Week 4 Playoff Picture Update: Commanders in Control?
7 min readAs we get further into the season, PlaySheet will spend more time talking about the nuts and bolts of the playoff races. We’re not even a quarter of the way into the season yet, and there are plenty of moving parts left to work with. No 3-0 team can feel confident they’re making the playoffs; no 0-3 team can feel like all hope has gone. Scenarios and what-ifs get inherently more interesting as the season progresses.
That being said, we are beginning to see a bit of separation, and that brings with it a couple milestones. We’re beginning to see who controls their own destiny for which seeds; which teams can win out and guarantee themselves a certain spot. We also, for the first time, have a team that could somehow win every single game left on the schedule and still find themselves on the outside looking in.
Home Field Advantage
After three weeks, we are down to four teams who control their own fate for the top seed in their respective conferences and the all-important bye week and home field advantage that bestows. Three of them will not surprise you:
- The 3-0 Miami Dolphins are the only undefeated team in the AFC, so they would be the only 17-0 team if they won out.
- The 3-0 San Francisco 49ers and 3-0 Philadelphia Eagles play each other in Week 13, a rematch of the NFC Championship that we really didn’t get to see last year. The winner of that game could therefore be the only 17-0 team, and would have control of the top seed if they won out.
But the fourth team? That’s a little more surprising. There are 14 teams sitting at 2-1, but only one of them controls their own fate for the top seed; everyone else would find themselves, at best, sorting through strength of victory tiebreakers even if they got to 16-1:
- The Steelers, Colts and Browns do not play the Dolphins, and therefore could not stop Miami from going 17-0 even if they won out.
- The Chiefs do not play the Steelers. So while Kansas City could go 16-1 with a perfect conference record, so could Pittsburgh. That two-way tie would have to be broken by strength of victory.
- Similarly, the Bills also don’t play the Steelers, but they’re in a worse boat thanks to that Week 1 loss to the Jets. The 16-1 Bills would have one conference loss; the 16-1 Steelers would have zero.
- The Ravens are in the same boat as the Bills, except replace “Steelers” with “Chiefs”.
- In the NFC, the Falcons, Packers, Lions and Saints play neither the 49ers nor the Eagles, so they can’t stop one or the other from getting to 17-0.
- The Buccaneers do play the 49ers, but they’ve already lost to the Eagles, blowing their chance to end Philadelphia’s perfect season.
- The Seahawks and Cowboys, as division rivals, do play both undefeated NFC teams. But, crucially, each already has one loss in the conference. And neither of them play Atlanta, Green Bay, New Orleans or Tampa Bay, all of whom could match them at 16-1 and 11-1 in conference. Seattle has the additional problem of Detroit being able to catch them, but Dallas at least could take care of the Lions themselves.
That leaves the Washington Commanders, the only other team in the NFC to be undefeated in conference play through three weeks. They play both Philadelphia and San Francisco, and can hand them head-to-head losses. And while they don’t play Green Bay, New Orleans, Tampa Bay or Detroit, all those teams already have conference losses. Washington would come out on top on the second tiebreaker against any or all of those opponents. That will likely end this week against the Eagles, but for now, the Commanders are in, er, Command.
Divisional Races
Because of the NFL’s unbalanced schedule, some teams haven’t even begun divisional play yet — the Chiefs, Titans, Cardinals, Eagles, Commanders, Buccaneers, Lions and Vikings are all sitting at 0-0 in the division, making calculating division tiebreakers oh-so-frustrating at this point. What that means is you have to be in pretty bad shape to not control your divisional fate after just three games. And yet, that’s the case for six teams:
- The Patriots would be 15-2 if they won out. But they only play the Dolphins one more time, so Miami could go 16-1.
- The Rams are in the same boat — a 15-2 Rams squad would not beat a 16-1 49ers team.
- The Bears are even worse. They would be at 14-3 if they won out, and the 15-2 Packers would be ahead of them.
- The Panthers join the Bears in futility — a 14-3 Carolina team could finish behind either 15-2 Atlanta or 15-2 New Orleans.
- The 15-2 Bengals would have a 4-2 divisional record. That wouldn’t work against the Ravens who could get to 15-2 themselves with just the one divisional loss, splitting the season series with Cincinnati.
- The 15-2 Giants would top a 15-2 Eagles squad thanks to a season sweep. But that Week 1 loss to Dallas could haunt them. The 15-2 Cowboys and 15-2 Giants would have split the season series and be tied in the division, common games and conference, leaving things to strength of victory to decide.
Playoff Berth
As of Week 3, 31 teams still control their own destiny for the playoffs. The one exception are the Carolina Panthers, the only team that sits with an 0-3 conference record. The other three 0-3 teams can’t get knocked out because a 10-2 conference record is still impervious at this point; there’s just no way to get enough teams to 15 wins or 14 and just two NFC losses to make it happen. Even knocking Carolina out takes some serious doing, but we can walk through the steps.
First, our 14-3 Panthers must lose the division. This can happen a number of ways — either Atlanta or New Orleans could win out to get to 15-2 and beating them straight up. That’s not strictly necessary; we have a game’s worth of wriggle room in the tiebreakers, but it turns out not to be necessary. I picked Atlanta for the linked example, but you can pull the same trick off with New Orleans.
Now, we need to find teams to reach at least 14-3 to get into tiebreakers with the Panthers in the wildcard. The Bears and Vikings are out; both are already 0-3 and have to lose to Carolina in this scenario. The Buccaneers are out, as they will have been swept by Carolina for their second and third loss of the season, meaning they couldn’t pass the Panthers even if we wanted them to. And because we sent Atlanta to 15-2, that knocks out the Saints who pick up their second, third and fourth losses to Carolina and Atlanta.
We would love to avoid teams Carolina beats head-to-head just to make breaking ties easier, but that’s not really realistic. Most notably, Carolina picks up head-to-head wins over Dallas, Detroit and Green Bay, leaving us with a couple things to take care of. We can scratch the Cowboys, funneling wins to the the Commanders and Eagles in the NFC East, but there’s no way to get around having either the Lions or Packers in the tiebreak. We can’t get them both past 14-3 because they play each other twice; give either team the 2-0 lead and the other one falls to four losses. We can’t use an NFC South team to provide a buffer, because the Saints/Falcons loser is not going to have enough wins to impact 14-3 Carolina. And we can’t get the 49ers, Seahawks and Rams high enough to take two of the wild card slots along with the Eagles/Commanders loser; there’s simply not enough wins to go around with the NFC West and NFC East playing each other this season.
What we need, then, is to invalidate Carolina’s head-to-head win over Detroit or Green Bay by adding a third, neutral team to the tiebreaker. Any of the five remaining NFC West or East teams would work for this; none of them play Carolina, after all! At that point, the head-to-head victory is overthrown due to a lack of a head-to-head sweep. The conference record will all be tied at 9-3, assuming you balance the wins and losses correctly. And there will not be enough common games between the teams to hit the minimum of four to be used as a tiebreaker. At that point, it comes down to strength of victory, and as long as the Packers/Lions loser is ahead of at least one of the remaining NFC West or East teams there, then they’ll clinch a playoff slot before their head-to-head loss can be used against them. From there, it’s just a matter of making sure Carolina’s strength of victory is in the basement, and voila — a 14-3 Panthers team sitting at home in January.
Unprecedented and frightfully unlikely, but technically possible. That’s the best you get after Week 3! It’s impressive enough that Carolina already needs help to make the postseason, as tiny as that necessary help would be.