Welcome to the NFL playoffs! If you're a lucky fan, congratulations. Your team has delivered on the preseason hype, survived the exhausting 16-game regular-season, and made it to January for postseason football. If you're a fan of the Patriots or Saints, you probably made reservations months ago. If you're backing the Colts or Ravens, well, you probably had to cancel some January vacation plans at the last moment. I suspect you're not upset.
The only bad thing about making the playoffs is that you're probably going to come up short of the Super Bowl. In real life, only one team can win the Lombardi trophy. Today, at least in print form, I'm going to change that. This year, my playoff preview is actually a series of recaps detailing how each of the 12 playoff contenders won Super Bowl LIII.
2018 NFL Playoffs Coverage
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These stories each take place in a multiverse, naturally, so what happens in the dimension of one story doesn't necessarily occur in (or might even be at odds with) another. The goal is to give each scenario a plausible path and see what that tells us about the real-life postseason to come. Is there a run of opponents that might play to one particular team's strength? Could an upset suddenly make one team's slate much easier? Is there a wildly entertaining matchup lurking as a possibility in later rounds? Playing with this format gives us a fun way to run through some interesting outcomes, one of which may actually resemble reality by the time the Super Bowl rolls around in Atlanta.
Unless specified, I'll be using DVOA to refer to a team's rankings. At the end of each section, I'll also try to find a Super Bowl winner (or loser) from the past with regular-season standardized score marks similar to the ones produced by each of our 12 playoff teams. You can read more about how standardized score works here. I'd also recommend checking out the wider range of comparables Jason Lisk built for the 12 playoff teams here. Jump to a team's story below:
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