Wild Card Round sides and totals
Playoffs? Don't talk about... playoffs?! You kidding me?
So we finished the regular season 45-39-3 in what was truly the weirdest NFL season I can remember in over two decades of closely watching this sport. The Bears wound up averaging 22.2 pass attempts per game; coming into the year, no team had averaged fewer than 25.0 in over a decade. They weren’t even alone; the Falcons at 24.4 pass attempts per game made it two teams going under that arbitrary cutoff.
Those are examples of extreme results of a sport-wide shift. Scoring was down to 21.9 points per team game, a throwback to the pre-2010 era. Since then, only one season — 2017 — averaged fewer points, at 21.7, and that year featured a wave of major QB injuries.
We saw over/unders drop throughout the year, and low totals still frequently go under, something I admittedly didn’t play super effectively around here. We also saw something a bit more subjective, but what I’d argue was more separation between the haves and the have nots — the legit good teams and the not so good ones — as everyone tried to navigate a new environment with defenses playing differently and limited time to implement some of the copycat trends that often spread around the league’s units — offenses copying offenses after defenses copied defenses, such that there’s this leaguewide ebb and flow over time.
Dalton hit me with a great little nugget this week from some research he’d done, where divisional opponents meeting for the third time in the postseason tends to create lush ground for the underdogs. That makes sense and follows other trends we’ve seen over the years that suggest just the second time divisional opponents meet in-season can cause reduced scoring and slightly more competitive games. Familiarity is definitely a thing.
But the three divisional rematches this week are also the three games with the big spreads, while the other three all come in within a field goal. Earlier this week, I had a buddy bring up Minnesota’s upset win in New Orleans on Wild Card weekend a few years ago, and it felt like that was a massive upset at the time. But Pro Football Reference lists that as a 7.5-point spread (their numbers are not always perfect, but purely by recollection, I’d thought it was a little longer, closer to 10). This week, we do have three games closer to 10, with the Bengals coming down to 8.5 currently, the 49ers holding at 9.5, and the Bills of course way up at 13.5. You just don’t typically see those types of lines in the playoffs; again, that 7.5-point spread Minnesota overcame felt like a huge upset back in 2019.
The unique year continues in that way, and the market always seems to capture this stuff. The best teams are viewed as such; those big spreads are as much about backup QBs starting on the AFC side as they are about the strength of Buffalo, Cincinnati, and San Francisco (who, of course, is the team with a backup QB in that matchup). These teams have separated, and while they aren’t incapable of losing against an inferior opponent — especially one with the divisional familiarity — the urge is very much to bet on teams that good to just coast in Round 1. The Damar Hamlin situation created a tough week for everyone in the NFL world last week, and was part of why I didn’t make any Week 18 picks, but my urge was to take those best AFC teams that were playing for something to cover big spreads, and Kansas City easily covered 9, the Bills covered 7.5, and the Bengals also covered 9.
This decision point makes up a big part of the Wild Card weekend betting card. Let’s get to the picks.