The biggest reason why my beloved Denver Broncos made the playoffs in Week 18 wasn’t because Kansas City benched everyone who was even tangentially important to winning football games, but because Kansas City’s coaches were not going to call any plays they would call in a game they remotely cared about. The NFL regular season is one long cat and mouse game, as teams know that any really good play they run will be shown to the world by the all-22 gods, and eventually this copycat league will find a way to stop it. This leads to teams embracing the reality that there are actually levels to this game within the games, while others hit their head on the ceiling of a sophisticated kind of football that they have yet to unlock.
There are playoff teams, and then there are playoff teams. My baby Broncos were the former, as the Buffalo Bills, the latter, demonstrated in a 31-7 rout where us sad frauds in Denver will always have the magic of that 7-0 lead. But my team was not alone. Denver’s former quarterback was having a semi-revival in Pittsburgh which got called into question by a late-season performance akin to the clock striking midnight on Cinderella. The Steelers offense cratered to close the year, ending on a five-game losing streak and making them the biggest Super Bowl longshot coming into the playoffs in Vegas’s eyes. They lost in Baltimore to their hated rivals, and the final score of 28-14 does not accurately reflect how lopsided the vast majority of that game was with the Ravens up 21-0 at halftime.
Speaking of quarterbacks no one really knew what to make of this year, Sam Darnold time traveled back to his Jets days in the biggest game of his life and produced one of the worst playoff quarterbacking performances in history, with the Vikings getting blown off the field 27-9. The Los Angeles Rams are no juggernaut themselves, but they are led by a Super Bowl winning quarterback and coach who still know a thing or two about football and showed Sam Darnold that there’s a reason Cinderella wasn’t invited to the ball in the first place. The Vikings have probably been the most well-coached team in the league this year, but the Darnold-Stafford gap was too much for them to overcome. A great head coach can only do so much if the guy executing his vision can’t even complete a screen pass.
Continuing the theme of quarterbacks playing like shit for franchises that can’t figure out how to win, the nation’s views around Justin Herbert are starting to come around to match us haters in Denver who have long accused this supposed Patrick Mahomes clone of actually being a meek little checkdown merchant. Houston’s 32-12 stomping wasn’t all on Justin Herbert and his four interceptions though, as the new regime under Demeco Ryans took over a 3-13-1 team and now has won a playoff game two years in a row, giving Texas hope that it may one day have a real Super Bowl contender in the state. Meanwhile, like the other team in Texas, the Chargers continue to prove that curses are real for teams with bad ownership, and it doesn’t matter if it’s 1980 or 1995 or 2009 or 2024, the Spanos Chargers are forever condemned to being the NFL’s mediocre team that always looks good on paper.
Another team that looked good on paper all year long was the Green Bay Packers, led by a good young quarterback in Jordan Love and one of the NFL’s best playcallers in Matt LaFleur. But this game was another demonstration of the yawning gap between true contenders like the Philadelphia Eagles and the delusional franchises who think that Nathaniel Hackett is a competent football coach worth employing. This was another two-score blowout that was not that close, as the Packers could not move the ball against the Eagles when it mattered. All year long we heard about how supposedly strong the NFC North was, only to watch their two Wild Card teams get yeeted into the sun the moment it shone on them, and instead it looks like the flaming pile of trash sprawled across the NFC is largely responsible for making the mildly competent teams up north look better than they actually were.
Last year, just one Wild Card game ended in a one-score game, and there were blowouts across the entire AFC. Save for a couple years ago with one-score games across the AFC, this is the norm for the Wild Card round, and it’s not a coincidence. Smarter teams plan all year to trap the less smart teams in hell this week, as months-long schemes get unleashed on a lot of overmatched rosters. Obviously having a Josh Allen is a huge advantage over not having a Josh Allen, but knowing how to use his immense talents all year in a way that sets him up for even more success in the playoffs is what separates the franchises who make token playoff appearances and those who would routinely contend for championships in a world where Andy Reid pursued his true passion as a hamburger chef.
The teams who romped this weekend, the Bills, Eagles, Rams and Ravens, all have one theme in common: they embrace analytics and are widely considered to be some of the smartest, most detail-oriented teams in the NFL, and they keep making appearances in the playoffs. This is not to say that Mike Tomlin isn’t smart, as he has proven he can win 10 games with almost any group of shlubs you give him, but there is a sophisticated football infrastructure behind Jim Harbaugh in Baltimore that is not as robust in other places like stodgy old Pittsburgh, and this is the time of year that knowledge gets unleashed on the frauds. Good teams can win playoff games, sure, but great teams beat the fuck out of good teams in playoff games, as is tradition for Wild Card weekend at this point.