Every January, as the NFL postseason reaches its climax, a striking pattern emerges in the American Football Conference: one of two teams almost always stands tallest.
Since the 2011 season, every AFC Championship Game has featured either the New England Patriots or the Kansas City Chiefs, a stretch now entering its 15th consecutive year.
Whether it was the old order led by Tom Brady and Bill Belichick or the modern run under Patrick Mahomes, the AFC’s title game has become a showcase for these two franchises’ supremacy.
Only once since that stretch began has the matchup included both teams facing each other, in the 2019 season, when the Patriots and Chiefs met in a memorable overtime battle for AFC supremacy before the Chiefs marched on to a Super Bowl.
The current 2025-26 season continues that trend, with the Patriots carving their way back into the conference title picture behind a young signal-caller and on the brink of facing the Denver Broncos, further underscoring this remarkable consistency.
A tale of two eras
Looking back to 2011, the AFC Championship Game landscape was heavily shaped by one of the greatest dynasties in football history.
The New England Patriots, under head coach Bill Belichick and quarterback Tom Brady, put together a run of sustained excellence that saw them reach eight straight AFC title games from 2011 to 2018, an NFL record.
During that stretch, Brady‘s theatrics were as predictable as they were thrilling.
His Patriots teams overcame varied competition to hoist the conference’s highest prize repeatedly, eventually parlaying those appearances into multiple Super Bowl trips and championships. Patriots dominance was so pervasive that it helped define the era itself.
Then came a changing of the guard.
Enter Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs. Beginning with their rise to prominence in 2018, the Chiefs have made seven straight appearances in the AFC Championship Game, winning the majority and turning Arrowhead Stadium into one of the toughest postseason venues in the league.
Mahomes has become the face of this new AFC order, his teams consistently outlasting stiff competition and remaining perennial Super Bowl contenders.
Together with Kansas City‘s win-or-go-home culture and roster construction, the Chiefs‘ title-game appearances have helped cement this era of AFC hegemony.
But the franchise’s remarkable run of playoff appearances, a defining chapter in the Andy Reid–Patrick Mahomes era, came to an abrupt halt in the 2025 NFL season.
After years of contending for division titles, conference championships, and Super Bowls, the Chiefs will miss the playoffs for the first time in over a decade.
Kansas City‘s 16-13 defeat to the Los Angeles Chargers on December 14 confirmed what had been unfolding for weeks: a season marred by injuries, inconsistency, and unmet expectations had extinguished their postseason hopes.
The loss dropped Kansas City to 6-8 and mathematically eliminated the Chiefs from playoff contention, ending a streak of 10 consecutive postseason berths that dated back to 2015.
Quarterback Patrick Mahomes, one of the faces of the modern NFL, had never experienced missing the playoffs in his career until this season, coming after suffering a left knee injury in the Chargers game that ended his season.
