Peculiar playoff pairings on tap
For the four teams playing host to NFL playoff games this weekend, this season has been one for the record books.
The San Diego Chargers are the first team to overcome a three-game division deficit in the last three weeks of the regular season.
The Miami Dolphins are the first team to go from 1-15 to the playoffs in successive seasons.
The Arizona Cardinals have a home playoff game for the first time in 61 years, since they were the Chicago Cardinals.
And the Minnesota Vikings have won the NFC North for the first time, their last division title coming in 2000 when they played in the old NFC Central.
But here’s the wild part of the wild-card round: All four home teams are underdogs.
That peculiar twist is more evidence that the NFL needs to take another look at the way it is seeding teams for the playoffs. At the Super Bowl in February, Commissioner Roger Goodell said the league would look into tweaking the system to create incentive for teams to play hard all the way through their schedule.
If there’s any team that can attest to the importance of that, it’s the Chargers, the first 8-8 team to win its division since the Cleveland Browns in 1985.
“Not ideal, but we’ll take it,” Chargers running back LaDainian Tomlinson said of his team’s unlikely path to the playoffs. “It’s a pretty strange season, ain’t it?”
The Chargers, who will play Indianapolis on Saturday, suddenly look explosive again, the kind of scoring machine whose offense can make up for its defensive shortcomings.
But it’s difficult to truly judge how good the Chargers are. They did win their final four games -- against Oakland, Kansas City, Tampa Bay and Denver -- but there wasn’t a powerhouse opponent in the bunch. The signature victory of their run was the road win over the Buccaneers, yet that team lost a do-or-die finale to the Raiders in Tampa.
In their thrashing of Denver, the Chargers looked like the type of team that could reach the Super Bowl. Their test will be to keep it rolling against Peyton Manning and a Colts team that, without the services of star safety Bob Sanders, won at San Diego five weeks ago.
Whereas the Chargers are on a dramatic uptick, Arizona lost four of its last six games. The Cardinals, who play host to Atlanta, have a most-valuable-player candidate in quarterback Kurt Warner but the league’s worst running game and a very shaky defense.
Arizona hasn’t beaten a team with a winning record since knocking off Dallas in Week 6. Since, the Cardinals are 0-4 against winning teams.
Miami knows the benefits of playing losing teams. The Dolphins had a spectacular season, winning nine of their last 10 games. But they also had the AFC’s fourth-softest schedule, based on what their opponents did this season. According to STATS LLC, only Buffalo, Tennessee and Denver had it easier.
Teams can’t choose their schedules; they play who the league tells them to play. But it will be interesting to see how the Dolphins handle the challenge presented by Baltimore, a team that beat them by two touchdowns in Week 7.
The Vikings, who could look very good or very average depending on the Sunday, needed a last-second field goal to beat the backups of the New York Giants and clinch the division. Actually, because Chicago lost, Minnesota didn’t need to win its finale, but the psychological lift was essential.
“It wouldn’t have felt the same if we won the division by default,” guard Steve Hutchinson said.
The real challenge for the Vikings is only days away. They play host to Philadelphia, a team that -- like San Diego -- regrouped late in the season and beat long odds to make the playoffs.
“For people to just put us out for dead, road kill, for that door to just open up just one more time for us, you never want to give a team another opportunity, because when that team gets in, it could be that team that you talk about that you don’t want to play,” said Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb, whose team is a three-point favorite over the Vikings. “The way that we’re feeling in this locker room, we can be that team.”
We’ll find out soon enough.
And we’ll also discover whether this weekend’s host clubs are very good teams. Or just very good stories.
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