I’d love to tell you that there are spoilers below for the 2020 NFL playoffs, but I know it’s not true. It is incredibly difficult to predict what 13 NFL games will look like. Last season, three of the four favorite teams to win in the wild card round lost. The world was waiting for a Ravens-Chiefs battle in the AFC Championship Game, but Baltimore was easily defeated by Tennessee in the divisional round. If you had a perfect playoff bracket when the Chiefs defeated the 49ers in Miami, well, you deserved it.
This year, as my preview for the playoffs, I will draw the key to 13 games and predict the winners, even the Super Bowl LV. It will almost definitely be wrong and ruined when we finish the three opening games on Saturday, which is a good thing. Hopefully, there is a vision here that will give you what to look for before the games, regardless of how the results actually go.
Let’s start with NFC and the first 7-seed in playoff history:
Jump to a tiebreaker:
Wildcard weekend: NFC | AFC
Divisional round: NFC | AFC
Conference championships: NFC | AFC
Super Bowl LV
NFC wild-card weekend
The four-game stretch of Bears quarterback Mitchell Trubisky, who left NFL executives agitated in December, went against teams ranked 14th (Vikings), 29th (Texans), 31st (Jaguars) and 32nd (Lions) on the DVOA defensive. In the game against the Vikings, Trubisky had 15 of 21 passes for 202 yards with a touchdown and a pick. A late fumble by Trubisky cost Chicago the game against the Lions. The fourth-year passer started and ended his run with games against the Packers, a team with a competent pass defense that requires the other team to bid to stay in the game. Trubisky averaged 5.6 yards per attempt, threw three interceptions and got in the way three times in those two games.