#chiefs beat the texans to get to the conference championship

[killa-trav]

trying not to think too much about the chiefs' season possibly ending this coming weekend like wtf

[youtubepromo321]

AFC Championship: Key Matchups and How to Watch Ravens vs. Chiefs

The Kansas City Chiefs and Baltimore Ravens will face off in the first of two Sunday games of conference championship weekend, as the NFL's best teams compete for the AFC's top spot.Image source: Getty images The Ravens, with the NFL's best record, will face Patrick Mahomes and the likely league MVP, Lamar Jackson. Baltimore aims for its first AFC title since 2012, following their 2012 Super Bowl victory against the 49ers.Kansas City aims to return to the Super Bowl for the fourth time in six seasons under center Mahomes and win its first road AFC title game win. This will be a new challenge for the Chiefs, who have hosted the conference championship for the previous five years.The AFC's Super Bowl opponent will soon be known, and there are a number of ways to watch the event.How to Watch Live Sports StreamingDate: Sunday, Jan. 28 | Time: 3 p.m. ETLocation: M&T Bank Stadium (Baltimore)TV: CBS | Stream on Paramount+ Follow: CBS Sports App Ravens -3.5, O/U 44.5 are the odds (based on Sportsline consensus odds).When the Chiefs Have the Ball, What's Their Game Plan?The Chiefs, after two strong offensive performances, face a formidable defense, with Baltimore ranking first in FTN's DVOA and having the seventh-best unit against the run and best defense against the pass.Mike Macdonald's team held the Houston Texans' C.J. Stroud and the Texans' explosive offense to just 213 total yards, 10 first downs, and three offensive points in their first road playoff game. This was a different task than holding Patrick Mahomes, Andy Reid, and the Chiefs' offense, which did not perform up to its usual standards this season.The matchup between Kansas City and Macdonald will primarily focus on how the Ravens' offensive line can withstand Macdonald's pressure looks. Despite not frequently blitzing, Macdonald heavily uses simulated pressures to create uncertainty for opponents, making it crucial to assess the Ravens' defense against Macdonald's pressure tactics.The Chiefs have been notably strong in the front, but their recent acquisitions of Jawaan Taylor and Donovan Smith have not been as successful as expected, making them more vulnerable up front than ever since their Super Bowl loss to the Buccaneers. Mahomes, a talented thrower and runner, has been more affected by pressure this season than at any point in his career. If the Ravens can disrupt his rhythm and get after him early, the Chiefs could be thrown off their game.Image source: Getty images Kansas City has largely resolved the issue in recent weeks, but the Chiefs will face more challenging secondary matches than against the Dolphins or Bills.Travis Kelce will face Roquan Smith and Marcus Williams in the middle of the field, with Kyle Hamilton waiting for him in the slot. Rashee Rice often lines up in the slot, dealing with Hamilton. Outside, Marlon Humphrey, Brandon Stephens, and cloud coverage could be present. Rice may be in motion to get free releases on downfield routes. Judicious use of screens will be key against the Baltimore defense, utilizing the Ravens' aggressiveness while not being too passive in challenging them downfield.Macdonald is expected to focus on pass-catching players like Marquez Valdes-Scantling and Justin Watson to force Mahomes to beat him. Reid has been scheming things up, but throwing the ball against the Ravens defense has been a challenging task in the NFL this season. The Ravens defense has been particularly difficult to tackle.Dominating the Field: Tactics for the Ravens When They Have the Ball

[junker-town]

How would recent NFL playoffs have looked with a 14-team field?

Photo by Michael Zagaris/San Francisco 49ers/Getty Images

Had a proposed expansion of the NFL postseason been in place, the Chiefs would’ve had an extra playoff game to win this January.

The NFL has proposed a collective bargaining agreement that would alter the way the postseason works. Under the new CBA, the field of playoff teams will grow from 12 to 14.

The CBA proposal still needs to be approved by players before it goes into effect, but if it gets the green light just one team from each conference will be able to earn a first-round bye.

A third wild card berth will add mostly mediocre teams to the playoffs. Had the rule change been in place last season, the Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs would’ve had to play the 8-8 Pittsburgh Steelers on Wild Card Weekend.

Would that have changed anything, though? Let’s imagine how the last three postseasons would’ve shaken out if it there had been a 14-team field:

The Chiefs’ road to Super Bowl 54 would’ve been a bit more difficult

Kansas City narrowly topped the Patriots for the second seed in the AFC, but that wouldn’t have resulted in a bye in this format.

What the new playoff bracket looks like:

AFC

No. 2 Chiefs vs. No. 7 Steelers

No. 3 Patriots vs. No. 6 Titans

No. 4 Texans vs. No. 5 Bills

No. 1 Ravens vs. lowest seeded wild card winner

NFC

No. 2 Packers vs. No. 7 Rams

No. 3 Saints vs. No. 6 Vikings

No. 4 Eagles vs. No. 5 Seahawks

No. 1 49ers vs. lowest seeded wild card winner

What changes:

The addition of the Steelers and Rams probably doesn’t change much.

No NFL result is a given. There’s certainly a chance the Steelers or Rams pull off an upset. But in this hypothetical, we’ll assume the Chiefs and Packers survive an extra game each.

The most significant difference is that neither team enters the Divisional Round with a week’s worth of rest. The Chiefs aren’t quite as healthy when they host the Texans, nor are the Packers against the Seahawks.

In real life, Kansas City pulled off three double-digit comebacks to win the Lombardi Trophy. That’s more difficult with another game to play.

What stays the same:

If anything, this proves a 14-team playoff could play out exactly the same as one with 12 teams. The Ravens were the No. 1 seed in the AFC and went down anyway to the sixth-seeded Titans.

Kansas City won all three of its playoff games by at least 11 points. Even with a slightly tougher path, the best bet is that the Chiefs still win it all.

Super Bowl 54 result: Chiefs beat the 49ers

Super Bowl 53 could’ve been an entirely different matchup

In 2018, both the Rams and Patriots earned No. 2 seeds. That could’ve kept them out of Super Bowl 53 in a 14-team field.

What the new playoff bracket looks like:

AFC

No. 2 Patriots vs. No. 7 Steelers

No. 3 Texans vs. No. 6 Colts

No. 4 Ravens vs. No. 5 Chargers

No. 1 Chiefs vs. lowest seeded wild card winner

NFC

No. 2 Rams vs. No. 7 Vikings

No. 3 Bears vs. No. 6 Eagles

No. 4 Cowboys vs. No. 5 Seahawks

No. 1 Saints vs. lowest seeded wild card winner

What changes:

While the 2019 Steelers weren’t very intimidating with Mason Rudolph and Devlin Hodges at the helm, the 2018 Steelers were different. They had a healthy Ben Roethlisberger and finished the season 9-6-1. Pittsburgh did beat New England in a pivotal Week 15 matchup, though knocking off the Patriots in Foxboro is a tall order.

The extra week of rest also helped the Patriots, a team with 41-year-old quarterback Tom Brady, better prepare for its postseason run. New England barely made Super Bowl 53 by pulling off a come-from-behind overtime win against the Chiefs in the AFC Championship. Even a little more wear and tear probably prevents that result from coming to fruition.

The Rams also got to the Super Bowl by the skin of their teeth. They needed a horribly blown call and overtime to beat the Saints in the NFC Championship. Can they do the same thing in this alternate universe after a wild card matchup against the Vikings two weeks prior? Probably not.

What stays the same:

Not a whole lot. The Saints and Chiefs were the two No. 1 seeds and cruised through the Divisional Round. That still happens here, but now they’re better positioned to actually win their respective conferences and make the Super Bowl.

With so many close overtime results, it’s likely that the teams with first-round byes would’ve reigned supreme. Kansas City vs. New Orleans is our new Super Bowl, a much more exciting matchup than the Patriots’ 13-3 snoozefest win over the Rams. We’ll give the Saints the edge due to experience.

Super Bowl 53 result: Saints beat the Chiefs

The Lions could’ve actually won a playoff game

Detroit hasn’t won a playoff game since January 1992. In the 28 years since, the Lions have lost on Wild Card Weekend eight times. If the NFL playoffs had 14 teams during the 2017 season, the Lions would’ve had a chance to snap that misfortunate streak.

What the new playoff bracket looks like:

AFC

No. 2 Steelers vs. No. 7 Ravens

No. 3 Jaguars vs. No. 6 Bills

No. 4 Chiefs vs. No. 5 Titans

No. 1 Patriots vs. lowest seeded wild card winner

NFC

No. 2 Vikings vs. No. 7 Lions

No. 3 Rams vs. No. 6 Falcons

No. 4 Saints vs. No. 5 Panthers

No. 1 Eagles vs. lowest seeded wild card winner

What changes:

Minnesota lost just three games in the 2017 season. Its only home loss was when the Lions came to town. Then, the Vikings got their revenge in Detroit on Thanksgiving.

In a 14-team postseason, the Vikings would’ve had to win a rubber match against Detroit. It could’ve been the Lions’ 10th consecutive playoff loss. But, hey, let’s throw them a bone and say they win. There’s a chance that changes a lot.

In the real timeline, Minnesota eliminated the Saints via a Minneapolis Miracle. Now New Orleans gets a home game against the seventh-seeded Lions. We’ll call that a ticket to the NFC Championship against the Eagles. That’s a hell of a matchup, but we’re still siding with Philadelphia’s Nick Foles magic.

What stays the same:

Just about everything else.

Even with a bye, the second-seeded teams didn’t have much success. The Vikings followed the Minneapolis Miracle by getting blown out in the NFC Championship. Pittsburgh didn’t even get through the Divisional Round.

The No. 1 seeds met in the Super Bowl, and there’s no reason to think that isn’t the case in this scenario too.

Super Bowl 52 result: Eagles beat the Patriots

Adding two more teams to the NFL playoffs would be a significant boost for No. 1 seeded teams, who become now the sole beneficiaries of a week off. However, the Ravens’ loss to the Titans in January is more than enough evidence that a first-round bye isn’t a free ticket to the Super Bowl.

Ultimately, the reshaped postseason could look a lot like the 12-team version the NFL has had for three decades. But even the little curveball of two more teams probably would’ve altered some recent Super Bowl results.

[kansascityhappenings]

‘They can pass the ball as well as the Chiefs’: NFL talk host hypes up Titans offense over Mahomes’ squad

Quarterbacks Mahomes (left) and Tannehill

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — As the Chiefs look to host the Titans in Arrowhead for the AFC Conference Championship, NFL talk show host Nate Burleson is all for Tennessee’s offense.

“Over the past three weeks, name a better team,” Burleson said.

The Good Morning Football host mostly touted the Titans’ offense for being multi-faceted. Last game against the Baltimore Ravens, the Titans’ offense maintained consistent scoring, pushing to a major lead in the second half with 14 points in the 3rd quarter alone.

Derrick Henry had an objectively strong game, running for 195 yards, averaging 6.5 per carry.

However, quarterback Ryan Tannehill only passed for 88 yards the whole game. He actually made history for being only the second quarterback in playoff history to win consecutive games throwing for less than 100 yards in both.

“They can pass the ball as well as the Chiefs, not in the same manner, but they get the same type of open wide receivers because Derrick Henry demands guys to look in the backfield,” Burleson said. “They can do both. They can go pass heavy, but I think their strength, their character, their identity is running the rock bully style, and they do that, they’ll control the clock, and like I always say, you control the clock, you control the game.”

Other hosts on the show weren’t so sure.

“This is a different Chiefs offense and a different Patrick Mahomes than it was in week 10,” Peter Schrager said. “Since then, Mahomes has gotten better every single week.”

The Chiefs first played the Titans in week 10, and the Titans spoiled Mahomes’ return from a knee injury, beating Chiefs 35-32.

Schrager said that, although the Chiefs lost to the Titans already, the Chiefs offense is stronger and more in rhythm than they were on their first match. Last week, they beat the Texans 51-31 after also having lost to them earlier in the season.

“The Chiefs have too much firepower,” Kay Adams said.

While the hosts mostly talked about the offense, they did briefly discuss the potential addition of defensive tackle Chris Jones to the Chiefs defense after he sat out of last game. His presence on the defensive line could prove troublesome for Derrick Henry, who will be looking to put up more impressive numbers on the ground this coming week.

from FOX 4 Kansas City WDAF-TV | News, Weather, Sports https://fox4kc.com/2020/01/14/they-can-pass-the-ball-as-well-as-the-chiefs-nfl-talk-host-hypes-up-titans-offense-over-mahomes-squad/

from Kansas City Happenings https://kansascityhappenings.wordpress.com/2020/01/15/they-can-pass-the-ball-as-well-as-the-chiefs-nfl-talk-host-hypes-up-titans-offense-over-mahomes-squad/

[truesportsfan]

Our Guide To The NFL’s Conference Championships

The dust is still clearing from a divisional-round weekend that gave us mostly chalk but also one massive upset. The Baltimore Ravens had been our favorite to win the Super Bowl — and pretty heavy ones at that — but Derrick Henry and Tennessee had different plans. Now, the Titans face our new favorites, the Kansas City Chiefs, in the AFC title game, while the San Francisco 49ers host the Green Bay Packers on the NFC side. Looking ahead, we’ve broken down the matchups using our Elo ratings — which track each team’s form, with adjustments for each starting quarterback — and also identified the phases of the game in which each team was best (and worst) according to ESPN’s expected points added (EPA) during the regular season. This week’s spreads aren’t sizable enough to generate any historic upsets, but the upside is that we should see a more balanced set of matchups here on the cusp of the Super Bowl.

Tale of the tape: Kansas City vs. Tennessee

3:05 p.m. ET Sunday

Kansas City Category Tennessee 13-4 Record 11-7 5th Schedule strength 2nd 1723 Elo rating 1661 2nd League rank 4th Patrick Mahomes Starting QB Ryan Tannehill 2nd QB Elo rank 12th 4th QB’s supporting cast 2nd 5th Avg. QB Elo defense 16th Pass offense Biggest EPA strength Run offense Run defense Biggest EPA weakness Special teams 69.4% 538 forecast 30.6%

Source: ESPN Stats & Information Group

After a pair of stunning upsets over the defending champs (New England) and the AFC’s No. 1 seed (Baltimore), what does Tennessee have in store next? Certainly the Titans are underdogs again, on the road at Arrowhead Stadium against the Chiefs. But Elo has also learned its lesson about them — to a degree — and has boosted Tennessee’s rating by a whopping 81 points since the start of the playoffs. Still, the Titans have their work cut out for them against a vastly superior (on paper) passing attack directed by reigning league MVP Patrick Mahomes. In leading Kansas City on a furious comeback from down 24-0 against the Texans, Mahomes posted a sky-high 97.9 Total QB Rating from the second quarter onward, so he may not prove as easy for Tennessee’s defense to stymie as Lamar Jackson was. The good news for the Titans, however, is that their offensive strength — the mighty power running of Henry and Co. — ranks fourth in schedule-adjusted EPA per game this season, corresponding well to Kansas City’s weakness in defending the run (29th in rushing defense). The ingredients are there for Henry to have another big day, perhaps similar to the 188 yards he produced against K.C. in a Week 10 Tennessee victory. The only question is whether it will be enough to match the Chiefs’ own firepower again — an unlikely proposition, though not that unlikely. Elo’s spread: Kansas City -5½

Tale of the tape: San Francisco vs. Green Bay

6:40 p.m. ET Sunday

San Francisco Category Green Bay 14-3 Record 14-3 11th Schedule strength 18th 1655 Elo rating 1635 5th League rank 6th Jimmy Garoppolo Starting QB Aaron Rodgers 22nd QB Elo rank 13th 1st QB’s supporting cast 3rd 6th Avg. QB Elo defense 4th Pass defense Biggest EPA strength Run offense Special teams Biggest EPA weakness Run defense 63.9% 538 forecast 36.1%

Source: ESPN Stats & Information Group

The most iconic playoff battle between these two teams happened back in 1999, when San Francisco’s Steve Young hit Terrell Owens for a 25-yard, game-winning TD to defeat Brett Favre and the Packers. The QBs in this year’s edition — SF’s Jimmy Garropolo (-18 QB Elo vs. average) and GB’s Aaron Rodgers (+12) — aren’t quite at the top of their games the way Young (+122) and Favre (+61) were back then, but they are assisted by two of the best supporting casts in the league, including a pair of strong pass defenses. In theory, that makes these teams pretty evenly matched: Even the biggest disparities on one side of the ball (such as Green Bay’s superior running game) are matched on the other side (e.g., San Francisco’s run defense is better). One thing the 49ers can point to is their 37-8 demolition of the Packers at home in Week 12, when Garropolo outplayed Rodgers and San Francisco outgained Green Bay 339 to 198. But even in that department, there’s some evidence that the team that was blown out in the regular season gains more information for the rematch than the team that dominated. Will that — and plain old regression to the mean — be enough to keep Green Bay more competitive this time around? Probably, though the 49ers are still clear favorites here. Elo’s spread: San Francisco -4

FiveThirtyEight vs. the Readers

As a weekly tradition here at FiveThirtyEight, we look at how our Elo model did against everybody who made picks in our forecasting game. (If you entered, you can find yourself on our leaderboard here.) These are the games in which Elo made its best — and worst — predictions against the field last week:

Elo’s dumbest (and smartest) picks of the divisional round

Average difference between points won by readers and by Elo in Week 19 matchups in FiveThirtyEight’s NFL prediction game

OUR PREDICTION (ELO) READERS’ PREDICTION PICK WIN PROB. PICK WIN PROB. Result READERS’ NET PTS BAL 87% BAL 84% TEN 28, BAL 12 +5.8

–

SF 67 SF 68 SF 27, MIN 10 -6.5

–

KC 83 KC 80 KC 51, HOU 31 -8.3

–

GB 74 GB 57 GB 28, SEA 23 -34.5

–

Home teams are in bold.

The scoring system is nonlinear, so readers’ average points don’t necessarily match the number of points that would be given to the average reader prediction.

A week ago, Elo made a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad pick when it took the Eagles over the Seahawks with 69 percent confidence. This time around, the model whiffed on the Ravens, giving them an 87 percent win probability … but so did basically everyone else. Elo lost only 5.8 points to the field on that pick, which it made up for by gaining 49.3 points over the average reader in the other three games — including a massive 34.5-point gain for picking Green Bay over Seattle. (Elo had been suspicious of the Seahawks for a long time.) As a result, Elo was back to its winning ways for the week, beating the field by 43.5 points on average.

Despite that, some readers did well. Congratulations to Andrew Lindstrom, who leads all (identified) readers in the postseason with 200.0 points, and Jan Hájek, who pulled into first place in the full-season contest with 1,061.3 points. Thanks to everyone who played — and if you haven’t, be sure to get in on the action! You can make picks now and try your luck against Elo in the playoffs, even if you missed Week 19.

Check out our latest NFL predictions.

source https://truesportsfan.com/football/our-guide-to-the-nfls-conference-championships/

[mastcomm]

N.F.L. Playoff Predictions: Our Picks for the Conference Championships

Back in Week 1, the Chiefs expected to be playing this weekend, and the Packers were certainly hoping to still be alive. The 49ers, however, did not start to feel like a real contender until they had strung quite a few wins together, and the Titans were still fighting for a playoff spot in Week 17. But regardless of expectations — and a regular season dominated by the Ravens — all four of these teams survived to this weekend, and each is a victory away from playing in Super Bowl LIV.

Here are our predictions for the conference championship games, with each pick made against the spread.

Last weekend’s record against the spread: 3-1

Overall postseason record: 5-2-1

A.F.C.

Tennessee Titans at Kansas City Chiefs

3:05 p.m., CBS | Line: Chiefs -7 | Total: 53

To get here, the Titans had to beat the team with the best defense in football (the New England Patriots) and the team with the best offense (the Baltimore Ravens) — with both wins coming on the road. Next up are the Chiefs, a team with a radically improved defense, one of the most intense home crowds in the N.F.L., and an offense led by Patrick Mahomes that on its best day is even more explosive than Lamar Jackson’s Ravens.

Case in point: The Chiefs were down by 24-0 to the Houston Texans in the second quarter of last weekend’s divisional round game, and they still managed to win by 20 points.

It is easy enough to see why Tennessee would find itself an underdog, but at this point there is no denying that Coach Mike Vrabel has found a fairly special formula for success — his unusual offense and his opportunistic defense. And it is entirely possible that the Titans are not done making Las Vegas look foolish for doubting them.

Scoring should not be a problem for Tennessee. As the Chiefs’ defense improved substantially this season, its biggest challenge was against the run, where Football Outsiders ranked the team 29th in efficiency. That should further the hopes of Titans running back Derrick Henry, who will go into the game having already gained 377 yards on the ground in these playoffs, putting on a show that has been must-see TV.

But after two weeks of relying on a largely one-dimensional offense, the Titans may diversify now that they have gotten past New England and Baltimore, which had two of the three most suffocating secondaries in the N.F.L.

Quarterback Ryan Tannehill has shown a keen ability to take advantage of any opportunity afforded him, and the Chiefs, who are missing their standout rookie safety, Juan Thornhill (A.C.L. tear), and do not yet know the status of Pro Bowl defensive tackle Chris Jones (calf), may just give him a few — provided he keeps the ball as far away from safety Tyrann Mathieu as possible.

Tennessee used a blend of Henry and Tannehill in Week 10 to beat the Chiefs, 35-32, in Nashville. But Mahomes, in his first game back from a knee injury, passed for 446 yards and three touchdowns in that game. He could be capable of even more against a Titans defense that seemed to wear down as the season chugged along, finishing in the middle of the pack in most rankings. While Tennessee creates some chaos with turnovers, it is also fairly soft against the pass. That should be an extreme liability against Mahomes, who has his choice of Tyreek Hill, Sammy Watkins and Travis Kelce on every play.

For Tennessee to pull off its third consecutive upset, it will need to get a few huge plays from Tannehill, grind up the clock with Henry and hope the defense can take advantage of a mistake or two from Mahomes. Each of those things is possible, but getting all three is not very likely. A narrow defeat is a better bet. Pick: Titans +7

N.F.C.

Green Bay Packers at San Francisco 49ers

6:40 p.m., Fox | Line: 49ers -7.5 | Total: 45

The efficiency with which the 49ers demolished the Packers in Week 12 is hard to forget. San Francisco forced a fumble on Green Bay’s opening drive and then scored a touchdown on its first offensive play. The Packers’ seven other drives of the first half ended in six punts and a turnover on downs, while the 49ers built a 23-0 lead.

In the end, a highly touted matchup of N.F.C. heavyweights became a 37-8 drubbing in which the 49ers’ defense limited Aaron Rodgers to 104 passing yards and held running back Aaron Jones to 38 yards on 13 carries. And that was when San Francisco was missing Dee Ford, one of its star defensive ends, because of a hamstring injury.

Ford, however, was not the only key player missing. Green Bay played almost the entire game without Bryan Bulaga, a mainstay at right tackle, and that was painfully obvious as Nick Bosa and the rest of the 49ers defense poured into the backfield on play after play.

Green Bay lost only three games this season, and it is telling that Bulaga missed huge chunks of two of them. He has been limited in practice this week with an illness but is expected to be on the field Sunday — as is Ford — and the game could easily be won or lost based on how Green Bay’s offensive line handles San Francisco’s ferocious pass rush.

The 49ers had one of the best offenses in the N.F.L. this season — they were ruthlessly efficient in the passing game and rushed for more yards than any team other than Baltimore — but even quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo made it clear this week that the primary difference in the team from last season is the defense. Garoppolo went so far as to suggest that his own season-ending knee injury in 2018 helped make the transformation happen, as San Francisco ended up with a record worth the No. 2 pick in the N.F.L. draft.

“I always told myself it was a blessing in disguise, the A.C.L.,” he said. “We got Bosa out of it.”

It would be fairly shocking if Rodgers, Jones and wide receiver Davante Adams did not have at least a little more success against the 49ers this time around. But nothing the Packers have done indicates that they are playing at San Francisco’s level, and their fine first season under Coach Matt LaFleur seems destined to end one step before the Super Bowl. Pick: 49ers -7.5

All times are Eastern.

from WordPress https://mastcomm.com/n-f-l-playoff-predictions-our-picks-for-the-conference-championships/

[jodyedgarus]

Will The Divisional Playoffs Restore Order To The NFL?

The NFL’s wild-card round may have been a brutal showcase of grind-it-out defense and uninspired offensive play-calling. But at least it threw another intriguing wrench into what was already shaping up to be a chaotic postseason. Three of the four favorites (according to FiveThirtyEight’s pregame Elo ratings) lost on opening weekend: the home Texans, Ravens and Bears. Now we’re left with an eight-team field in which every member has at least a 6 percent probability of winning the Super Bowl, and no one is above 22 percent. Over the previous four postseasons, the favorite had an average championship probability of 31 percent at this stage of the playoffs. So with things still looking as wide-open as ever, let’s zoom in on some numbers — including classic Elo and a version with our experimental quarterback adjustments — for each divisional matchup.

How Elo sees the divisional round playing out

Win probabilities for Week 19 games according to two methods: standard Elo and a version that contains an adjustment for starting quarterbacks

Standard Elo QB-Adjusted Elo Team Rating Win Prob. Base Rtg Starting QB QB Adj. Win Prob. NO 1669 64% 1605 Drew Brees +52 64% PHI 1633 36 1616 Nick Foles +5 36 NE 1640 58 1603 Tom Brady +38 63 LAC 1648 42 1605 Philip Rivers +13 37 LAR 1634 66 1619 Jared Goff +11 66 DAL 1581 34 1576 Dak Prescott +5 34 KC 1656 66 1619 Patrick Mahomes +49 68 IND 1608 34 1565 Andrew Luck +37 32

Home teams are in bold.

Elo quarterback adjustments are relative to average, based on a rolling average of defense-adjusted QB stats (including rushing).

Source: Pro-Football-Reference.com

The most up-for-grabs game of the divisional round might be the New England Patriots against the Los Angeles Chargers on Sunday afternoon. This year’s Patriots are not the unassailable juggernaut they usually have been, though they literally have been unbeatable at home (where they’ll be this week). In fact, come kickoff, it will have been 470 days since the Pats last lost a home game of any sort and 2,185 days since they fell at home in the playoffs.

But the Chargers may actually be the superior team. Not only did L.A. have the better record (12 wins vs. 11 for New England), it ranks higher than New England in ESPN’s Football Power Index, Football Outsiders’ Defense-adjusted Value Over Average and Jeff Sagarin’s power ratings, among other rankings.

Tale of the Patriots-Chargers tape

Leaguewide NFL ranks in various categories for the Los Angeles Chargers and New England Patriots in the 2018 season

Category Chargers Patriots Football Power Index 4th 5th Defense-adjusted Value Over Average 3rd 7th Elo rating 3rd 4th Sagarin ratings 4th 5th Simple Rating System 6th 8th Starting quarterback’s Total QBR 7th 6th

Sources: ESPN.com, Football Outsiders, USA Today, Pro-Football-Reference.com

Talent-wise, the Chargers also have more Pro Bowlers than the Pats (7 to 2) and just as many All-Pros (4 apiece). And although Elo does gives New England a 58 percent chance to reach the AFC championship game for the 10th time in 13 years, that’s the second-lowest pregame probability the Pats have had in a divisional playoff since 2006-07 — when they were given a mere 35 percent chance of beating, you guessed it, the Chargers.1 Then again, the Pats did in fact end up winning that one, in San Diego, under crazy circumstances. As always, it’s tough to count out Tom Brady in the AFC playoffs,2 where he is 22-7 all-time as a starter and hasn’t lost since January 2016.

On paper, the biggest mismatch of the second round features the New Orleans Saints at home against the Philadelphia Eagles. Las Vegas’s sportsbooks opened with the Saints as 8-point favorites, which would seem to make sense in a clash between a 13-3 top conference seed and a 9-7 team that needed an unlikely confluence of events just to make the playoffs at all. But, of course, the Eagles aren’t just any team — they’re the defending champs, with a script that seems all too familiar.

Once again, backup QB Nick Foles has relieved the injured Carson Wentz (probably for the rest of the season?), and once again Foles is leading Philly on an underdog playoff run. When this happened with last year’s Eagles, coach Doug Pederson changed his offensive approach to better accommodate Foles’s strengths, focusing on higher-percentage short passes with more yards picked up after the catch (mixing in the odd deep bomb), and calling more play-action passes with an emphasis on getting the ball out quickly and avoiding mistakes. So how much of that stylistic shift has played out this time around?

Is Eagles QB history repeating itself?

Key passing rate statistics for Carson Wentz and Nick Foles in the 2017 and 2018 seasons (including playoffs)

2018 Season (incl. playoffs) QB Comp% AY/Att YAC/Cmp TD% Int% Pressure% Sack% Play-Action% Wentz 69.6% 7.8 5.0 5.2% 1.7% 26.2% 7.0% 26.7% Foles 70.6 6.9 5.0 3.8 2.6 24.1 4.1 22.6 2017 Season (incl. playoffs) QB Comp% AY/Att YAC/Cmp TD% Int% Pressure% Sack% Play-Action% Wentz 60.2% 9.8 4.8 7.5% 1.6% 29.5% 5.6% 21.6% Foles 64.7 7.8 5.6 5.3 1.4 28.8 3.3 30.9

AY/ATT = Air yards per attempt YAC/CMP = Yards after catch per completion

Source: ESPN Stats & Information Group

This year, the differences are more subtle. The Eagles have once again thrown downfield less with Foles, but that hasn’t been paired with more yardage after the catch, nor has it resulted in fewer picks. They’re also calling a lower share of play-action passes for Foles than they did for Wentz, a big reversal from last year. But one constant has been Foles’s ability to get rid of the ball under pressure and avoid sacks, which was a key factor on Sunday against Khalil Mack and Chicago’s ferocious pass rush. The Saints were sixth in sacks this season, so Foles’s quick release should come in handy again this weekend as the Eagles try to avoid a repeat of their 48-7 thrashing at the hands of New Orleans in November. But for all the Foles mania, it remains to be seen if Philadelphia’s defense can slow down Drew Brees and the Saints’ offense after allowing 546 total yards in that earlier matchup.

As my ESPN colleague Adam Teicher recently wrote about, Saturday’s game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Indianapolis Colts is a historically great quarterback matchup. The two QBs — Patrick Mahomes and Andrew Luck — spent the regular season tossing 89 combined touchdown passes, an NFL record for QBs facing off in any postseason contest. (Even considering the NFL’s spike in passing numbers, that’s a lot of touchdowns!)

The Chiefs are looking to finally snap a decades-long run of postseason futility that hasn’t seen them advance past the divisional round since 1993-94. But the bad luck of running into, um, Luck is part of their ongoing problem at this stage of the postseason. Among the 21 teams that have played at least five divisional playoff games since the Chiefs’ dry spell began, the Chiefs have faced the third-most difficult slate of opposing quarterbacks, according to our QB-adjusted version of Elo:

The Chiefs have run into some tough playoff QBs

Highest average quality of opposing quarterback faced in the divisional round (based on QB-adjusted Elo ratings) for NFL teams with a minimum of five divisional playoff games since the 1994 season

Average Opp. Elo Win Percentage Team Games QB-Neutral QB Adjustment Effective Rating Predicted Actual Jaguars 5 1622 +56 1678 32.3% 60.0% 49ers 9 1596 +40 1636 53.3 55.6 Chiefs 6 1581 +40 1621 61.7 0.0 Jets 5 1647 +40 1686 37.7 60.0 Falcons 7 1608 +34 1642 51.9 57.1

Includes playoffs for the 2018 season.

Source: Pro-Football-Reference.com

Thanks to a steady dose of all-time greats such as Brady, Peyton Manning, John Elway, Ben Roethlisberger and now Luck, the Chiefs have seldom caught a break by facing a comparatively weak QB at this point in the playoffs. Since 1994-95, only the Jaguars and 49ers have had worse luck in that regard. (Of course, those teams still managed to overcome it and win more often than not, while the Chiefs keep finding ways to lose.) But it’s also worth pointing out that KC has seldom had the superior QB in the matchup, which it does have this year in Mahomes. According to Elo, Mahomes is not only better than Luck, but he has the second-best pregame rating adjustment of any Chiefs playoff starter in a divisional round game since the 1970 merger, trailing only Trent Green from 2003-04 (when Kansas City gained 408 yards — and didn’t punt the ball once — but still lost because the Colts gained even more yards and also didn’t punt.) With a likely MVP under center, the Chiefs are hoping they finally have the ingredient that was missing in those previous postseason disappointments.

Instead of having to face the Dallas Cowboys in January, the Los Angeles Rams probably would prefer it if the playoffs had been held a month and a half ago, back when they were on pace for 14 wins and sat as Super Bowl favorites in Vegas. According to Elo, the Rams peaked after beating the Detroit Lions in Week 13 — after which they went 2-2 and shed nearly 40 points off their rating. But the good news for L.A. is that similar “peaking too early” teams tend to do pretty well for themselves in the playoffs. I looked for other teams that cracked a 1650 Elo rating (with the QB adjustment) through 12 games of an NFL regular season,3 then lost at least 30 points of Elo over the final four games before going into the playoffs. Of those 20 teams, 14 still made the conference championship, with nine making the Super Bowl and five winning it all (the most recent of which were the 2009 Saints). So any rumors of the Rams’ premature demise may have been greatly exaggerated.

If there is a takeaway from the Rams’ late-season slump, it might be a reminder that one of the most important factors for Los Angeles will be getting back to selling the run and keeping the Cowboys off-balance with play-action passing. During the Rams’ 11-1 start, they led the league with 5.3 expected points added per game off play-action passing, more than 0.8 points per game better than New England, the next-best offense. In Weeks 14 through 17, that number dropped to 3.2 EPA per game, which ranked only seventh-best.

The Rams’ play-action game disappeared down the stretch

NFL ranks for the 2018 Los Angeles Rams on play-action passes, by week

NFL Rank Category Weeks 1-13 Weeks 14-17 Passing EPA per game 1st 7th Total QBR 8th 25th Passer rating 7th 15th Yards per pass 5th 15th Passing yards per game 1st 8th

Source: ESPN Stats & Information Group

Though L.A. running back Todd Gurley was on track for an MVP-caliber season before missing games with a balky knee down the stretch, there isn’t evidence that missing a stud RB necessarily hurts a team’s play-action game. The Cowboys had one of the NFL’s best run defenses this season, so overusing Gurley to set up play-action on Saturday might be a waste anyway. But getting Dallas to commit to defending the run and then shredding the Cowboys through the air seems like the Rams’ best ticket to the NFC title game.

FiveThirtyEight vs. the readers

To keep up with every team’s Elo rating during the playoffs, check out FiveThirtyEight’s NFL prediction interactive, which simulates the rest of the season 100,000 times and tracks how likely every team is to advance to the Super Bowl. You can also pick playoff contests against the Elo algorithm in our prediction game and keep climbing up our giant leaderboard. (Or you could be like me, and forget to set picks before the first round of the playoffs…)

According to data from the game, here’s how readers did against the computer on wild-card weekend:

Elo’s dumbest (and smartest) picks of wild-card weekend

Average difference between points won by readers and by Elo in Week 18 matchups in FiveThirtyEight’s NFL prediction game

OUR PREDICTION (ELO) READERS’ PREDICTION PICK WIN PROB. PICK WIN PROB. Result READERS’ NET PTS BAL 60% LAC 51% LAC 23, BAL 17 +17.0

–

HOU 56 HOU 53 IND 21, HOU 7 +0.8

–

CHI 61 CHI 65 PHI 16, CHI 15 -16.8

–

DAL 54 SEA 54 DAL 24, SEA 22 -22.5

–

Home teams are in bold.

The scoring system is nonlinear, so readers’ average points don’t necessarily match the number of points that would be given to the average reader prediction.

Readers won big when the Chargers won on the road over Lamar Jackson and the Ravens, and the Colts’ win over the Texans was basically a wash (both the readers and Elo incorrectly picked Houston). But Elo took the weekend on the strength of the Eagles’ win over the Bears — the algorithm liked Philly slightly more than the readers — and especially the Cowboys’ victory over the Seahawks. Despite the game being in Dallas, the average reader assigned Seattle a 54 percent chance of winning, and that led to a massive loss of points after Michael Dickson’s weird onside kick attempt went awry. Elo has now beaten the average reader 17 times in 18 weeks this season.

Having said that, congrats are in order to Alex McQuillen and Ben Zornes, who currently lead all users in the postseason with 200.0 points apiece, and to Neil Mehta, who moved into first place for the season with 1,128.1 points. Thanks to everyone who has been playing — and the game isn’t over yet! You should keep making picks and trying your luck against Elo throughout the playoffs.

Check out our latest NFL predictions.

from News About Sports https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/will-the-divisional-playoffs-restore-order-to-the-nfl/

[mvalleefootball-blog]

Ho-Hum Pats Win; Patriots Jaguars Preview

By Michael Vallee

Welcome to NFL groundhog day.  The Patriots win their division; the Patriots get a bye; the Patriots yawn their way to another easy breezy lopsided, barely-break-a-sweat home divisional blowout of yet another not-yet-ready-for-primetime team.  Raise your hand if you’ve heard this narrative before.  With their 35-14 win last week over the Tennessee Titans the Patriots, once again, kicked off their playoff season by dispatching an overwhelmed opponent that offered little in the way of talent or resistance as New England cruised to their record seventh consecutive AFC Championship.

It was every bit as effortless as the score suggests.

The Patriots are 11-1 under Belichick in the divisional round coming off a bye.  While this implies dominance, this divisional game wasn’t always as easy as that record suggests.  The closest of these games might have been the first, when the Patriots beat the Raiders in the now infamous “Tuck Game” in the ‘01 playoffs.  After that there was a close frigid win over the Titans, a matchup against Peyton Manning’s Colts and their record-setting offense, and even in the undefeated year of ‘07 the Patriots were locked in a one-score game in the 4th quarter against the Jaguars.

Then of course came the bloodbath in 2010 when the Patriots lost handedly to a Jets team they had beaten 45-3 just six weeks earlier.  It was one of the worst losses of the Belichick era as New England entered the ‘10 playoffs as prohibitive favorites to win it all.  It also ushered in the so-called “Tomato Can” era where the divisional game transformed from an early challenge to a glorified scrimmage.

Since 2011 the Patriots have played in seven consecutive divisional playoff games coming off a bye and they have coasted to a 7-0 record.  In those seven games the average point spread was -10 and the average margin of victory was 17.  The NFL lined‘em up and the Patriots knocked’em down.  Their opponents provided less resistance than Donald Trump’s nutritionist.  And nobody knew this more than Brady, who produced 21 touchdowns in these games to just four interceptions, posting a QB rating of 103.

The only test in that stretch came in 2014 when they twice had to rally from 14 down to beat the Ravens 35-31 in arguably the best game ever played at Gillette Stadium.  The rest of the time it was the Patriots toying with the likes of the overrated Andrew Luck and the overwhelmed Tim Tebow.  

However, those blowouts didn’t exactly serve the Patriots well going forward.  After that tough Ravens victory New England went on to win their 4th Super Bowl title, revealing a distinct pattern.  In the years when the Patriots faced a challenge in the divisional round (‘01 Raiders, ‘03 Titans, ‘04 Colts, ‘14 Ravens and ‘16 Texans) they would eventually win the Super Bowl.  In the years when they waltzed their way past some half-ass opponent (‘11 Broncos, ‘12 Texans, ‘13 Colts, ‘15 Chiefs) they inevitably came up short.

Coincidence?  Perhaps, but if sports history has taught us anything it’s that competition is a good thing for a team.  All of this reminds me of the 1991 UNLV Runnin’ Rebels who dominated college basketball and coasted into the Final Four undefeated.  Their Final Four opponent, the Duke Blue Devils, played in the most competitive conference in the country, the ACC.  On that day their prior competition served them well as Duke beat UNLV in a close game that they were simply better prepared for because of the schedule they played.  

Beating up on an inferior opponent teaches you very little about your team and in no way prepares you for a tough road ahead.  Sometimes it can even have an opposite effect, pumping a team full of overconfidence.  It’s in the close battles where you truly learn what your roster is made of.  A fighter reveals a lot more about himself in a 12-round brawl than he does in a first round knockout.

The Patriots will try to break that pattern this year as they attempt to win their 6th Super Bowl title.  They can take some solace in knowing that past dynasties have also cake-walked through the divisional round and gone on to win the championship.  The Cowboys dominated the league from 1992-1995, winning three championships in four years.  During those four years the Cowboys won their four divisional round games by an average of 20 points.  The 80s Niners also rolled through the divisional round in each of their four Super Bowl years, also winning by an average of 20 points.  Landslide wins in the divisional round obviously doesn’t preclude you from winning a Super Bowl, but so far for the Patriots it’s been a bad omen.

In the end was it a win last Sunday for the Patriots?  Yes.  Did we learn anything new about New England?  No.  Was it entertaining?  Barely.  Is it their fault that the best the NFL can muster for a second round playoff opponent is a crappy 9-7 Titans team lead by one of the lowest rated QBs in the NFL and a coach that was days away from being fired?  Absolutely not.  But now amateur hour is over and the real challenge begins: the challenge of beating a team that might actually put up some resistance.  A team led by such dynamic names as Blake Bortles and Doug Marrone.  On second thought, see you in Minnesota.  

Patriots Jaguars Preview:

How the Jaguars can win:  It’s not easy to make a case that Jacksonville will walk into Foxboro and beat the New England Patriots but if they pull off the upset here’s how it might happen:

The key to beating the Patriots in the Brady/Belichick era has always been the defense.  Unless your last name is Manning or Rodgers your just not winning a playoff shootout against Brady.  A quick scan of the Patriots worst playoff losses shows a relatively simple pattern - stop Brady and you have a shot.  In New England’s playoff losses to the Giants (‘07, ‘11), the Broncos (‘13, ‘15), the Jets (‘10) and the Ravens (‘09, ‘12) combined, Brady posted just a 73.6 QB rating and the Patriots averaged just 16.1 points.

Of course stopping New England is easier said than done, so how does Jacksonville pull it off?  For starters you need a team with the talent and stones to play a lot of tight man-to-man.  Brady abuses zone coverage, just ask the Steelers.  The good news for the Jaguars is they boast one of the best cornerback tandems in the league in Pro Bowlers Jalen Ramsey and A.J. Bouye.  If you can take away New England’s short to mid-range bread-and-butter, and prevent them from moving the chains on 3rd down, you can frustrate Brady and the offense.  Then it’s time to attack.

The Jaguars are loaded up front with Calais Campbell, Malik Jackson and Yannick Ngakoue combining for 34.5 sacks.  If Jacksonville can take away the Patriots short passes and force Brady to hold the ball longer the Jaguars defensive front could thrive.  And if Jacksonville is smart they will be aggressive and not just rely on the front four to generate pressure.  There is a misperception that you can’t blitz Brady but if you have the horses to cover on the back end, well-timed and well-disguised blitzes, particularly up the middle, can be effective against New England.

This is also essential for the psyche of the young Jaguars.  If Brady is carving them up early it will suck the life right out of them and demoralize their inexperienced roster.  By the third quarter they will be staring at the game clock waiting for the pain to end.  But if they can get some early three-and-outs, and end a couple of those drives with sacks, then things could go in the other direction.  The cocky aggressive Jaguars will see their confidence swell, and their are few things scarier in the NFL Playoffs than a talented defense that thinks it can’t be stopped.  If that happens then New England will find themselves in a rock fight and they better hope Matt Patricia’s defense is up to the challenge.

The X-factor for the Jaguars defense is Gronk.  I can’t recall watching a Patriots playoff game where Gronk is dominating the middle of the field and New England loses.  If he is ripping off 15 and 20-yard gains down the seam Jacksonville is in for long afternoon.  The Jaguars have to make stopping #87 their top priority, and they have to deploy any and all methods to do it.  Chip him at the line, double-cover him, disguise coverages, hold him, grab him, punch him - they must try anything and everything or he will bury them (again, ask the Steelers).  And if all else fails don’t be afraid to give all-world cornerback Jalen Ramsey the assignment of stopping Gronk.  He has the size, speed and confidence to take on the Eric Berry role that has been effective in the past.

A lot will be made of the importance of getting that physical bull, Leonard Fournette, cranking and crafting a game plan that mitigates Blake Bortles from screwing everything up.  But those are minor sub-plots.  This game comes down to one matchup: a 40-year old soon-to-be-MVP quarterback vs. the number one pass defense in the NFL, and if the Jaguars lose that matchup, it’s going to be a long day at Gillette.

Curb Your Enthusiasm:  There is no denying the talent that Jacksonville has on the defensive side of the ball but a closer look indicates their lofty status as a dominant top two defense was significantly aided by a soft schedule.  The Jaguars 18 games featured opponents with an offense ranked 20th or worse and in the six games where they faced an offense that wasn’t among the dregs of the league they allowed 27.1 points per game, including two 40+ games in the last month against Jimmy G’s niners and the Pittsburgh Steelers.  Additionally their 55 sacks were dramatically inflated by the 20 sacks the registered in two games started by Tom Savage and Jacoby Brissett.

The Phantom Menace:  Can someone explain to me why so much of the pregame coverage has been devoted to the mysterious “Coughlin Factor”.  Jaguars president, Tom Coughlin, was a great head coach and had a lot of success against Belichick and the Patriots, but this idea that he is Brady’s kryptonite has been wildly overblown.  Yeah, I get it, the Giants beat the Patriots twice in the Super Bowl but it wasn’t as if Coughlin devised some magic defensive riddle to stop Brady.  Much of this reputation is tied to the ‘07 Super Bowl when Coughlin’s Giants shocked the football world by ending the Patriots undefeated season.  Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t that game come down to the simple fact that the Giants stout defensive line dominated a Patriots O-Line that had its worst game of the year?  Credit Coughlin for having his team ready to play but there wasn’t a lot of Xs and Os genius behind that win.

How they were built:  With the Jaguars pulling off a massive one-year turnaround, going from 3-13 to 10-6, it has a lot of people asking, “How did they do it?”  While the hiring of Doug Marrone and smart drafting helped, surprisingly it was free agency that keyed their success.  NFL free agency is usually fool’s gold.  For every success story there seems to be a dozen Albert Haynesworths and Adalius Thomases.  But Jacksonville bucked that trend the last two years and rebuilt their defense behind massive contracts to Campbell, Jackson and Bouye.

Attack Mode:  If the Patriots are smart they won’t make the mistake the Steelers made and allow Blake Bortles to get comfortable.  The Steelers registered zero sacks on Bortles last week and played the majority of the game on their heels, allowing Bortles and the Jaguars offense to dictate the action.  Jacksonville has no weapons in the passing game and Matt Patricia would be wise to unleash the dogs on the aerially-challenged Bortles and take the risk of Allen Hurns beating them.

Stupid is as stupid does:  Gotta love the stories surfacing from Pittsburgh that show just how unprepared mentally the Steelers were for the rematch against Jacksonville.  My favorite is Le’Veon Bell tweeting the following late Saturday night, “I love round 2s...We’ll have two round 2s in back-to-back weeks….”  Hey, why get a good night’s rest before your first playoff game when you can instead stay up late and piss off your opponent.  And this was after Bell had blown off Saturday’s walk-through, showing up with just five minutes left in practice.  Additional reports have multiple coaches and players showing up late the day of the actual game.  Is this the NFL playoffs or spring practice at Kent State?  And the disciplinary result of these   transgressions?  Nothing.  Zippo.  Do you think Dion Lewis would play if he blew off practice the day before a game and then trashed his opponent on Twitter later that night?  It amazes me Tomlin still has a job as he looks more and more like Marvin Lewis with a better roster. 

Perhaps most amazing is that the Jaguars curb-stomped the Steelers earlier in the year.  For normal teams that would be a wake up call but apparently there is nothing normal about the Tomlin Steelers.  Pittsburgh’s arrogance confounded their opponents who released these gems in response, “I was wondering why they were so confident,” said Ramsey.  “We stomped their ass last time and we knew we was going to do the same this time.”  Linebacker Myles Jack was equally puzzled by the Steelers bravado, “It was like they had...amnesia...or something.  I don’t know if they just forgot and thought that didn’t happen but it happened…”

Jacksonville Jag-offs:  Let’s end on a humorous note.  A few years ago an enterprising Jaguars fan devised Jacksonville’s own version of the steelers Terrible Towel and came up with the “Jag Rag”.  Yup, that actually happened.  I would love to watch YouTube videos of every guys reaction when they first heard the name Jag Rag.  Sadly, the Jag Rag is no longer available for purchase, providing the NFL with a big sigh of relief while disappointing anybody with a sense of humor.

[junker-town]

The 49ers & Chiefs barely earned 1st-round byes. It proved crucial

Photo by Alika Jenner/Getty Images

49ers vs. Chiefs is the 7th straight Super Bowl between top-two seeds.

The San Francisco 49ers finished the regular season with a 13-3 record — good enough for the No. 1 seed in the NFC. It came right down to the wire, though.

Their last four games of 2019 (three of which they won), were decided in the final seconds. San Francisco’s Week 17 finale against Seattle was literally an inch away from being a loss. Seahawks tight end Jacob Hollister was tackled right next to the goal line on a fourth-down play with nine seconds left. Had it been a touchdown, the 49ers would’ve lost the NFC West and entered the postseason as the No. 5 seed.

Instead, they landed at the very top of the NFC, thanks to tiebreakers over the Packers and Saints.

The Kansas City Chiefs also secured a first-round bye by the skin of their teeth. They won their last six games during the regular season — including a ref-assisted victory against the Patriots — to finish the year 12-4. That would’ve landed them the No. 3 seed in the AFC, but New England inexplicably lost to the tanking Dolphins in Week 17. Kansas City hopped the Patriots and ended up with the AFC’s No. 2 seed.

Both the 49ers and the Chiefs barely earned first-round byes that kept them from having to play on Wild Card Weekend. The extra week off is a big reason why both teams navigated the postseason to make it to Super Bowl 54.

That’s been the norm, lately. It’s been years since a team that didn’t earn a first-round bye made it to the Super Bowl. Kansas City and San Francisco are the latest examples, and showed exactly why a top-two seed is so valuable.

The 49ers and Chiefs got healthy with time off

The 49ers were banged up in the second half of the 2019 season. They started the year 8-0 with an indomitable defense, but slowed down when key contributors like Dee Ford, Richard Sherman, Kwon Alexander, and Jaquiski Tartt had to deal with injuries.

An extra week off gave those players time to return to 100 percent in time for the playoffs. Now the San Francisco defense is back to wrecking shop.

The rejuvenated 49ers beat both the Vikings and Packers by 17 points. They notched nine sacks and five turnovers in the pair of wins.

Kansas City also benefitted from time to get healthy. Or rather, to stay healthy.

Patrick Mahomes suffered a dislocated kneecap in Week 7 and was out of action until Week 10. Prior to that, speedy receiver Tyreek Hill went down with a shoulder injury in Week 1 and missed a month.

The Chiefs’ electric offense slowed down without Mahomes and Hill at 100 percent. Even after their return, it took time for Kansas City to get rolling again. But now they’re back to their usual explosive selves. The Chiefs eclipsed 400 yards of offense in both of their postseason wins, their first time with back-to-back 400-yard performances since September.

Now, the 49ers and Chiefs are hitting Super Bowl 54 with relatively clean bills of health. Kansas City coach Andy Reid had zero injuries to report from the AFC Championship, and the most significant problem for San Francisco is a shoulder injury for Tevin Coleman — just one part of the 49ers’ stable of running backs.

Neither team had a particularly tough slate of playoff opponents

If the Patriots managed to win in Week 17, Kansas City would’ve played the Titans on Wild Card Weekend. If the Chiefs won, it would’ve been a matchup with either the Ravens or the Patriots, and another game after that.

Instead of that slate, the Chiefs only had to beat the Texans and Titans — the fourth- and sixth-seeded teams in the AFC, respectively.

The 49ers’ path was a little tougher, but not much. They had to go through the Vikings (No. 6) and Packers (No. 2) to get to Super Bowl 54.

Neither had to play a playoff game on the road.

Most importantly, the Chiefs got to avoid the 14-2 Ravens and the defending champion Patriots. The 49ers didn’t have to face the Saints or their divisional rival Seahawks. Those were some of the biggest favorites of the postseason when the field was set after the regular season ended.

Kansas City earned its spot in Super Bowl 54 by blowing out teams in January with unstoppable offense. San Francisco got there with ferocious defense and a steady dose of Raheem Mostert and Tevin Coleman. Securing first-round byes certainly helped both teams along their respective paths, though.

It’s been years since a team without a bye made the Super Bowl

The Joe Flacco-led Ravens were the last NFL team to play on Wild Card Weekend and still advance to the Super Bowl. That was way back in 2013.

The 49ers and Chiefs will meet for the seventh consecutive Super Bowl between teams that entered the playoffs with a top-two seed. Clearly, homefield advantage and the benefit of a week off have reigned supreme, as of late.

It’s a relatively new phenomenon, though. Six of the eight Super Bowl champions between 2005 and 2012 didn’t earn a first-round bye. Since then, it’s been nothing but No. 1 and No. 2 seeds getting through the conference championships.

It’s impossible to know if San Francisco and Kansas City would’ve been able to buck the trend. Thanks to some favorable Week 17 results, neither team had to find out.

[kansascityhappenings]

Chiefs’ postseason revenge tour began with Houston, brings Tennessee to KC next

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — In a jubilant locker room after the Kansas City Chiefs had thumped Houston to return to the AFC title game, defensive end Frank Clark thought back to a humiliating loss to the Texans midway through the regular season.

“Last time they were here they beat us, just smacked us in our face. That’s the one thing I remember,” Clark said of that Week 6 debacle at Arrowhead Stadium. “At the end of the day, you’re talking to the wrong guy, talking to the wrong team. They talk all that stuff and they come out here and we embarrass them. We sent them home early.”

It was only the first stop on the Chiefs’ postseason revenge tour.

Damien Williams #26 of the Kansas City Chiefs scores a touchdown in the second quarter of the AFC Divisional playoff game against the Houston Texans at Arrowhead Stadium on January 12, 2020 in Kansas City, Missouri. (Photo by David Eulitt/Getty Images)

After coming oh-so-close to reaching the Super Bowl last season, the path to their first championship in 50 years will take them through the Tennessee Titans — who knocked them off in Week 10 — and perhaps the Green Bay Packers, who beat them in late October and will play the San Francisco 49ers for the NFC spot in Miami.

But that’s getting ahead of things, and after rallying from a 24-0 deficit to beat the Texans 51-31 on Sunday, the Chiefs know quite well that anything can happen.

So their focus remains squarely on the Titans and bruising running back Derrick Henry, who ran right through their revamped defense during a 35-32 victory on Nov. 10 — Kansas City’s most recent loss.

“They beat us in Tennessee, right?” Clark asked with a grin. “We owe them one, period.”

Not just for this year, either.

The Titans bounced the Chiefs from the playoffs in the wild-card round at Arrowhead Stadium a couple of years ago, and Andy Reid is an astounding 1-8 against the franchise since it moved from Houston. As the coach of the Eagles and Chiefs, Reid has lost to four of the five coaches the Titans have had since their relocation.

Now, that same franchise is standing in the way of the Chiefs finally hoisting the Lamar Hunt Trophy — named for the late Chiefs founder — as the AFC champions for the first time since the 1969 season.

“Obviously we would love it. It has Lamar Hunt’s name on it. We’d love to have that,” Reid said. “At the same time, we have to go through the process and focus, and we’re playing a good football team. We need to go back and make a solid game plan and then come out and play well. That’s really what it is. Then good things happen.”

WHAT’S WORKING

Patrick Mahomes — big surprise there.

The Chiefs quarterback is finally healthy after dealing with a sprained ankle and dislocated kneecap this season, and it showed in his performance against Houston. He became the first player in history to throw for at least 300 yards, run for at least 50 and throw five touchdown passes in a single playoff game.

WHAT NEEDS HELP

The Chiefs didn’t need their run game against the Texans, but they almost certainly will against Tennessee.

Damien Williams ran for a pair of touchdowns but he also gained just 47 yards on 12 carries, and backups LeSean McCoy and sixth-round pick Darwin Thompson didn’t even get a carry against Houston.

STOCK UP

The Chiefs raised plenty of eyebrows when they traded for Clark, then signed him to a massive $101 million contract before he had ever played a down.

But the former Seattle defensive end earned every cent against the Texans, sacking Deshaun Watson three times and knocking him down four times in a dominant performance.

STOCK DOWN

Tyreek Hill, but only as a punt returner.

The Chiefs had used Mecole Hardman in that role all season but sent the dynamic Hill back for a punt early against Houston. He dropped it, the Texans recovered and soon scored a touchdown. Hill was back again later in the game, even though Hardman was voted to the Pro Bowl as a return specialist.

INJURIES

Defensive tackle Chris Clark tweaked his calf last week and tried to play Sunday, but he wound up inactive when he couldn’t make it through pregame warm-ups.

The Chiefs hope he is back — and close to 100 percent — to help deal with Henry, who gouged them for 188 yards and two touchdowns when they met earlier this season.

KEY NUMBER

4 minutes, 50 seconds: That’s the amount of time the Chiefs had the ball in the second quarter Sunday, when they ran just 16 plays but still managed to score four touchdowns.

That not only wiped out the Texans’ 24-0 lead but gave Kansas City a halftime advantage that only grew during the third quarter.

UP NEXT

The Chiefs will be playing in the AFC title game for the second consecutive season, the first time that has happened in franchise history.

They haven’t won a conference championship since beating the Oakland Raiders on Jan. 4, 1970, nine full months before Mahomes’ father — longtime big league pitcher Pat Mahomes — was even born.

from FOX 4 Kansas City WDAF-TV | News, Weather, Sports https://fox4kc.com/2020/01/13/chiefs-postseason-revenge-tour-began-with-houston-brings-tennessee-to-kc-next/

from Kansas City Happenings https://kansascityhappenings.wordpress.com/2020/01/13/chiefs-postseason-revenge-tour-began-with-houston-brings-tennessee-to-kc-next/

[truesportsfan]

Sure, The NFL Playoffs Seem Chaotic … But They’re Actually Pretty Predictable

The Tennessee Titans’ run from the sixth seed to the AFC championship game is a Cinderella tale amid an NFL postseason full of great stories. Even after the Minnesota Vikings upset the New Orleans Saints in the Superdome, and the Houston Texans racked up (and then blew) a 24-0 lead over the Kansas City Chiefs, the Titans beating the New England Patriots and Baltimore Ravens on the road on consecutive weeks still stands out.

This isn’t supposed to be unusual in the league of parity, where the sixth-seed 2005 Pittsburgh Steelers kicked off an era of wild-card teams winning it all. The 2007 New York Giants, a five-seed, met the 18-0 New England Patriots in the Super Bowl and beat them. The 2010 Green Bay Packers won it all as a sixth seed, too. In 2011, the Giants won another Super Bowl ring after sneaking into the playoffs at 9-7 as the champion of a weak NFC East.

It’s no wonder fans and analysts frequently complain about the NFL’s playoff format, insisting that it’s too easy for weak teams to get in and too hard for the regular season’s best teams to capitalize on their seasonlong performance. Amid reports that the league is looking to add a playoff game on each side of the bracket and some in the players union are trying to change the seeding, it seems like a solution to this problem is coming.

The only problem? There’s no problem.

In fact, the NFL playoffs are a chalk factory. Since at least 2010, no other major U.S. professional sport has put its best teams in the semifinals more frequently than the NFL. The NFL and NBA averaged three top-two seeds in the conference finals per season, while MLB averaged two, and the NHL averaged 1.3.

In eight of the past 10 NFL seasons, at least three of each year’s four conference finalists have had a first-round bye. In fact, no season has had fewer than two top-two seeds in the final four. Overall, 30 of the 40 title-game participants have been either No. 1 or No. 2 seeds. Since the 2013 season, every Super Bowl winner has been a top-two seed — and all but one have been their conference’s No. 1.

The NBA is just as good at putting its best teams in position to win a ring; over the same period, it has averaged 3 top-two seeds in its final fours. Of course, every round of the NBA playoffs is a best-of series instead of a single-elimination game — and, as Michael Mauboussin found, NBA basketball results are driven more by skill than any other major U.S. sport. Luck plays a much bigger role in baseball and hockey, so it’s no wonder that MLB and the NHL don’t put top seeds in the semifinals nearly as often.

But wait — we know NFL results are significantly luck-driven, too, and single-elimination games give underdogs a better chance to win than a multiple-trial series. How does the NFL put its regular-season champs in position to win conference and league titles as frequently as the NBA?

Credit the NFL playoff structure. When the season’s winningest teams have to win just one home game to make the conference finals, they’re going to do so more often than not. Of course, when luck is a significant factor in wins and losses, the winningest teams aren’t necessarily the best ones. FiveThirtyEight’s Elo rankings still regard the Ravens and Saints as the strongest and third-strongest teams. The Ravens, Saints and Patriots also finished first, third and fourth in Football Outsiders’ DVOA.

But the reason we have playoffs is to put the winners against the winners and see who wins — and the NFL’s format does that more effectively than anyone gives it credit for.

Check out our latest NFL predictions.

CORRECTION (Jan. 16, 2020, 5:28 p.m.): A previous version of this article incorrectly identified the league that averaged two top-two seeds in its conference finals from 2010 through 2019. It was MLB, not the NBA.

source https://truesportsfan.com/football/sure-the-nfl-playoffs-seem-chaotic-but-theyre-actually-pretty-predictable/

[flauntpage]

Ranking Every NFL Team's Super Bowl Chances

With eight weeks of the 2017 NFL season in the books (we all know the Chiefs are beating the Broncos on Monday night so we can do this now), it's time to take stock of each team's Super Bowl chances. You're probably saying, "That's silly, because not all 32 teams have a chance at a Super Bowl."

You're right, but those teams are great for the purpose of making jokes.

Let's get right into it, because 32 is a lot of teams.

32. San Francisco 49ers (0-8) — lmao

31. Cleveland Browns (0-8) — lol

30. New York Giants (1-6) — OK, so maybe doing this with all 32 teams was a little ambitious. The good news is the New England Patriots are looking like the favorites to represent the AFC in the Super Bowl, and everyone knows Tom Brady can't beat Eli Manning in a Super Bowl. The bad news is the only time we're seeing Odell Beckham in a Super Bowl is in that painful ad with the Silicon Valley guy who mixes up sports terminology at the press conference like a TOTAL NERD, lol learn sports, nerd!

29. Indianapolis Colts (2-6) — What if the reason Andrew Luck hasn't played this season is because he's undergoing surgery and treatment that will allow him to become Wolverine? The reports surrounding Luck's "injury" have been odd, with the story changing every couple weeks. Even his name—Luck—would be a cool X-Men name. The Colts will be a tough out in January if their quarterback can't be tackled by regular humans.

28. Tampa Bay Buccaneers (2-5) — When you combine a former Florida State quarterback with a former Jacksonville Jaguars offensive coordinator, you should just be happy to have the 28th-best team in the NFL.

27. Oakland Raiders (3-5) — Just move this stupid franchise to the moon already. In hindsight, a team coming off a breakout season signing a guy who had retired for a year just because he's from the area was an odd choice. And, I mean, Marshawn Lynch is clearly his own guy, so him running on the field to fight some dudes mid-game does, in hindsight, seem inevitable. We should have known the Raiders would screw this up.

26. New York Jets (3-5) — The way I see it, the Jets may have the best chance of winning the Super Bowl, because these are the Jets, and whatever they want to do, the opposite happens. Since they're trying to tank, finishing 9-7 and winning the Super Bowl has about an 80 percent chance of happening. They're the Cleveland Indians in Major League except Rachel Phelps was a much more sympathetic owner. Who wouldn't rather live in Miami than Cleveland?

25. Los Angeles Chargers (3-5) — Prove to me the Chargers weren't trying to lose to the Patriots on Sunday. When teams shave points, usually they try to hide it, but Philip Rivers fumbling with no contact and a guy running backward 15 yards to take a safety is a little too obvious. The Chargers don't want to win, so I won't raise the hopes of the 800 people in Los Angeles who care about them.

24. Chicago Bears (3-5) — Every team in the league has three wins, FYI. Mitch Trubisky completed 43 percent of his passes Sunday against the Saints, which shows why the Bears only allowed him to throw seven passes two weeks ago. An NFL quarterback completing 43 percent of passes against the Saints would be like an NBA player shooting 2-of-19 against a high school team. It's too bad someone like Deshaun Watson wasn't available at the draft when the Bears… [looks back at draft order] oh, whoops.

23. Cincinnati Bengals (3-4) — Say it out loud: "Andy Dalton, Super Bowl champion." Yeah, never gonna happen.

22. Arizona Cardinals (3-4) — If David Johnson returns in time, yeah, why not the Cardinals? He recently referred to the wrist as a "complicated limb," which tells me he's taking advantage of the painkillers. "Bro, ever think about wrists? They're like… complicated, man." If Carson Palmer is upright, weirder things have happened.

21. Washington Sports Franchise (3-4) — Bob Kraft is a buddy of Vlad Putin, but doesn't he feel miscast as owner of the sport's most hated franchise? Wouldn't Dan Snyder make more sense with the Patriots? Sadly, Snyder is an inept billionaire with a barely functioning franchise and a quarterback taking his money one mediocre year at a time. Washington's season died Sunday against Dallas, but take comfort in knowing the team will win just enough games so they won't be able to draft a franchise quarterback after Cousins leaves in the off-season.

20. Houston Texans (3-4) — Deshaun Watson might be the most talented rookie quarterback in modern NFL history, and you just know Bill O'Brien will screw it up. After his defense had shown for an entire half it was incapable of stopping the Seahawks on Sunday, he ran it three straight times, punted, and watched Russell Wilson deliver a near instantaneous death blow. When Watson wins a Super Bowl, it won't be with O'Brien clenching on the sideline in a big game.

19. Detroit Lions (3-4) — It's the Super Bowl. Lions down five. Fourth and goal. Two seconds remaining. Matthew Stafford rolls right, time expires, he throws and…Eric Ebron! Touchdown! No time left! The Lions have—hang on. Officials are gathering in the end zone. "Due to the pass being caught with no time left, the touchdown is only worth 4.5 points. Therefore, by rule, which was just invented before the play in secret in the league office, the game is over, Lions lose." The following day, the NFL will apologize for not allowing the Lions to kick the winning extra point but won't take the title away from the Patriots. I guess what I'm saying is, the Lions, no matter what, will find a way to not win the Super Bowl.

18. Denver Broncos (3-3) — You lose at home to the Giants by 13 points, I don't understand why you even show up for the rest of your games.

17. Baltimore Ravens (4-4) — The Ravens are the NFL's ideal picture of mediocrity. A quarterback that's just OK enough, a defense that'll do just enough to win a couple games, and boom, you're 8-8 at the end of the year. This will be the state of the Ravens for two decades as punishment for years of making us watch Ray Lewis dance.

16. Dallas Cowboys (4-3) — If Ezekiel Elliott's arbitrator is based in Texas and has him in fantasy football, sure, maybe he plays the whole season and the Cowboys can do it. There's no harder team to read, but if there's one thing I know about sports justice, it's that Elliott won't face any discipline until the 2021 season, when his suspension is reduced to three preseason games.

15. Tennessee Titans (4-3) — They have two very good running backs, a pretty good quarterback, a decent group of wide receivers, and a defense that's…clearly the weak link. But really, what makes the Titans different from last year's Falcons? Fine, Eric Decker isn't Julio Jones and Rishard Matthews isn't Mohammed Sanu, and…OK, fine, forget it. I almost talked myself into it.

14. Miami Dolphins (4-3) — How in the name of sweet baby Jesus has this team won more games than it has lost? I'm scrolling up from the bottom of the NFL standings as I write this, and when I saw the Dolphins here at 4-3, I did that blinking guy GIF everyone on Twitter loves. The Dolphins team on Ballers coached by Peter Berg and GM'd by Dulé Hill has a better chance of winning it all.

13. Jacksonville Jaguars (4-3) — Blake Bortles, you just won the Super Bowl, where are you going? "I'm going to Dorney Park!" No, Blake, the other amusement park. "I'm going to Busch Gardens!" No, man, forget it. If the Jags are going all the way, it's via their defense, but I think it's fun to imagine Bortles doing all he can to muck it up along the way, then lying to him that he's MVP just so you can get him to say into a cellphone camera, "I'm going to Six Flags Great Adventure!" That's viral content, my friends.

12. Green Bay Packers (4-3) — Nope. I'm sorry. The NFC North is too tough for the Packers to survive the rest of the regular season without Aaron Rodgers. What's truly torturous for fans is how many commercials that have Rodgers and injured Giants wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. Every commercial break, you're reminded that your favorite team's season is over because the best player was broken in two. There should be a rule that if an NFL guy is out for the year, he gets replaced by his backup in any national ad campaign. Brett Hundley gets all the State Farm ads the final nine weeks. Roger Lewis Jr. gets all the Verizon ads. Sorry, but it's now in the CBA.

11. Atlanta Falcons (4-3) — The Falcons' hangover isn't a 22-year-old's hangover, where you're slightly groggy the next day but you can still attend your CrossFit Sauna Expert Master class at 6 AM; this is a 39-year-old hangover where you Google "can you die from a hangover" from your bed at 7 PM the next day. I still think if the Falcons can make themselves puke one more time before the stretch run, the Falcons can get back to the Super Bowl.

10. Carolina Panthers (5-3) — If the Dolphins are the league's worst 4-3 team, the Panthers are the league's worst 5-3 team. Cam Newton has nine touchdowns and ten interceptions in eight games and the Panthers are headed toward the playoffs because football is a crapshoot like no other sport, and players don't matter, for we are all part of a human experiment known as life where chaos and randomness rule us despite our best efforts to seek control. Eat at Arby's.

9. Seattle Seahawks (5-2) — They can't run the ball and the defense is sort of old, but you have to respect the championship pedigree. You get the sense the Seahawks are that college graduate taking a year off to "find themselves" and they'll either be better off for the journey or they'll still have zero offensive line when it's over and won't be able to find a job in a saturated marketplace when they return home. I'm mixing metaphors there but you get my point. If Sunday showed us anything, it's that when Pete Carroll, a good coach, gets in a close game with a bad coach like Bill O'Brien, he'll find a way to win, and fortunately for Seattle there are more bad coaches than good coaches in the NFL.

8. New Orleans Saints (5-2) — The Saints are Steelers South. Only instead of defense, the Saints offense has looked incredible against mostly slop. They've won five straight against the Panthers, the Dolphins, the Lions, the Rodgers-less Packers, and the Bears. There's maybe one impressive win in there. Can you really count on the Saints to shut down a really good offense? Wait, does anyone have a good offense besides the Saints? My god, they are going 14-2, aren't they? This could happen.

7. Los Angeles Rams (5-2) — It's not going to happen, but the idea of a disheveled Jeff Fisher alone in a shack watching what is mostly the same roster he had last season continue to advance in the playoffs while he mutters "7-9…7-9" to himself is a fun image. Fisher will start a Buzzfeed account and start writing things like "16 Ways Millennials Are Ruining Jeff Fisher's Life" that will just be GIFs of Sean McVay.

6. Kansas City Chiefs (5-2) — Say hello to our best hope of beating the Patriots, which, oh well, maybe next year the Patriots won't get to the Super Bowl. Imagine a superhero movie with the worst possible villain, only instead of the Avengers or Batman, the villain has to defeat Paul Blart. That's the Chiefs. The only way the Chiefs win that matchup is if our world is a feel-good comedy and not film noir directed by Christopher Nolan. Based on recent evidence in this world, what do you think happens in a Chiefs-Patriots AFC title game? Yeah, me too.

5. Buffalo Bills (5-2) — Nothing would be funnier than the Bills beating the Patriots in the playoffs. It would be the greatest 1980s movie ever where the nerd finally gets the best of the bully. Tyrod Taylor dropping 40 on Tom Brady in Foxboro would be the Lucas/Karate Kid mashup Bill Simmons wishes he sold to a movie studio ten years ago. But this is reality, and what's more likely is LeSean McCoy tearing his ACL the Friday before the game and Rob Gronkowski somehow growing a foot taller at halftime and posting 300 yards in the second half.

4. Pittsburgh Steelers (6-2) — Yeah, the Steelers have the second-best defense, but they've compiled these numbers against the Browns, the Vikings, the Bears, the Ravens, the Jaguars, the Chiefs, the Bengals, and the Lions. Outside of the Chiefs, that's just pure dreck. But there's more dreck on the schedule, so the Steelers are practically a lock to make the playoffs, which seems nuts when you consider that two weeks ago when they lost to the Jaguars you wondered if Ben Roethlisberger would retire mid-season. This league stinks.

3. Minnesota Vikings (6-2) — No. This is a glitch in the Matrix. Instead of two cats, it's Case Keenum and Sam Bradford looking exactly the same in everything they do. The difference this year is the Packers are toast without Rodgers so the NFC North is there for the taking. It's not that Vikings are bad, but I don't want to listen to people talk about how good they are. They're basically a Netflix show.

2. Philadelphia Eagles (7-1) — It's pretty tough right now for a certain segment of the U.S. population—the Eagles and the Yankees are getting really good again at the same time. And both will be really good for a long time. It's heartbreaking. There's no reason the Eagles can't win a Super Bowl this year, other than the fact they are the Eagles and they always find a way to crap their pants. You can take the Andy Reid out of Philadelphia but you can't take the Philadelphia out of Andy Reid. Or something. Fuck the Eagles, man.

1. New England Patriots (6-2) — There's no better evidence that we are living in a computer simulation run by a vindictive sociopath than the existence of the Patriots. Their idiot quarterback is 100 years old but plays like he's 28. The team cheats but nobody cares. The coach writes love letters to Donald Trump. The Pats could have and perhaps should have lost their past four games but, of course, they won them all. This team has no business still being Super Bowl favorites but it's time we just accept that this is our reality until Morpheus finds us and frees our minds. Congrats to the Patriots on another Super Bowl win.

Ranking Every NFL Team's Super Bowl Chances published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

[jodyedgarus]

The Patriots’ Super Bowl Path Is The Easiest In Modern NFL History

On Sunday, the New England Patriots will make their 12th AFC Championship Game appearance under Bill Belichick and Tom Brady, and the legendary coach/QB combo will be gunning for a record eighth Super Bowl appearance together against the Jacksonville Jaguars. Cut through all the drama, the speculation about Brady getting old and questions about the Pats’ defense, and it has been a pretty vintage championship-caliber season in Foxborough: another year, another seemingly effortless trip to the Super Bowl.

They’ve had a little help, though. According to our Elo ratings, which estimate a team’s strength at any given moment, the Pats will have faced the easiest pair of opponents of any conference title-game participant with a first-round bye since 1990 (when the NFL established its current playoff structure). Given who they’ve played, it would have been much more surprising for New England to not make the Super Bowl than to return to it for a third time in four seasons.

For one thing, the AFC was exceptionally weak this year. In inter-conference play during the regular season, NFC teams went 41-23 against their AFC counterparts, which was the second-best record for one conference against the other in a season since 1990. (Only the 2004 season, in which the AFC went 44-20 against the NFC, saw a wider split.) As a result, the AFC playoff field contained only two teams with more than 10 regular-season wins, as opposed to five in the NFC. That meant a path was already forming for the top-seeded Pats to sail through to another Super Bowl.

Then a few key upsets boosted New England’s advantage. First, the Tennessee Titans toppled the Kansas City Chiefs in the wild-card game, setting up a huge divisional-round mismatch at Gillette Stadium. According to Elo, the Pats were favored by 12, since Tennessee rated at 1499 — below the league average rating of 1505 — even after knocking off K.C. That made it the third-most lopsided divisional matchup since 1990, trailing only the Pats vs. the Tim Tebow Broncos in the 2011 season and Minnesota vs. Arizona in 1998. The Titans hung with the Pats for about a quarter, but New England eventually dropped 35 unanswered points on Tennessee and rolled to victory.

The next day, another upset further cleared the way for New England. The Jaguars went into Heinz Field and took a quick 28-7 lead over the stunned Pittsburgh Steelers, then hung on for a 45-42 win. Elo had only given the Jags a 24 percent chance of winning — even lower than Tennessee’s chances at Kansas City — and it still only ranks Jacksonville as the 12th-best team in football, below five teams that were knocked out of the playoffs and three that didn’t even make it to the playoffs.

Just like that, the two AFC teams Elo thought had the best chance of beating the Pats going into the playoffs — the Chiefs and the Steelers — were gone, and in their place were a below-average team and another that doesn’t rate much higher. According to Elo, New England is a 10-point favorite to beat Jacksonville, with an 81 percent chance of winning the Lamar Hunt Trophy yet again.

If we multiply together the Patriots’ pregame odds of beating the Titans (85 percent) with that of the Jaguars (81 percent), we could say they had a staggering 69 percent chance of making the Super Bowl before they ever played a game. (This is assuming we’d somehow know that both of their opponents would pull off the upsets they did.) That’s easily the best number for any conference title-game participant since 1990.

Of course, some of that is also because the Patriots are a very good team; they went into the playoffs with the sixth-best Elo of any Pats season since the Brady Era began in 2001. We shouldn’t penalize them for being so darned good that they created some of their own easy path. There’s an easy fix for this, though. We can swap out the Patriots’ Elo ratings for a generic rating of 1646, which represents the average for all conference title-game teams since 1990, and then recalculate the odds of reaching the Super Bowl against the opponents a team faced.

For our generic NFL “final four” team, that requires multiplying together a 77 percent chance against the Titans and a 71 percent chance against the Jaguars, which gives a 55 percent Super Bowl probability. In other words, that number represents the relative ease of any good team making it through the Pats’ specific path to the Super Bowl — and it’s the easiest of any championship-game entrant since 1990.

The Patriots’ Super Bowl cakewalk

The teams with the easiest roads to the Super Bowl, based on how their opponents would have fared against a generic conference finalist 1990-2017

Generic Team’s Chances Game No. 1 Game No. 2 Team Season Opponent Win % Opponent Win % Super Bowl % Made SB? 1 Patriots 2017 Titans 77.2% Jaguars 71.0% 54.8% ? 2 Eagles 2004 Vikings 75.6 Falcons 72.2 54.6 ✓ 3 Bears 2006 Seahawks 74.6 Saints 72.7 54.2 ✓ 4 Patriots 1996 Steelers 68.7 Jaguars 77.8 53.4 ✓ 5 Steelers 1995 Bills 74.2 Colts 69.9 51.9 ✓ 6 Packers 2007 Seahawks 68.6 Giants 67.7 46.5 7 Patriots 2011 Broncos 81.4 Ravens 57.0 46.4 ✓ 8 Bills 1993 Raiders 73.8 Chiefs 61.1 45.1 ✓ 9 Giants 2000 Eagles 67.2 Vikings 66.0 44.3 ✓ 10 Patriots 2016 Texans 76.2 Steelers 56.9 43.4 ✓ 11 Steelers 1994 Browns 65.0 Chargers 66.6 43.3 12 Jaguars 1999 Dolphins 74.1 Titans 58.3 43.2 13 Vikings 1998 Cardinals 80.2 Falcons 53.7 43.1 14 Bears 2010 Seahawks 84.3 Packers 50.8 42.8 15 Saints 2009 Cardinals 69.4 Vikings 60.9 42.3 ✓ 16 Eagles 2003 Packers 59.9 Panthers 69.8 41.8 17 Eagles 2002 Falcons 70.9 Buccaneers 57.9 41.0 18 Seahawks 2014 Panthers 70.5 Packers 57.5 40.5 ✓ 19 Redskins 1991 Falcons 67.7 Lions 59.6 40.4 ✓ 20 Patriots 2012 Texans 64.7 Ravens 61.4 39.7 21 Bills 1990 Dolphins 64.4 Raiders 61.6 39.7 ✓ 22 Steelers 2001 Ravens 61.9 Patriots 63.8 39.5 23 Bills 1991 Chiefs 62.4 Broncos 63.3 39.5 ✓ 24 Cowboys 1995 Eagles 70.6 Packers 54.6 38.5 ✓ 25 Dolphins 1992 Chargers 62.6 Bills 61.3 38.4

The generic team has an Elo rating of 1646, which is used to generate probabilities against each opponent.

Source: Pro-Football-Reference.com

Note that the Pats’ situation this year — with several upsets leading to easier-than-expected playoff matchups — is a pretty common thread across all of these smooth-sailing runs from the past. Being lucky enough to face a low-seeded opponent in one or both conference playoff games is a major advantage, and it’s no coincidence that eight of the nine teams below New England on the list above went on to represent their conference in the Super Bowl.

In these topsy-turvy AFC playoffs, that’s not exactly guaranteed for the Pats, despite their seemingly straightforward path to Minneapolis. Jacksonville was one of the most inconsistent teams in football this season, so it’s difficult to predict which version of the Jags will show up Sunday. If it’s the one that torched the Steelers for 45 points last weekend, New England’s relatively unimpressive defense could be in real trouble.

But the odds are that Brady, Belichick and company will punch that return ticket to the Super Bowl. And if they do, they can be thankful that one of the softest playoff red carpets ever was rolled out in front of them.

from News About Sports https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-patriots-super-bowl-path-is-the-easiest-in-modern-nfl-history/

[mvalleefootball-blog]

Pat Keep Rolling, Crush Raiders

By Michael Vallee

It’s amazing how fast perceptions can change over the course of an NFL season.  Through four weeks the Patriots record was an unimpressive 2-2 and the only thing preventing them from being 1-3 was a dropped late-game interception by the Houston Texans.  New England had the worst defense in the NFL and looming on their schedule was a potentially brutal two-game road swing against the Denver Broncos and Oakland Raiders.  So much for that perception.  On Sunday the Patriots pounded the Raiders like they were a Mexican pinata stuffed with Super Bowl rings, coasting to a 33-8 win.  This completed the Patriots two-week-high-altitude road trip where they glided thru the thin air of Denver and Mexico City with the ease of a 62-yard stephen Gostkowski field goal, outscoring their opponents 74-24.

Of course, as has been the recent trend, Patriot greatness was only half of the equation.  The Raiders committed eight penalties, had two turnovers and in general performed with an almost staggering level of bumbling incompetence.  What the hell happened to that team?  I know Jack Del Rio isn’t going to be mistaken for Vince Lombardi any time soon but his teams are generally, at least, competitive and display a modicum of preparation.  What did Oakland do all week to prepare for their Mexico trip, take lessons on burrito making and listen to Rosetta Stone?  This is a team that was 12-4 last year and was on the short list of AFC teams that might actually make the Patriots sweat a little.  Instead they join the long list of Houstons, Denvers, Chargers and Chiefs that can’t get out of their own way and will be lucky to finish the year at .500.  

And if you think the AFC Conference is bad, how about the AFC East.  I hope you don’t watch the Patriots for entertainment purposes, if so, you might want to shut it down until the playoffs.  The Patriots have exactly one interesting game remaining, Pittsburgh week 15, otherwise it’s five games against their laugh-out-loud awful divisional opponents.  The Bills have lost three straight, the Dolphins have lost four straight and the Jets are 1-4 in their last five.  Boston’s subway system the morning of a blizzard runs with more precision than this collection of stiffs.  As long as Brady is the Patriots quarterback and Belichick is the Patriots coach the league should mandate that all of their AFC East opponents change their team logo to a white flag.

The Patriots are 8-2.  They are a virtual lock to win 13 or 14 games.  They are going to have a first round bye.  They are going to crush a lousy team with a lousy quarterback in the divisional round of the playoffs.  The only pressing question left from now until the AFC Championship is whether or not that game will be played in Foxboro or Pittsburgh.  So much for the unpredictability of sports.

Notes

Inside the Numbers:

-In Brady’s two games on the high altitude swing through Denver and Mexico City he was a combined 55 for 71, for 605 yards and 6 touchdowns.  His QB rating was 130.3.

-In Brady’s last 22 regular season games he has thrown 50 touchdowns and 4 interceptions.

-When Brady has faced a team with Jack Del Rio as either the head coach or defensive coordinator, including the playoffs, he has thrown 25 touchdowns and one interception.  Hey Jack, whatever you’re doing, it’s not working.

-On Sunday Belichick recorded win number 271 as a head coach, passing Landry for third place on the all-time list.  He is still a staggering 76 wins shy of Don Shula for the top spot.

-The Patriots have won 13 straight road games.  It is the 2nd longest streak in NFL history.  The 1988-90 Niners are the current record holders with 18.

TB12 Method:  In his constant battle to kick father time’s ass Brady was spectacular Sunday, completing over 80% of his passes for a 131.9 quarterback rating.  Is it possible at age 40 that Brady is actually getting better?  He is the current favorite to win the NFL MVP award; he continues to move in the pocket as well as he ever has; and he might be throwing the ball downfield with more precision than at any point in his career.  Brady completed two perfect bombs to Brandin Cooks against Oakland, including a 64-yard touchdown that effectively iced the game in the first minute of the 2nd half.  Brady currently leads the NFL with 43 passes over 15 yards.  If they’re smart every quarterback in the NFL has ‘The TB12 Method’ on their Christmas list.

Center of Attention:  One of the most impressive things about Sunday’s win over Oakland was that the Patriots were without starting center, David Andrews.  Andrews is having a Pro Bowl caliber year and was replaced by a guy, Ted Karras, with virtually no game experience, and the Patriots offense didn’t miss a beat.  15 years ago the Raiders organization learned the hard way of the potential impact of losing a quality center, when their Pro Bowl center, Barret Robbins, went missing before Super Bowl XXXVII.  Robbins never played in the game and their offense imploded in a 48-21 loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.  

Strange side note: We later learned from Robbins’ ex-wife the bizarre details of his pre-Super Bowl disappearance.  The episode was apparently triggered by Robbins not taking his depression medication, and it must have been some strong medication because he spent the day before the big game partying in Tijuana, Mexico where he thought he was celebrating the Raiders “victory” in the Super Bowl that had not yet been played.

Bowl Cut:  They should add a Mark Davis cam to every Raiders broadcast.

Into Thin Air:  This game might have been won before the ball was ever kicked off.  The Patriots not only played Denver in the thin air of mile high last week but Belichick wisely kept the team in the high altitude of Colorado, holding practices at the Air Force Academy.  By the time the Patriots reached Mexico City, which is 2,000 feet higher than mile high, they were fully acclimated to the conditions.  The Raiders, on the other hand, rolled into town the day before the game and looked completely gassed right out of the chute.  The Raiders used the same approach last year when they beat the Houston Texans in Mexico City so they went with it again.  Makes perfect sense to think that something that would work against the Texans would also work against the Patriots.

A Week in the Life of:  Marshawn Lynch recently had a rather unusual week as far as NFL running backs go.  He was tossed from a game for contacting an official, spent the rest of the game watching from the stands, then after the game took the train home, was eventually suspended for one game and during his suspension practiced with his old high school, causing them to be investigated for violating local high school bylaws.

Sensitivity Training:  Belichick reportedly ruffled a few feathers when he said this about the game in Mexico City on WEEI Monday,  “I think we’re fortunate there was no volcano eruptions, earthquakes or anything else…”  A bunch of overly sensitive types freaked out on Twitter including one guy who countered that Mexicans should be happy when they visit America and are not killed in a mass shooting.  Now that is a perfectly valid point considering that Mexico is a completely non-violent and safe country.  I read recently that drug cartels in Juarez just instituted a new policy of meting out discipline with hugs and kindness.

He Said What Now?:  Don’t expect Jerry Jones to be invited to Thanksgiving dinner at the Kraft’s this year.  ESPN’s ‘Outside the Lines’ recently reported that Roger Goodell called Jerry Jones in August to inform him of Ezekiel Elliott’s six-game suspension and Jones responded with this poetic gem, “I’m gonna come after you with everything I have.  If you think Bob Kraft came after you hard, Bob Kraft is a pussy compared to what I’m going to do.”  While Patriots fans have likely used similar language to describe their beloved owner’s response to Deflategate, Jones is shameless hypocrite.  Not long ago he was telling Kraft to stand down and accept his Deflategate punishment but when it’s Jones’ team that is being adversely affected suddenly he is singing a different tune.  As far as picking sides in the Jones v. Goodell feud that would be like asking a woman who she’d rather date, Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein.  Sophie had an easier choice.

Gridiron Death Star:  Mark Davis might be a clown but is he also about to become the first owner of an NFL team in Las Vegas, where the Raiders are building one helluva a badass looking stadium.  The only thing missing from this virtual tour video is a Darth Vader voice over declaring, “The battle station is almost fully operational.”

For The Record:  Gostkowski’s high-altitude-aided 62-yard field goal at the end of the first half got me thinking, who is the true record holder of the longest field goal in NFL history.  This title comes with two stipulations:

-The kick cannot be assisted by thin air (sorry Denver)

-The kicker has to have a human foot.  As impressive as Tom Dempsey’s then record 63-yard kick was, I am looking for a field goal that was made by someone that doesn’t have a shoe shine box attached to their leg.

True Record Holder:  David Akers, San Francisco 49ers

Akers kicked a 63-yard field goal in 2012 at Lambeau field which means it was both outdoors and on grass.  Impressive.

Terry Glenn, 1974-2017:  Tough news hearing about the sudden death of Terry Glenn from an automobile accident.  Apparently Glenn had an infamous reputation as a driver, a sentiment echoed on Twitter by WEEI’s Gerry Callahan, “I spent a day with Terry Glenn once upon a time. Nice enough guy, but I remember one thing above all others: He drove like a maniac”.  People might not remember that Glenn caught Brady’s first touchdown pass and it came during Brady’s breakout came as a pro.  After two unspectacular starts Brady lit it up in his third start, a 29-26 win over the San Diego Chargers, throwing for 364 yards and two touchdowns.  More significantly Glenn was at the heart of the infamous power struggle between owner Bob Kraft and then coach Bill Parcells.  It was just before the 1996 draft and the Patriots held the seventh spot in the first round.  Kraft and Director of Player Personnel, Bobby Grier, wanted a lightning fast wide receiver out of Ohio State and Parcells reportedly wanted to take a defensive lineman.  Kraft would eventually side with Grier and the Patriots drafted Terry Glenn.  

This move was the beginning of the end for Parcells’ time in New England.  After the season Parcells was hired to run the NY Jets and Grier was promoted to general manager.  Glenn had a highly productive rookie year, hauling in 90 catches for over 1,100 yards, but a disappointing career plagued by injuries and attitude problems.  If, however, you believe in the butterfly effect, Glenn proved to be the catalyst for Bill Belichick ultimately landing with the Patriots and taking them on this historic run.  His Patriots career may have been disappointing but his impact is still being felt.  Glenn was 43-years old.

[junker-town]

4 questions that will define a Chiefs-49ers Super Bowl 54

Photo by Tom Pennington/Getty Images

Can the Chiefs protect Patrick Mahomes? Will the 49ers finally have to throw the ball?

One of the premier football teams of the 1960s will take on one of the best teams of the 1980s in the first Super Bowl of the 2020s.

Welcome to Super Bowl 54 between the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers.

The Chiefs and 49ers each gave their home crowds a parting gift with double-digit victories in their respective conference championship games. Kansas City rode another big comeback from Patrick Mahomes, who erased an early 17-7 deficit to stop the Titans’ Cinderella run dead in its tracks. San Francisco only needed to throw the ball eight times to beat the Packers because Raheem Mostert decided to do everything himself. His 220 rushing yards were the second-most in NFL playoff history.

Those wins were emphatic reminders these two teams were the best each conference had to offer. Still, squaring two dominant teams against each other will only raise more questions in the two weeks leading up to the Super Bowl. Here’s what sticks out the most in the aftermath of Sunday’s conference championships.

1. Patrick Mahomes’ first Super Bowl will come against the NFC’s top defense

Mahomes dispatched the Texans and Titans with relative ease. In two postseason games, he’s thrown for 615 yards and eight touchdowns — all while erasing two different double-digit deficits. These are very Patrick Mahomes numbers, but they came against two teams that ranked 21st (Tennessee) and 27th (Houston) in Football Outsiders’ passing defense efficiency metric (DVOA).

At Super Bowl 54, he’ll stare down a defense that ranked second in that same metric. The Niners’ defense limited the Packers and two-time MVP Aaron Rodgers early in a scoreless first half before eventually cracking under the pressure of Green Bay’s pass-heavy comeback effort in a 37-20 win.

Davante Adams played Green Bay’s hero with an eight-catch, 160-yard, two-touchdown performance in a Divisional Round win over the Seahawks. All-Pro cornerback Richard Sherman was hot and cold on him in coverage Sunday night, sticking to him early in coverage but ultimately getting roasted on a 65-yard deep ball in the fourth quarter.

.@AaronRodgers12 goes DEEP!@Tae15Adams on the other end for 65 yards! #GoPackGo #NFLPlayoffs : #GBvsSF on FOX : NFL app // Yahoo Sports app Watch free on mobile: https://t.co/jti8uZSrIn pic.twitter.com/hVNbD2mzzG

— NFL (@NFL) January 20, 2020

Adams finished his day with nine catches (on 10 targets) for 138 yards, though not all those catches came with Sherman acting as his shadow. What can Tyreek Hill do in a similar situation in the Super Bowl? How about Travis Kelce?

2. Can the Chiefs’ offensive line keep Mahomes comfortable?

Kansas City’s offensive line ranked just 14th in the league in pass block win rate this season, per ESPN’s advanced stats. That typically didn’t matter thanks to Mahomes’ ability to improvise both in and out of the pocket. He’s always been a wizard when it comes to buying time in the pocket, typically leading to big gains to streaking targets downfield or, as we saw Sunday, seemingly effortless jaunts to the end zone.

Big-time players make big-time plays in big-time games pic.twitter.com/ZC8Ts5dHqK

— Kansas City Chiefs (@Chiefs) January 19, 2020

Mahomes’ ability to move has made him the Chiefs’ leading rusher this postseason, but he’s going to be chased by a higher-caliber pass rush in Super Bowl 54. The Niners ranked second in the league in sack rate last season by dragging down opposing QBs on nearly nine percent of their dropbacks. Four different players — Arik Armstead, Nick Bosa, Dee Ford, and DeForest Buckner — had at least 6.5 sacks in the regular season.

Mahomes’ magic is a function of the time he creates for his targets to find room downfield. San Francisco has the chops to cut down those scrambles and keep the Chiefs from burning them with a lineup of off-script improvisations that turn into massive gains.

3. Can Raheem Mostert do what Derrick Henry couldn’t?

A big part of San Francisco’s success this postseason has been a willingness to completely shut down its passing game in favor of a steady diet of runs. In the Divisional Round, head coach Kyle Shanahan dialed up 12 straight running plays to grind the Vikings into dust. He went back for more against the Packers, turning a short field into a 37-yard touchdown drive without a single Jimmy Garoppolo dropback in second quarter. In all, Shanahan called up 32 more runs than passes (40 to eight) in a blowout win over Green Bay.

The star of that show was Mostert, who set an NFL record by being the first player in league history to have 150+ rushing yards and three touchdowns in the first half of any playoff game. He may have to be ready for another big turn in Miami, as Tevin Coleman had to be carted off the field in the first quarter after suffering an arm injury. An extended absence from Coleman could hand the reins of the rushing offense to Mostert and Matt Breida, two complementary backs who’ve shined in stretches.

They’ll have to take on a Chiefs defense that held NFL rushing leader Derrick Henry to his least efficient outing (3.7 yards per carry) since Week 7. Kansas City limited the Titans’ star tailback by stacking its defense up at the line of scrimmage and trusting its defensive backs in man coverage with a lone deep safety behind them. Doing so again could keep Mostert from sustaining this breakout — but it could also leave massive gaps for Jimmy Garoppolo to exploit.

4. What will Jimmy Garoppolo bring to the table?

Garoppolo’s had a pretty easy postseason so far. He’s been fortunate enough to largely step back and let a smothering defense and clock-churning rushing game carry his team to the Super Bowl. After throwing the ball a shade under 30 times per game in the regular season, he’s thrown 27 total passes in two playoff wins for the Niners. He’s been mostly fine in those situations — 17 of 27, one touchdown, one interception, 208 yards — but those are numbers befitting a 1970s quarterback rather than one taking the field in 2020.

Garoppolo learned the NFL quarterbacking game under Tom Brady, who could typically turn to cheat code tight end Rob Gronkowski when he needed a clutch play. The young veteran will have his own game-breaker in at tight end George Kittle. Kittle was the Niners’ security blanket in third-down situations late, and while he’s had only four receptions in the playoffs he remains an oft-unstoppable monster once he gathers some momentum downfield.

Emmanuel Sanders adds a pair of reliable hands in the middle of the field. Deebo Samuel has proven to be a versatile playmaker Shanahan can deploy from anywhere in his lineup. Garoppolo won’t be hurting for weapons, especially if Mostert can loosen up that Kansas City secondary with some big runs.

It’s still fair to wonder how Garoppolo will react if asked to dial his passing back to regular season levels. The former Patriot had some turnover issues where dropping linebackers sloughed into his blind spot downfield, creating interception opportunities. It could only take one of those mistakes to derail the Niners’ Super Bowl bid.

There’s still plenty of time for each team to address these issues. The Chiefs will have two weeks to prepare for the San Francisco pass rush. Garoppolo will have 14 days to digest film and figure out which Kansas City weak spots he can exploit.

But in the afterglow of two conference championship wins, these are the questions that may define who hoists the Lombardi Trophy on Feb. 2, and who trudges through a confetti shower and into a sad locker room.

[kansascityhappenings]

Chiefs rally from 24-0 hole to beat Texans 51-31 in playoffs

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs are back in the AFC championship game.

How they returned to the brink of their first Super Bowl appearance in 50 years was unlike anything anybody could have imagined.

After digging a 24-0 hole against Houston early in the second quarter Sunday, Mahomes and the rest of the high-flying Chiefs embarked on the biggest comeback in franchise history. Their young superstar proceeded to throw for 321 yards and five touchdowns, Travis Kelce and Damien Williams reached the end zone three times apiece, and Kansas City reeled off 41 consecutive points in a 51-31 victory over the Texans in the divisional round of the playoffs.

The Chiefs are the first team in NFL history to win a playoff game by at least 20 points after trailing in that game by at least 20 points. And Mahomes is the first player in NFL history with at least 300 passing yards, at least five TD passes and at least 50 rushing yards in a playoff game.

“Yeah, I mean, obviously we didn’t start the way we wanted to, but all we were preaching — offense, defense and special teams — is let’s do something special,” Mahomes said. “Everybody’s already counting us out, let’s keep fighting and just go one play at a time, and we found a way. Obviously, this is a huge win and now we’ve got the AFC championship game at home.”

The Chiefs (13-4), who lost to the Patriots in overtime in last year’s conference title game, will play Tennessee next Sunday for a spot in Miami. The Titans stunned Lamar Jackson and the top-seeded Baltimore Ravens on Saturday night.

“We’ve already played them and we know they’re a tough team,” Mahomes said of the Titans, who beat Chiefs in November. “They’re a team that battles all the way until the end. They’re a team that’s really hot, playing really good football right now, so we know it’s going to take our best effort. And, whatever way, we’ve got to find a way to win. That’s the biggest thing you saw here today was we’ve just got to find a way no matter what.”

Kelce finished with 10 catches for 134 yards, Williams ran for two scores while catching a TD pass, helping the Chiefs win their seventh consecutive game and reach back-to-back AFC title games for the first time.

Watson, meanwhile, threw for 388 yards and two touchdowns while running for another, but not even his heroics could bail out the Texans (11-7) after they were outscored 28-0 in the second quarter. They continued to allow Kansas City to pull away during a dismal third, their epic collapse leaving the reborn Houston franchise 0-4 in the divisional round.

The Chiefs certainly gave them the perfect opportunity to finally break that streak in the first quarter.

On defense, Kansas City blew overage on Kenny Stills on the opening possession, allowing him to walk into the end zone from 54 yards. On offense, they wasted timeouts, dropped a series of easy passes and managed just 46 yards. And on special teams, the Chiefs had a punt blocked for a score and fumbled a return that set up another touchdown.

Indeed, the Texans were humming right along after finishing on a 22-3 run to beat Buffalo last week, while the mountain of miscues made by the Chiefs made them only the fourth home playoff team to trail 21-0 after the first quarter.

Then it was the Texans’ turn to struggle.

They had stretched the lead to 24-0 before the Chiefs, whose largest deficit overcome had been 21 points, put together a comeback for the ages. Mahomes hit Williams with a quick touchdown toss to begin it, then Houston curiously faked a punt at its own 31-yard line and was stuffed, giving the Chiefs a short field and another easy touchdown.

On the ensuing kickoff, Texans return man DeAndre Carter had the ball pop loose and into the arms of Darwin Thompson, whose return set up a second Mahomes-to-Kelce touchdown in a matter of seconds. And a third came after the Chiefs forced a punt — a successful one, for a change — and they drove 90 yards to take a stunning 28-24 halftime lead.

“I mean, it was amazing,” Mahomes said of Kelce. “The first thing I said to him when I saw him there at the end, I was like, ‘Man, I mean, you’re a monster, man. You are.’ I mean, the way he was fighting through injury and still making plays all day long.”

The comeback became a clobbering by the time the third quarter ended.

The Chiefs’ breezed downfield to start the second half, and Williams finished the drive with his first TD run. Their overhauled defense under coordinator Steve Spagnuolo sacked Watson on fourth down to get the ball right back, and Mahomes and Co. required just six more plays to position Williams for another TD run and a 41-24 lead.

It was the most unanswered points in a playoff game since the Jets had 41 against the Colts in the 2002 wild-card round.

Even when the Texans finally cracked the scoreboard, when Watson scrambled to his left and dived over the pylon, the Chiefs rendered the touchdown moot. In four plays they went 72 yards to set up the fifth TD pass by Mahomes, the strike to little-used tight end Blake Bell giving coach Andy Reid’s team a postseason-record seven straight TD drives.

It also gave a festive crowd that turned out early in freezing weather and a slight drizzle a chance to celebrate early.

INJURIES

Houston played without S Jahleel Addae (hamstring) and TE Jordan Akins (hamstring). They also lost RT Chris Clark to a knee injury early in the game, and backup Roderick Johnson struggled against the Chiefs pass rush the rest of the game.

Kansas City sat defensive tackle Chris Jones, who strained his calf muscle late in the week and couldn’t make it through pregame warm-ups. WR Tyreek Hill left briefly after a hard hit but eventually returned to the game.

UP NEXT

The Texans will spend the offseason wondering how they let a 24-0 lead slip away, and the Chiefs will begin preparing for the Titans in the AFC title game. Kansas City lost lost 35-32 at Tennessee in Week 10, when Derrick Henry ran for 188 yards and two touchdowns against them. It was the most recent time the Chiefs lost a game.

from FOX 4 Kansas City WDAF-TV | News, Weather, Sports https://fox4kc.com/2020/01/12/chiefs-rally-from-24-0-hole-to-beat-texans-51-31-in-playoffs/

from Kansas City Happenings https://kansascityhappenings.wordpress.com/2020/01/13/chiefs-rally-from-24-0-hole-to-beat-texans-51-31-in-playoffs/