Just like that, it’s over. The 2024 season came crashing down with a thud, the sound of the Eagles slamming the door in the Chiefs’ faces and foreclosing their bid for history.

The Eagles took a pretty wild ride in the Power Rankings this season, starting in the No. 5 position, then falling to 13(!) after a 17-point loss to the Buccaneers in Week 4. They steadily climbed back up, reaching the top spot overall in mid-December, before dropping back down amid Jalen Hurts‘ late-season injury.

But Eagles fans will never let me live down bumping the Commanders ahead of their team prior to the NFC Championship Game — and they shouldn’t, so I might as well lean into it. Even going into Sunday, I still had the Chiefs penciled into the top spot. At least I flipped my Super Bowl pick at the last minute, for whatever that’s worth.

Philadelphia and Kansas City figure to be right up close to the top throughout our various offseason Power Rankings, and then when we rerack it all in August. These two teams have the quarterbacks, the coaching staffs and the defenses to be back in the Lombardi Trophy game when the NFL world gathers at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara next Feb. 8.

For the version here, putting a bow on the 2024 campaign, I’ve blurred the lines a bit and obviously taken into account all that we’ve learned since the end of the regular season. So while we don’t do up/down arrows after the Super Bowl — thanks to the funkiness of the postseason rankings, which progressively exclude eliminated teams — a few lower-rung squads have received bumps in their general place in the hierarchy (or slid down the board), depending on what early offseason developments have occurred. I’ve also married the results of the regular season and postseason for the teams closer to the top of the list.

It’s an imperfect science, as the Eagles’ wild swings prove. But my argument is that those swings were real, and that the Eagles had to endure them in order to come out on top. The Chiefs might also have earned the No. 1 spot heading into Super Bowl LIX, given everything they did to reach that game, even if they were very much not the best team on the Superdome field.

There’s some logic and sense to the method, even with the resulting madness. That’s the beauty and the bugaboo of the Power Rankings. The good news is, I’ll soon be starting over from scratch, just like every team in the NFL.