Bell only got 3.1 ypc and Jags run def wasn't good which is much better with Dareus now. That game gonna be ugly.

Man even New England fans would probably do this. One rang for every team in the league is probably >EV for next 5 seasons.

I mean who wouldn't you make this for even one argument SF if you assume he's the next GOAT?

Brady's gonna be dead. Roeth keeps flirting with retiring. Every other team would snap take the rang right now. Hell half the teams fanbases would agree for locking him up for 10 seasons.

Unless Brady gets hit by a car the game is RM proof...Pats will prob win by 40.

Saints, Falcons, and lolstealers.

Tim Tebow's broncos, the 7-9 seahawks, Capone's post. Brock Osweiler started one. Didn't TJ Yates start one somewhere?

9-6-1 @ 9-7 was a NFC title game (Phi @ Ari), the other side had 6@2 (though that 6 went 11-5). 8-8 SD that year also made round 2. The pats missed at 11-5.

2004 season both NFC Wildcards were 8-8, they both won rd 1. For those of you complaining how bad the AFC looks this weekend, I'd be surprised if it topped that one. Rams were -73.

The Jets at 9-7 beat Peyton 41-0.

99 Arizona -53

Sure there's a total AIDS one somewhere back there but I dunno if I wanna look for it.

95 bears -30 @ 49ers +209. Bears did not cover the spread.

1989 the AFC only had one team over 9 wins. Good lord. (only 5 team playoff back then, so 2 NFC teams missed at 10-6, while the 2 seed in the AFC was the browns @ 9-6-1).

Any chance that Marty Oata's wife bumps into Bardy's wife prior to the game and tells her, "Well, MY husband CAN throw the ball and catch it too"?

Why would she emphasise 'can' in that sentence

When the Giants beat the Pats in their 2nd SB, Welker didn't quite get to a catchable pass that probably would have iced the game. Mrs. B made some snarky comment immediately after the game that her husband couldn't throw the ball and catch it too.

Feels like AND should be emphasized imo

The emphasis is correct. Read the Gisele quote again:

If you took the best players and coaches from the 4 AFC teams in the wild card round, could you build a team that would be favored @ NE?

Favored? You could build a team that would beat the Pats 19/20 times

I would agree. Only positions the Pats would have an edge at would be QB, TE and HC (+Slater+lolkicker). Defense would be completely in favor of the wild card allstars

If you took the best players and coaches from the three remaining teams that "all star" squad would look a lot like the Steelers + Jags secondary.

The question was about the wild card teams though.

LOL PFF and all but just for fun I took a look at the PFF grades for such a hypothetical matchup.

In 3 WR vs nickel formation, the grade averages for the regular season would be:

Patriots O 79
Patriots D 60.5 (their LBs all grade in the 40s as well as their nickel DB)

Wild Card All Stars O 82
Wild Card All Stars D 89.4

O is a little weak with the Chiefs stars Smiff at QB (87) + Hunt (89) and Kelce (87). The rest of the team is just solid with grades from 78 to 83.

D consists of a lot of Jaguars with the Jags secondary + the rookie CB White from the Bills and the Titans all-pro Byard at Safety...

So by that theory it wouldn't be very close...

Blake "120 million dollar man" Bortles.

Fat Rape def gonna be in a walking boot after getting concussed 4 or 5 times by the SCUMJAGS

#TEAMSCUMJAGS

Tomlin is beyond awful and I could easily see the lolstealers thread getting bumped this weekend.

I'm betting the pats -13.5 and staying away from the other three games.

I think it's actually close. PFF gradeout is an interesting way to do it, but you'd have to model individual player win shares. Instead, I roughed out a model with DVOA and Sagarin predictor. Neither of those are perfect, but I think they are good enough to get a ballpark estimate, and I can also easily get the data going back several years. I'd use Vegas power rankings in place of Sagarin if I had a good source for historical data.

I'm using DVOA to deconstruct down to the offense, defense, and special teams levels. The idea here is I'll pick the best units from the WC round and put it all back together. So I modeled the Sagarin predictor based on those components, chose the best WC units (KC O, JAX D, KC ST), and then produced a predicted Sagarin predictor (!).

One convenient thing about DVOA and Sagarin is that they work really well in a stock OLS regression model. The relationships are linear, the error terms aren't correlated with the predictors, there are no interactions or quadratics, etc. The model fit is really good, so I just have a simple model specification here and will use the parameter estimates to reassemble a Sagarin predictor for the fake team.




Don't forget the 2.44 points (Sagarin) to NE for home field advantage:



I get NE favored by less than a point by Sagarin predictor. Now we can start subbing in player upgrades to our KC-JAX squad and argue how many additional points they are worth, which will obviously be > 0, but not obviously worth more than a few points. At least not obvious to me, anyway.

Betting Falcons, not touching the rest

Don't forget all-pro Micah Hyde!

Pit -7.5 feels like 2.5 points too high.

Thinking of buying AFC or NFC championship tickets. Do you think prices on StubHub right now are inflated or a better price than once the team is confirmed? Obviously would get a refund if they don't make it.

In my lone experience buying playoff tickets the price increased once a good match up was confirmed.

AFC favorites cover
NFC dogs cover

Uh, so essentially my WC round picks