Blowouts in wild card round unlikely to be precursor for rest of playoffs

Martin Rogers

FOX Sports Insider

The National Football League is trendy around this time of year, and no, I’m not talking about all those new fans enticed because Taylor Swift keeps popping up at games. 

More than any other spot on the calendar, the postseason is when all kinds of weird trends, quirks and coincidences emerge for us to ruminate upon, stress about, and wonder whether there is something deeper at play. 

You want examples? For eight straight years, the winner of the Super Bowl coin toss … went on to lose the game. From the mid-1980s to John Elway’s long-awaited ring in January of 1998, the NFC champion won the biggest game of all an incredible 13 consecutive times, despite often not being the betting favorite, as Buffalo Bills fans will painfully recall. 

And across the past long weekend, the wild-card round produced a collective outlier of an outcome, game after lopsided game adding up to the biggest combined winning margin that the opening group of playoff games has ever seen.  

The start of a new trend? We’ll see. 

A whopping 104 points separated the teams in the six clashes of the Saturday-through-Monday slate, kicked off by the Houston Texans getting things rolling in the opener, where C.J. Stroud’s excellence and a pair of timely pick-sixes set up a 45-14 thumping of the Cleveland Browns.  

It didn’t slow down from there. 

Of the six matchups, only the Detroit Lions’ first postseason win for 32 years provided down-to-the-wire drama, capped off by Jared Goff’s clutch first-down throw to Amon-Ra St. Brown, sealing a 24-23 triumph. 

[2024 NFL playoff picture, bracket, schedule, standings]

Out of the remainder, both the Bills’ rescheduled Monday winterfest against the Pittsburgh Steelers, and the Green Bay Packers’ stunning beatdown of the Cowboys in Dallas were considerably more one-sided than even the eventual 14 and 16-point margins suggested. 

Concerned that this might…

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Publish date : 2024-01-16 19:06:10

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