NFL Wild Card and Divisional Round Update

We finally made it. With another season gone by, it’s that time once again to prove who’s the best in the league. As hopeful as many teams may feel, the fact is that until proven otherwise, the Kansas City Chiefs are still seated firmly on the throne. Will this be the year that someone rises up to challenge them?

Just in case you don’t already know how NFL playoff formatting works, I’ll give you a brief explanation. The league is split into two conferences: the AFC and NFC. Those conferences each contain four divisions of four teams: the North, South, East and West. The team with the best record from each division gets into the playoffs, as well as the three teams with the best records from each conference that didn’t win their division, adding up to a total of seven teams representing both conferences. The team with the highest record gets a free pass to the divisional round, while the other six teams on each side each play a single-elimination game in the Wild Card Round to determine who moves on. That narrows the divisional round down to four teams left in each conference, followed by the conference championships to determine who will represent each in the Super Bowl.

Starting with “Wild Card Weekend,” most of the outcomes were pretty predictable. The Baltimore Ravens beat the rotting corpse of a team known as the Pittsburgh Steelers, the Buffalo Bills walloped the Denver Broncos, who arguably lucked into the playoffs over the significantly more electric Cincinnati Bengals and the Washington Commanders beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. 

The first outcome of the Wild Card Round to surprise me was the Houston Texans blowing out the Los Angeles Chargers. The Texans were the only AFC team I thought looked worse than the Steelers coming in, but somehow they made it happen regardless. The second surprise was that the Los Angeles Rams dismantled the Minnesota Vikings. While the Vikings may perform their same humiliation ritual every season, this year seemed different. I thought that just maybe they had pulled things together enough over the course of the regular season to make a run in the playoffs… I was sorely mistaken. 

That leads us into the Divisional Round, which kicked things off with the biggest non-starter of a game I could imagine: The Houston Texans against the Chiefs in Kansas City. C.J. Stroud may have been blessed with one surprise win, but no amount of luck was going to overcome the system. The Kansas City Chiefs are already a different kind of animal to face in the playoffs, but with all of the key penalty flags going in their favor, there was nothing for the Texans to do but go home and regroup for next season. 

In a much more surprising turn of events, the Washington Commanders had the most exciting upset of the playoffs so far. They went into Detroit to play the Lions, and after an absolute shootout of a second quarter, Jayden Daniels and the Commanders’ offense were able to hold their lead just out of reach of the Lions for the remainder of the game. One devastating blunder of a trick play from the Lions ended their hopes at a comeback with a brutal interception thrown by wide receiver, Jameson Williams. 

The Philadelphia Eagles ended the season of the Los Angeles Rams when they blew the game open by two possessions on a monster run by Saquon Barkley. The Rams did everything they could to try and mount a comeback, but by that point, it was too little too late.

Finally, the last game before the conference championships was the Baltimore Ravens playing in Buffalo against the Bills. The game felt like a true clash of the football titans, with Buffalo gaining an 11-point lead going into halftime. The Ravens brought it within two points in the third quarter, but the Bills were able to cling to their lead just long enough to advance to the AFC Championship.

The conference championships will be played back-to-back on Sunday, Jan. 26, starting with the Washington Commanders in Philadelphia against their division rivals, the Eagles, at 3 p.m. At 6:30 the Buffalo Bills play in Kansas City to try and replace the Chiefs as the new face of the AFC. The winners of those will move on to the Super Bowl, which takes place on Feb. 9 in New Orleans, La.

Photo courtesy of Mitchell Layton.

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