Benjamin Hoffman of The New York Times has done well with his playoff picks. If you don't count the spread but just the straight-up picks, Hoffman is 6-2: 3-1 for the wild card round; 3-1 for the divisional round.
At 2-6, I am the opposite of Hoffman. I've been making these NFL playoff picks since 2013. Without doing an audit of my performance, I'd have to say this is my worse outing to date (though I think there was one year that I was equally bad during the wild card and divisional rounds before hitting the remaining championship and Super Bowl picks, ending up close to .500).
Usually I hover around .500. Maybe there was one year that I performed in Hoffman's range, hitting three out of four picks. But mostly I'm in coin toss territory. Not what I imagined in my 20s when I daydreamed about moving to the desert and supporting myself by picking winners at the Vegas sports books. In that dream I lived alone, as I do now, and drove a pickup truck on sun-drenched dusty roads, which I do not.
In thinking about what has gone wrong for me so far the one big mistake I have made is not factoring in what a huge advantage it is to be the number one or two seed and get a bye for the wild card round. Almost every year three out of the four teams competing in the conference championship games are one or two seeds. This year all the teams are one and two seeds, as it was for the 2015 season. The last time a wild card team won a Super Bowl was Green Bay during the 2010 season, almost ten years ago, after it being a regular occurrence during the aughts.
Something has changed, and I don't think it's an erosion in conditioning. Richard Sherman has repeatedly complained about Thursday games and the stress it places on the players. His season-ending Achilles tear last year on a Thursday night in Phoenix proved his point.
My feeling is that the speed and athleticism of the National Football League has increased. It's a difficult thing to maintain peak performance over a 17-game regular season schedule. When you factor in winter travel during the playoffs, no wonder teams that get a week off to play at home have a huge advantage.
With this in mind the lopsided games of the divisional round make sense. The only game that was truly competitive was the Philadelphia-New Orleans match-up, and I would argue that Alshon Jeffery's game-losing flub of a Nick Fole's pass was due to the fact that Jeffery was flat-out gassed. All the rested home teams displayed much more juice than their visiting opponents from the wild card round.
I'm going with the home teams for the championship round. The home teams are both favored, but Hoffman, while picking the Chiefs at home, is taking the Rams in the Superdome over the Saints. I don't see Los Angeles running the ball against New Orleans like they did against Dallas. Though, to be fair, I didn't foresee C.J. Anderson having such a huge day against the Cowboys. Nonetheless, Drew Brees's quick-release passing to Alvin Kamara out of the backfield and Michael Thomas over the middle is going to shred the Rams defense. Take the Saints.
The second of Sunday's game is the tougher one to call. Patrick Mahomes had the yipes when he played in Foxborough earlier in the year. If he had not made mistakes in the first half of that game the Chiefs would have won.
Brady has seemed uncharacteristically disinterested this season. You can see him dreaming about life after football as he sits on the bench. New England is not a particularly good road team. Regular season losses to Detroit and Jacksonville prove the point. The one hope for the Patriots -- and it's a possibility -- is that they can control the ball on offense and wear down the Kansas City defense. Temperatures are said to be in the 20s.
Andy Reid and Patrick Mahomes will get it done in Arrowhead. Kansas City running back Damien Williams is playing incredibly well. Take the Chiefs.
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