The NFL's Playoff Favorites Are Even Scarier Now
Most of the dark-horse teams who could have pulled upsets (by the numbers) got knocked out this weekend.
(Note: Quick post today — apologies for the issues with the 🏈 2024-25 NFL Playoff Predictor 🏆 this morning, but that module should be working again tomorrow/after Monday’s results.)
Last week, I wrote about the top-heavy nature of this NFL postseason — with an exclusive coterie of elite teams consuming almost all of the Super Bowl odds right from the jump. But I also wrote about the dark-horse contenders — teams with surprisingly solid regular-season numbers who might be a threat to shake up the hegemony around those top teams if given the chance.
Well… the bad news for fans of chaos — or just haters of the Lions, Chiefs, Eagles, Bills or Ravens — is that most of those dark horses were put out to pasture in Wild Card weekend. Notably, the Buccaneers slipped up late to let the Commanders doink their way to the Divisional round; the Packers committed four turnovers and never really threatened the Eagles; the Chargers let a winnable game against the Texans get completely out of hand and turn into a 20-point loss; and the Broncos could not hang with the Bills at all in the second half on Sunday.
While the Commanders themselves still retain dark-horse potential, and the Vikings are still awaiting their game — one made more winnable by the shift to a neutral field, due to the tragic L.A. fires — the playoffs just lost four of the top five Super Bowl contenders (according to the Elo ratings) outside the group of Detroit, K.C., Philly, Buffalo or Baltimore, and could lose all five unless Minnesota prevails over the Rams tonight.
Certainly, that string of results offered proof that Tampa, Green Bay, Denver and the Chargers were not quite as robust as their regular-season numbers indicated, so their departures don’t represent quite the loss of contenders that we might have thought going into the weekend — if, say, any of those games had been especially closer. (Only the Bucs lost a game that arguably they could or should have won, and even that came against a Washington team that looks like it might have an even higher ceiling with Jayden Daniels at the helm anyway.)
But still, the absence of teams with more statistical upset potential helped consolidate odds around the Big Five contenders that we’ve been highlighting all season long. These numbers won’t exactly match what I had going into the playoffs (because of a slightly different method I had to put together this morning due to problems with the normally amazing nflseedR), but the collective odds of the Lions, Chiefs, Eagles, Bills and Ravens rose from around 85 percent in a pre-playoff simulation to 93 percent now:
The only teams who didn’t benefit fully were the top-seeded Lions and Chiefs, who lost the probability that some other members of the ruling class would get knocked out and create an easier path for themselves. But their consolation prize is to face weaker statistical teams than they might have otherwise, particularly in the case of Kansas City (no offense to Houston, who still ranks just 14th in the SRS ratings). And of course, Philly, Buffalo and Baltimore saw their odds shoot up by virtue of taking care of their business in Round 1.
One of the Big Five will get eliminated next round: Either Baltimore or Buffalo will turn the lights off on an extremely promising season. But otherwise, it’s down to the Commanders, Texans and the Vikings-Rams winner to be roadblocks for the Lions, Chiefs and Eagles, respectively… and that seems unlikely. Instead, the top teams have already gotten even stronger on the road to a Super Bowl that has felt like it was destined for them all year long.
Filed under: NFL, Football Bytes