Team Fluff wins over Team Ruff

These pups got a new leash on life and it was pawsitively adorable!

One team was crowned the winner of Puppy Bowl 2025 and are now su-paw-stars: Team Fluff.

The 21st installment of the beloved rescue animal event saw Team Ruff and Team Fluff face off in Puppy Bowl XXI on Sunday.

Team Fluff took home the win with a close score of 68-66. Paws Allen, a labrador retriever mix from Buffalo, New York, scored the game’s final touchdown.

The Underdog Award went to Mercury, while Foxtrot won the Most Valuable Puppy Award.

The show took place before the 2025 Super Bowl game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles, giving viewers a chance to catch both events.

The three-hour special was broadcasted on Animal Planet, Discovery Channel, TBS, truTV, Max and discovery+. This year, the show had 142 rescue dogs from 80 shelters across 40 states and two countries competing on both teams — more than ever before.

Eleven special needs dogs also entered the field.

Throughout the broadcast, the four-legged players scored touchdowns on a gridiron carpet when they crossed any goal line with a toy in their mouth.

The bark of the town is a fun way to raise money and awareness for shelters across America, while showcasing adoptable dogs and other pets.

Before the big show, Puppy Bowl referee Dan Schachner got candid on the behind-the-scenes workings, including how they deal with on field accidents.

“Every single year we try to not get delayed by it,” he told The Post. “It’s very easy to call a delay of game.”

“There’s many different euphemisms we can use like pooch puddle or fertilizing of the field, tinkle on the 20, turd and long,” Schachner explained. “There’s a lot of ways that we can describe it in a funny way. But at the end of the day, we have a game to play. So it’s not in our best interest to show dogs doing what they do.”

But at the end of the day, the long-time ref, 50, knows that it’s all part of the game.

“How we deal with it — because again, we’re trying to show all sides of dogs — is we scoop it up, clean it up as quickly as possible,” continued Schachner. “We have a team that’s almost like a NASCAR pit crew that comes in and just quickly scoops it up. You wouldn’t know it was there after a minute, and we resume play as quickly as possible.”

“They are untrained dogs and they will do their business,” he added. “And we just try to move on as much as we can.”

Most of the dogs come from New York since that’s where the Puppy Bowl is filmed, but there are adoptable pooches from all over.

“Of course, we have some New York rescues, but you name it. Florida, Texas, Phoenix, California, Midwest. This year we have a pup from Nicaragua because we want to showcase some of the overpopulation issues in Central America,” Schachner exclaimed.

“We cast as wide a net as possible, and the beautiful thing is these shelters will bring themselves to Puppy Bowl,” the ref noted. “They have no problem transporting these puppies — which is not easy. But they have no problem doing it because the reality is once this dog is on national TV, it will, of course, get adopted right away.”

“But, more importantly, the shelter will receive a lot of attention it might not otherwise have. And all the shelters we work with report a huge increase in adoption inquiries after they are featured on Puppy Bowl. So it’s a win-win.”

As for what it takes to make it onto Team Ruff or Team Fluff in the first place? Well, it’s quite simple, as Schachner put it: “Just got to be young, cute and adoptable.”

“I think the age cutoff is like six months, something like that,” he explained. “So really it’s true puppies. And we want them untrained because we want to show puppies in all of their hectic glory, [which] is the nice way of putting it.”

Last year’s winner was Team Ruff — who overtook Team Fluff in a similar narrow match.

The final score was 72 points to 69, which marked Ruff’s fourth victory over Fluff.