the standard of defensive lines in the playoffs remains fairly high. The 75.5 overall PFF pass rush grade this year is the third-highest since PFF began grading, and the pressure rate remains well ahead of some of the weaker postseasons in the late 2010s. 

At this point, you may be wondering if there’s anything defenses are doing to mess with quarterback performance this postseason that we aren’t accounting for. Truthfully, nothing comes to the surface. 

For the most part, defenses are treating playoff games with the same level of complexity as regular-season games. Sure, their approaches may be more bespoke for each opponent, but the overall rate of coverage disguises (33%) has stayed within a few percentage points of the regular season rate. The same can be said for man coverage rate, blitz rate and stunt rate.

Defenses are rarely saving any crazy new concepts or approaches for the postseason because the majority of these teams find themselves in must-win situations well before the playoffs get underway. 

The simplest explanation remains the most accurate one: quarterbacks have just been worse. Not unlucky, or uniquely overmatched by some historic wave of defensive innovation. They’ve just been overly inaccurate, reckless with the football, and unable to string together efficient passing performances over the course of this postseason. 

You can blame it on weather, injuries to top stars, or other offensive positions not pulling their weight, but the metrics align across accuracy, efficiency and ball security without a corresponding spike in defensive dominance to absolve quarterbacks of the blame.

Of course, the defensive side of the ball now appears in its healthiest state in years, but this postseason feels less like a defensive renaissance and more like a vacuum left behind by a down year for many of the league’s truly elite quarterbacks.

For now, the 2025 playoffs stand as a stark reminder that when quarterback play drops to this level, every other area of the game becomes exponentially more important. As a result, Super Bowl 60 was a perfect encapsulation of this postseason in its final act.