NFC playoff picture: probably first-round opponents for the Detroit Lions
As of right now, the Detroit Lions are the second-best team in the NFC after beating the Minnesota Vikings and then losing to the Dallas Cowboys.
But what’s more important is that the Lions won the NFC North as well as will host the first playoff game to Ford Field’s history. They can finish no worse than third and still have a chance to be the top seed in the league.
For now, let’s look at the NFC postseason picture through Week 16. On Monday, three more games will be played.
Detroit will fall back to the third spot if the Philadelphia Eagles defeat the New York Giants on Monday.
For the first time since 1993, the Detroit Lions won their division on Sunday. After a thrilling game, Dan Campbell’s team won the NFC North by a score of 30–24 over the Minnesota Vikings.
If the Lions win their division, they will play no fewer than one playoff game at Ford Field. It is still possible for Detroit to get a bye and home-field advantage in the NFC playoffs.
If there was a tie, the 49ers would have the extra game, but if San Francisco lost an additional match and Detroit won all of their games, the Lions would get to play first. Watch out, because this is not likely to happen.
Plus, the Lions just won their very first division win in 30 years. It is possible for anything to happen.
The playoff picture changed a lot in Week 16. With three games left on Monday, let’s see how things stand.
The Detroit Lions and the San Francisco 49ers will both have 11-4 records with two games left if the Ravens beat the 49ers on Monday night. Still, Christmas Eve and indeed Christmas Eve Eve had a lot of action and a lot of playoff movement.
The NFL’s schedulers made sure that we had a lot of games to choose from on Christmas Day. The biggest game of Week 16—and maybe the whole season—was saved for Christmas night.
After opening gifts and eating, we can turn our attention to the game between the No. 1 teams, the Ravens of Baltimore and the San Francisco 49ers.
They showed us who the winners and losers were on Christmas Eve. The Ravens and 49ers are currently in first place, but it will be hard for them to stay that way all the way to Las Vegas.
Week 14 ended with two of the biggest wins of the season. With only four meetings left in the regular season, they also gave some teams new hope of making the playoffs.
The Giants (5-8) beat the Packers in the last second and are now only one game away from a wild card spot. Tennessee’s record-setting comeback win over Miami has kept their slim playoff hopes alive.
The Chicago Bears have been another team that has a chance to make the playoffs. Both the Bears and and the Giants thought that was impossible when they were 2–7.
There are 11 teams in the AFC that have good records. This is the most teams from a single conference this far into the season in 43 years.
Not only did those results affect those teams, but so did the rest of Week 14, which was very busy and made a previously interesting playoff race even more interesting.
While both the AFC (Ravens) and NFC (49ers, Cowboys, Eagles) have teams that stand out, there are also a lot of teams in each conference that are just on the edge of making the playoffs and could do so with a few good weeks.
Even with all the unknowns, these seed pairings are still not very likely. The NFC playoff field is likely to look like this 5% of the time, but it’s only likely to look like this 1% of the time for the AFC field.
We chose one of those to show how the rest of the season might go.However those are the exact events that are most likely to happen at each conference.
There were only two simulations whereby the most likely outcome for each conference happened.