The NFL, hoping to wring out some drop of drama from its final slate of games, scheduled every Week 17 contest for some time on Sunday. This meant no dreadful J.V. game on Thursday night. This meant no pitifully small sampling of late Sunday afternoon games — after 10 games in the first wave, we got five more in the late afternoon before the Vikings and Packers battled for the NFC North crown in primetime. Everything about this approach screamed surefire drama and ratings gold.
And yet! There was relatively little to actually be decided. Outside from the Jets and Steelers battling for the sixth seed in the AFC, as well as a couple of seeding determinations, the field was set. (A nine-game parlay gave the Colts’ a 0.1 percent chance of winning the AFC South title over Houston, but alas, it topped out at 5-4. Congrats, Houston!) Hell, coaches aren’t even supposed to get fired until the morning of Black Monday, and one big fish has already been thrown back into the pond. And Sunday night, the Niners sent Jim Tomsula packing. Several more will come Monday, only now that this dreadful regular season is over.
This doesn’t mean we don’t have a whole lot to look forward to come January 9 and the start of the Wild Card round. Very competitive second-tier teams like Kansas City, Green Bay, Minnesota, and Seattle are sure to give us at least one classic game somewhere along the line. Washington won the NFC East, so they’re back in the playoffs, which is definitely not a thing people thought we’d see back in September, so that’s good and cool. Houston played like dumpster dregs through Week 5 of this season and then remembered they had a halfway-competent quarterback and the best defensive player on the planet, so now the Texans are AFC South champs. What a time to be alive.
And awaiting half of them in the Divisional round will be No. 2 seed New England, which has looked lethal at times, but has a tendency to do the dumb thing when it’s most inopportune. No. 1 seed Denver is still kind of an open mystery, and question the Al Jazeera report on Peyton Manning all you want, but it’s definitely a distraction in some regard and distractions are usually Bad News for teams this time of year.
Cincinnati, which fell to the No. 3 seed, yet tied its best record ever at 12-4, is totally reliant (at least for now) on A.J. McCarron, who had injured his non-throwing wrist on the walkoff fumble last Monday night against Denver, but played well enough yesterday against a bad Ravens team. Andy Dalton may only be able to return should the Bengals advance to the conference title game or thereabouts. But it’s vital that McCarron stay healthy because his backup is [scans Cincinnati’s roster] Keith Wenning, a very real person who has never played a snap in the NFL.
In the NFC, Carolina and Arizona have been the clear and present dangers to all other conference foes this season. The Panthers finally clinched home-field advantage by handling Tampa Bay, while the Cardinals were smoked by a motivated Seahawks squad. These top two teams are so evenly matched and playing at such a high caliber, that any final NFC matchup that doesn’t encompass this exact pairing would be a colossal disappointment to the general football fan with no rooting interest. Seattle, which gave up the fewest points of any team for the fourth-straight season, has a decent-enough chance to break up this destined date, and I wouldn’t get mad online if the Seahawks somehow made their way back to the Super Bowl, but Panthers-Cardinals is what America needs.
Maybe America even deserves the best possible matchups, too. We’ve endured this season of bad officiating, bad overall play (two of eight division winners barely cracked .500), bad news about some of our favorite athletes, and all this after a really bad offseason. We need something good to cheer for, and these playoffs represent an opportunity to start fresh for that Good Thing that has eluded us.
All we needed to do was get through one last Sunday. We did it. Now don’t ever look back.
