Divisional Round sides and totals
Plays for both of Saturday's games
Wild Card weekend was a blast. It’s hard to watch a playoff weekend without being reminded that this time of year, picking games is a different animal. Teams pull out all the stops — they might lean into something like the Giants with Daniel Jones rushing 17 times, a full five times more than his previous career high, or it might be less sweeping, like coming with their best situational plays for third downs and the red zone, or calling a fake punt or surprise onside kick.
And then of course, there are teams who just don’t have another gear, or coaches that haven’t set anything up on film throughout the year for the perfect third-down conversion later, playing it straight through and through like they can just line up and beat you. And sometimes they can, through pure execution! Playoff victories don’t require gimmicks by any means. But things get ratcheted up across the board, either way. We see teams play at their best and sometimes also their worst.
Sometimes, we see both in the same game, like with Trevor Lawrence throwing four interceptions in the first half last week but coming back for the victory after halftime. Part of what leads to that four-interception scenario is the realization that in the playoffs, it’s win or go home. I believe it to be essentially inarguable that football as a sport is coached and played more conservatively than is optimal. But in the playoffs, coaches and players seem to care far less about the margin of defeat. If they think they need to throw, they will keep throwing, regardless of whether they’ve thrown multiple interceptions to start a game. In the regular season, you might see the Jaguars give up a little bit and start running the ball heavily in a game like that, afraid of things spiraling on their young QB as they look ahead to the next week and the rest of the season. But the playoffs may be the purest form — or the last bastion, depending on your perspective — of football being played as if both teams care only about winning, with no regard for optics.
Anyway, enough romanticizing about the sport. We went 3-2 last week, moving sides and totals to 48-41-3 on the season for +3.59 units. Let’s close the season on a high note. Here are the plays for Saturday