Culture
2023-24 NFL Week 18 playoff scenarios: Packers, Bills, Steelers clinch berths
The Jacksonville Jaguars lost to the Tennessee Titans on Sunday setting off some AFC playoff dominoes. The Pittsburgh Steelers and Buffalo Bills clinched playoff spots with the Jags’ loss. This also gave the Houston Texans the AFC South title.
And later, the Bills gained the AFC East title by beating the Miami Dolphins on Sunday night.
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Plus, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers punched their ticket to the postseason capturing the NFC South crown with a sluggish win over the Carolina Panthers on Sunday. And the Green Bay Packers grabbed the last remaining NFC wild card berth by beating the Chicago Bears.
Below is a glimpse at all the scenarios for every team with playoff life remaining.
Follow here for live updates from NFL Week 18 and here for live updates on Buffalo Bills vs Miami Dolphins.
AFC
Clinched
- Baltimore Ravens (13-4) — AFC North division title, No. 1 seed, first-round bye and home-field advantage
- Buffalo Bills (11-6) — AFC East division title
- Kansas City Chiefs (11-6) — AFC West division title
- Houston Texans (10-7) — AFC South division title
- Cleveland Browns (11-6) — playoff berth
- Miami Dolphins (11-6) — playoff berth
- Pittsburgh Steelers (10-7) — playoff berth
Bracket seedings
- Ravens
- Bills
- Chiefs
- Texans
- Browns
- Dolphins
- Steelers
GO DEEPER
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NFC
Clinched
- San Francisco 49ers (12-4) — NFC West division title, No. 1 seed, first-round bye and home-field advantage
- Dallas Cowboys (12-5) — NFC East division title
- Detroit Lions (12-5) — NFC North division title
- Tampa Bay Buccaneers (9-8) — NFC South division title
- Philadelphia Eagles (11-6) — playoff berth
- Los Angeles Rams (10-7) — playoff berth
- Green Bay Packers (9-8) — playoff berth
GO DEEPER
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Bracket seedings
- 49ers
- Cowboys
- Lions
- Buccaneers
- Eagles
- Rams
- Packers
GO DEEPER
NFL Week 18 schedule: Bills-Dolphins clash on SNF
Required reading
- NFL Week 18 playoff standings and projections: Which teams have best chance to make postseason?
- Russini: What I’m hearing about the NFL coaching carousel entering Week 18
- NFL Power Rankings Week 18: Browns and Packers move up, plus a lesson from every team
(Photo: John Fisher / Getty Images)
When a writer is praised for having a sense of place, it usually means one specific place — a postage stamp of familiar ground rendered in loving, knowing detail. But Kiran Desai, in her latest novel, “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” has a sense of places.
This 670-page book, about the star-crossed lovers of the title and several dozen of their friends, relatives, exes and servants (there’s a chart in the front to help you keep track), does anything but stay put. If “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” were an old-fashioned steamer trunk, it would be papered with shipping labels: from Allahabad (now known as Prayagraj), Goa and Delhi; from Queens, Kansas and Vermont; from Mexico City and, perhaps most delightfully, from Venice.
There, in Marco Polo’s hometown, the titular travelers alight for two chapters, enduring one of several crises in their passionate, complicated, on-again, off-again relationship. One of Venice’s nicknames is La Serenissima — “the most serene” — but in Desai’s hands it’s the opposite: a gloriously hectic backdrop for Sonia and Sunny’s romantic confusion.
Their first impressions fill a nearly page-long paragraph. Here’s how it begins.
Sonia is a (struggling) fiction writer. Sunny is a (struggling) journalist. It’s notable that, of the two of them, it is she who is better able to perceive the immediate reality of things, while he tends to read facts through screens of theory and ideology, finding sociological meaning in everyday occurrences. He isn’t exactly wrong, and Desai is hardly oblivious to the larger narratives that shape the fates of Sunny, Sonia and their families — including the economic and political changes affecting young Indians of their generation.
But “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” is about more than that. It’s a defense of the very idea of more, and thus a rebuke to the austerity that defines so much recent literary fiction. Many of Desai’s peers favor careful, restricted third-person narration, or else a measured, low-affect “I.” The bookstores are full of skinny novels about the emotional and psychological thinness of contemporary life. This book is an antidote: thick, sloppy, fleshy, all over the place.
It also takes exception to the postmodern dogma that we only know reality through representations of it, through pre-existing concepts of the kind to which intellectuals like Sunny are attached. The point of fiction is to assert that the world is true, and to remind us that it is vast, strange and astonishing.
See the full list of the 10 Best Books of 2025 here.
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