Week 7 Playoff Picture Update: Hope for the Patriots and Other Zombie Teams

It’s October, so bolt your doors and turn out the lights. The dead walk among us.

There are six teams with fewer than two wins at the moment; all of which have lower than 2% playoff odds per FTN. Fitting for October, these are your Walking Dead – teams that may shuffle along, giving the false image of life, but whose playoff chances flatlined long ago. They shuffle their way through the season, watching as fast teams run around them, only occasionally reaching up and snagging the ankle of one of those popular, successful teams who believe they’re invincible. Speedbumps to some; season-ending embarrassment to others, they clutter up the schedule and the 1 PM window, mere shells of their preseason selves.

Occasionally, one of these dead teams rise up and become something even more dangerous – the Zombie Team. While it’s rare for a team this bad to salvage their season, we have seen three 1-5 teams make the playoffs in the past decade. The 2020 Football Team fell all the way to 2-7 before rebounding to win a truly dreadful NFC East. The 2018 Colts found a defense to go with their offense, going 9-1 the rest of the way to finish a half-game ahead of the Steelers in the wild card race, and actually won their first game before being destroyed in the divisional round. And the 2015 Chiefs ran the table after their 1-5 start, earning the fifth seed and not stopping until they crashed into Tom Brady, as was the fate of so many AFC teams of the era.

If you’re a fan of a bad team, these playoff scenarios are copium of the highest order. While some fans tune out or start skimming through draft guides when they see their team sitting at 1-5, others start piecing together progressively wilder and wilder scenarios. Maybe if Russell Wilson speeds up his cadences, and Deshaun Watson’s shoulder injury lingers and the Chiefs decide to take November off so Patrick Mahomes can improve his chemistry in his commercials…

For the teams at the very bottom of the playoff picture, it’s no longer enough just to try to play better themselves; they need assistance from other teams above screwing up, sometimes significantly, if they want to kindle those faded playoff hopes. If you have four losses in the NFC, or five in the AFC, you can no longer guarantee a playoff berth just by winning out – mathematically, you need help. And even just sticking in the realm of halfway feasible possibility, it’s not particularly feasible to count on, say, the Bears upsetting the Lions in Detroit or the Broncos showing the Bills a thing or two. While certainly possible, praying for those results at this point is desperation, pure and simple.

With apologies to the Panthers – we did them two weeks ago and that still holds; just win a bunch of games and take a weak NFC South – and the Giants – we’re limiting this to two AFC teams and two NFC teams so we don’t repeat ourselves too much – let’s carve out playoff paths for our zombies. Will Jeffery Combs be able to re-animate them, or will they simply become dead by daylight?

Arizona Cardinals

For a season with roughly zero expectations coming in, the Cardinals have been feisty all year long. Josh Dobbs leads an above-average offense, and they’ve taken the Commanders and Giants to the wire in addition to their upset win over the Cowboys. Since Week 3, however, the magic has been wearing off, culminating in them scoring just nine points in last week’s loss to the Rams. Those missed opportunities the first two weeks loom large now, as they have the fourth-toughest schedule remaining, according to DVOA. Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, and the Cardinals’ schedule is about to blow up.

While mathematically, a five-win team can still make the playoffs, the first point where it becomes even remotely viable is at eight. An 8-9 team has somewhere between a 10-15% chance of making the playoffs in the NFC, depending on the exact tiebreakers. That’s something you can actually start planning around, rather than the one-in-a-million chance that the entire rest of the conference forgets how to play football.

Step one, then, is finding the easiest path to seven more wins for the Cardinals. They play the Bears, so that’s a good start – if they can’t beat Chicago, I don’t know what we’re talking about here. Let’s also add a home win against the Rams and a split against the Seahawks; divisional matchups often can get round-robbiny like that. While we’re at it, let’s also give them the season split against the 49ers with a big upset in Week 15. That will be the weak after Arizona’s bye, with the 49ers just coming off of their Seahawks-Eagles-Seahawks slugfest; a potential letdown game if I’ve ever seen one. That not only adds three more wins to Arizona’s total, but gets them to 3-3 in the division, which will be important later on. Let’s round it out with a homestand victory over Atlanta, as well as your choice of two from the Baltimore/Houston/Pittsburgh/Cleveland set in the AFC; I’d pick a rookie day from C.J. Stroud and a drop-fest from the Ravens’ receiving corps, but the precise specifics don’t matter in that case.

There’s still a little more work that needs to be done, and it starts with the collapse of the Seattle Seahawks. We want the Cardinals to finish at least third in the NFC West, and they’re not catching the 49ers. The Rams have two divisional wins already compared to one for the Seahawks, so they’re our primary target, needing six more losses to fall to 8-9. Well, we’re killing their divisional odds, so why not have the 49ers sweep them and the Rams handle them at home coming off of a bye week? Add in losses to the two NFC East contenders in Philadelphia and Dallas, as well as a road game in either Baltimore or Tennessee, and we have an 8-9 Seahawks team that finished 1-5 in the division. Arizona’s 3-3 record handles that, cleanly.

We can do a similar process to bump off the 3-3 Saints. Our path to 8-9 for Arizona very specifically got them to a 6-6 conference record, so we could find six losses, at least four in the NFC, to make sure the Saints get knocked out of the picture. That’s not too tough to do, either – New Orleans has road trips to Minnesota, Atlanta, Tampa Bay and Los Angeles on their schedule, as well as a game against Detroit looming. Those five, plus at least one other slip-up against one of their AFC South or NFC South opponents, will send them tumbling to, at best, 8-9 with a 5-7 conference record. Advantage: Arizona.

With those hurdles cleared, most of the rest of the league more or less takes care of itself. Washington collapses under the weight of a schedule that features Philadelphia, San Francisco, Miami, Los Angeles and Dallas (twice!). Jordan Love and Desmond Ridder continue to show that they’re simply Not It, with Atlanta unable to win outside of Mercedes-Benz and Green Bay getting knocked about by the AFC West, they fall out of the picture. And you get the following result, with the 8-9 Cardinals standing proud with a date in Detroit in the Wild Card round!

Chicago Bears

Now that you get the idea, we can go a little faster. We need to find seven more wins for Chicago to get them to that 8-9 minimum threshold for viability. And, like Arizona, the best thing we can do for them is having them be surprisingly competent in division. Let’s have them split the season series with Detroit, Green Bay and Minnesota and get to a competitive 3-3 in the NFC North. They have what should be winnable games against fellow zombie teams Carolina and Arizona, getting us to five. Add in a home game this week against a Raiders team that should be missing Jimmy Garoppolo and a New Year’s Eve home game against the Falcons – enjoy that Chicago weather, Desmond Ridder – and that’s not an unreasonable path to 8-9 if the Bears find enough fight in them to scrap the rest of the way.

Chicago faces many of the same problems as the Cardinals did in the previous scenario, of course. Both Seattle and New Orleans have to be dealt with in much the same way. With Seattle, at least, we can substitute the other one of Baltimore/Tennessee for an Arizona upset, which puts it a little bit into more realistic reach. The Saints are a little bit more interesting, because Chicago and New Orleans play each other in Week 9. In our scenario above, we had the Bears losing that one on the road. So either we need to give the Saints 10 losses and knock them out of the tie entirely, or we need to have another 8-9 team in the picture to wipe out the head-to-head tiebreaker and let Chicago’s 7-5 conference record shine through. That can be the role of the Seahawks, as they don’t play the Saints this year – a buffer, just in case the potent Chicago offense doesn’t work on the road for some unimaginable reason.

With everything else rolling much the same as it did for Arizona, this time we’ve managed to slip the Bears into the playoffs at 8-9, where Philadelphia awaits them. Good luck!

New England Patriots

The Patriots have an advantage most of the other dead teams don’t have – they still play basically everyone who could be in a wildcard tie with them.

The Patriots still play the current #5 seed Bills (twice!), the current #6 seed Steelers, the current #8 seed Colts, the current #10 seed Jets (with a win in hand!) and the current #13 seed Chargers. Better still, only two of those are actually road games, with the Colts game taking place in neutral Germany. With that in mind, the Patriots path is clear – beat your rivals!

Let’s write off the Bills, because there may be a slight talent gap between the two teams, and we can let someone run away from the pack. Beating the other four contenders on the list gets the Patriots to five wins. Add in wins against fellow rotten teams in the Broncos and Giants, as well as an upset over Washington (…better them than Miami or Kansas City, right?), and you get to 8-9 and ready to wade through tiebreakers.

The Patriots problems are the teams they don’t play – the Browns, Ravens, Texans, Titans, Raiders and Bengals. We have a wildcard slot to play with, so we can let the Ravens and Browns escape as the top two teams in the AFC North. Everyone else has to get down to ten losses or lose tiebreakers in the division to the teams the Patriots are beating.

Let’s cut to the chase, because the tiebreaker is quite fun.

Right! So, though careful shuffling of wins to the NFC, and allowing the Chiefs and Dolphins to run wild and free over the rest of the conference, we’ve managed to put together a nine-way tie at 8-9. If this situation unfolds, we are going to have so much fun tracking it and breaking it down throughout December. As it stands, here’s how the tie would be resolved:

• The Patriots would have the head-to-head sweep over the Jets, finishing third in the AFC East.
• The Raiders would beat the Chargers in Week 15 to split the season series, but Los Angeles ends up with the better divisional record thanks to a Week 18 upset over a resting Chiefs team, and thus takes second place in the AFC West. This eliminates one of the teams New England doesn’t play.
• The Steelers and Bengals split their head-to-head matchups, but the Bengals’ Week 2 loss to Baltimore ends up doing them in. Swept by the Ravens in their Week 11 rematch, the Bengals lose the tiebreaker to Pittsburgh on divisional record, and thus the Steelers are third place in the AFC North. That removes another team New England doesn’t play.
• The Texans are swept by the Colts and Titans, causing them to finish fourth in the AFC South. Indianapolis and Tennessee split the season series, and finish with identical 3-3 divisional records. That takes things to common opponents – Houston, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Tampa Bay, Carolina, New Orleans, Cleveland, Jacksonville and Baltimore. The Ravens are the real sticking point there – Baltimore has already beaten Tennessee and lost to Indianapolis. The Colts come out with the better common opponent record, finishing second in the AFC South, and eliminating two more teams the Patriots don’t play.

That leaves the Patriots, Colts, Steelers and Chargers in the race for the seventh seed…and we had New England beat them all. New England takes the seventh seed, and is rewarded with another trip to Miami.

Denver Broncos

The Broncos, too, are in an interesting situation – they’ve already nearly irreparably damaged their tiebreakers.

Remember when I said that 8-9 teams make the playoffs 10-15% of the time, depending on the tiebreakers? Well, the Broncos are much worse off than that. Denver’s already 0-4 in the conference; only the Panthers have a worse conference record. That’s going to harm a lot of Denver’s potential tiebreaker situations. They also don’t have great head-to-head odds to improve things. They’ve already dropped games to the Raiders and Jets, and don’t play the Steelers, Colts or Bengals. That, in combination with their bad conference record, means that the Broncos are going to be massive underdogs in any tiebreaker situations that aren’t with the Browns or Texans, and that’s just not a good place to be.

To get to a “realistic” longshot scenario, then, we’ve got break the seal and get Denver to nine wins. That means we can only pick three more games they can lose, which includes games against Buffalo, Kansas City and Detroit. Normally, you’d spot those three as the games we could afford to lose and have the Broncos run the table against everyone else, though that means that the Broncos would have to sweep the Chargers. Is it easier to beat the Chargers in Los Angeles than the Chiefs at Mile High? Eh, probably, even with Kansas City occasionally sputtering this year. But these are the kinds of decisions we’re forced to make.

At 9-8, the Broncos are fairly safe, all things considered. We just need to keep those wildcard challengers pinned down – have Cleveland’s lack of offense cost them against the Texans, or the Colts’ situation without Anthony Richardson cost them a game against the Patriots, things like that. But the actual mechanics of keeping everyone else to eight wins or below isn’t too complicated at this point, so we shall leave this scenario here.

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