OnTheWarpath15
01-11-2016, 05:38 PM
Two jaw-dropping finishes and two comfortable blowouts later and the NFL playoffs are down to eight teams. After the wreckage of Cincinnati's emotional meltdown and Blair Walsh's stunning miss, what we're left with is a very compelling eight-team playoff in which virtually every team has a serious chance of making a run to the Super Bowl.
Take a look at the regular-season DVOA rankings and you'll see what I mean. Each of the eight teams left ranked among the 10 best teams in football. The two teams from the regular-season top 10 who are missing are the Bengals (second) and Jets (ninth). The other three teams that lost this weekend were all outside the top 10. There are years when the variance that comes with a 16-game schedule and the brutality of a single-elimination playoff leaves us with a bunch of above-average teams duking it out while the league's best teams are already at home.
That's not the case this year. The best of the best remain. Even more thrillingly, it looks as though this could be a playoffs when we have eight teams that are relatively evenly matched. The Seahawks are comfortably the best team left in the postseason by DVOA, but they narrowly squeaked out a win over the Vikings. And the Packers are simultaneously the worst team left in the postseason based on their regular-season performance but finally got their running game going in the second half of an impressive victory over Washington. Anybody could beat anybody.
And yet, it's almost always too easy to overreact to the opening round of the NFL playoffs. We often give too much credit to the teams that show up and produce impressive performances while forgetting about the teams that spent the week on bye, getting a little healthier. What we saw this weekend matters, but it's only one week. Take 2013, when three of four wild-card road teams won their games and the Colts required a massive comeback against the Chiefs to avoid making it the same clean sweep we saw this weekend. The next week, three of those four road teams lost by an average of 12 points.
With that in mind, let's reset and look forward at the next two weekends of football. It might feel as if we're dealing with eight equal teams, but even if we incorporate what amounts to Week 18 into our estimates of how good each team actually is at this point, there are some clear conclusions. The three best teams left in the playoffs reside in the NFC. Injuries and roster decisions might wildly swing our projections of who actually looks best in the AFC. You probably would rather play the Packers than the Seahawks.
In the postseason, where everybody's good, those advantages get magnified. To advance to the Super Bowl, it can be less about the quality of your own given team and more about the teams you avoid and the ease of the path you have to take. So let's sort through those paths and figure out who has the easiest -- and toughest -- road to Super Bowl 50.
Let's start with the toughest slate, which belongs to the team that arguably had the most impressive win of wild-card weekend.
Click for rankings:
http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/14545824/ranking-super-bowl-potential-all-playoff-teams-based-degree-difficulty-nfl
Take a look at the regular-season DVOA rankings and you'll see what I mean. Each of the eight teams left ranked among the 10 best teams in football. The two teams from the regular-season top 10 who are missing are the Bengals (second) and Jets (ninth). The other three teams that lost this weekend were all outside the top 10. There are years when the variance that comes with a 16-game schedule and the brutality of a single-elimination playoff leaves us with a bunch of above-average teams duking it out while the league's best teams are already at home.
That's not the case this year. The best of the best remain. Even more thrillingly, it looks as though this could be a playoffs when we have eight teams that are relatively evenly matched. The Seahawks are comfortably the best team left in the postseason by DVOA, but they narrowly squeaked out a win over the Vikings. And the Packers are simultaneously the worst team left in the postseason based on their regular-season performance but finally got their running game going in the second half of an impressive victory over Washington. Anybody could beat anybody.
And yet, it's almost always too easy to overreact to the opening round of the NFL playoffs. We often give too much credit to the teams that show up and produce impressive performances while forgetting about the teams that spent the week on bye, getting a little healthier. What we saw this weekend matters, but it's only one week. Take 2013, when three of four wild-card road teams won their games and the Colts required a massive comeback against the Chiefs to avoid making it the same clean sweep we saw this weekend. The next week, three of those four road teams lost by an average of 12 points.
With that in mind, let's reset and look forward at the next two weekends of football. It might feel as if we're dealing with eight equal teams, but even if we incorporate what amounts to Week 18 into our estimates of how good each team actually is at this point, there are some clear conclusions. The three best teams left in the playoffs reside in the NFC. Injuries and roster decisions might wildly swing our projections of who actually looks best in the AFC. You probably would rather play the Packers than the Seahawks.
In the postseason, where everybody's good, those advantages get magnified. To advance to the Super Bowl, it can be less about the quality of your own given team and more about the teams you avoid and the ease of the path you have to take. So let's sort through those paths and figure out who has the easiest -- and toughest -- road to Super Bowl 50.
Let's start with the toughest slate, which belongs to the team that arguably had the most impressive win of wild-card weekend.
Click for rankings:
http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/14545824/ranking-super-bowl-potential-all-playoff-teams-based-degree-difficulty-nfl