Week 9 Scenario Update: Cowboys-Eagles and Dolphins-Chiefs Set to Reshape Playoff Picture
13 min read
Eagles WR A.J. Brown
Welcome to Week 9, where the playoff races start heating up in earnest. After a couple weeks of rather lackluster competition, the NFL is giving us two stellar matchups which will go a long way in deciding both a divisional race and the race for the top seed in each conference. In other words, it’s time to start pulling out the charts and metrics and looking at some actual scenarios.
Early Sunday morning, the Kansas City Chiefs (6-2) will take on the Miami Dolphins (6-2) in Germany; arguably the best and most important game that has ever been shipped overseas. That neutral site game between two of the four six-win teams in the AFC will have a major impact on the race for the all-important bye week, as head-to-head losses are a tough thing to overcome. If anything, though, it’s overshadowed by the afternoon’s NFC East battle between the Philadelphia Eagles (7-1) and the Dallas Cowboys (5-2). An Eagles-Cowboys game is always a good time, with decades of bad blood coloring things, and any year where they’re both legitimate Super Bowl contenders promises a good time.
It’s two playoff-caliber games, and we’re not even at the halfway point in the season. Let’s dive in and see what impact these matchups will have, starting in the NFC.
Dallas Cowboys (+3) @ Philadelphia Eagles
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All DVOA numbers courtesy of FTN
If you know what to make of the Dallas Cowboys, you’re a wiser man than I. The team that just throttled the Rams to the tune of 43-20 is the Super Bowl contender we thought they’d be at the beginning of the season, and they’ve shown up a couple times so far – 40-0 over the Giants, 38-3 over the Patriots, and so forth. But this is also the team that somehow lost the Cardinals, got blown out by the 49ers and barely managed to squeak past the Chargers. Even the worst Cowboys are still a playoff team; it would just be nice if the same Cowboys showed up in back-to-back weeks at some point so we had some idea who the heck they actually were. Dallas in dead last in variance in DVOA and, yeah, that checks out. That’s mostly because the defense is flopping from world-beating to just above-average; when they’re on fire, the somewhat milquetoast Texas Coast offense is more than enough to put away anyone. When they’re not, well, Dallas has been more adequate than phenomenal.
The Eagles, meanwhile, just can’t seem to fully click into world-beating mode the way they had last season. They’ve had their moments – the entire Miami game is highlight 1A, of course, but they’ve also had drives and stands throughout every game so far that make people remember just why they’re the defending NFC Champions. They just haven’t always been able to put it together for 60 minutes, and they’ll probably have to to deal with a team of Dallas’ caliber. At the very least, they have to play better than they’ve done against Washington twice this season; it’s not fair to say they were lucky to beat the Commanders last week, but they were dancing up and down on Philly fans’ nerves for most of that one, losing multiple fumbles at the goal line and even seeing the fabled Tush Push get stopped.
The Eagles have been given basically the default home advantage, with Vegas setting the line at just three points. That seems a little soft – while the Eagles have had trouble with consistency, it’s nothing even approaching Dallas’ issues. It’s easy to imagine a scenario where De’Andre Swift and the Eagles running game takes over, blunting Micah Parsons and company in the pass rush, and just methodically march over Dallas. But that is, as they say, why they play the games.
NFC East
From a playoff scenarios perspective, the Cowboys and Eagles are clashing for the NFC East title and the top wildcard slot. Philadelphia is essentially already in the postseason in every way that matters but actually mathematically clinching; Aaron Schatz and DVOA give them a 99.4% chance of making the postseason. The fifth seed is basically their worst realistic scenario. Dallas isn’t quite there yet, but they are Philadelphia’s only legitimate challenger for the NFC East crown; the Commanders and Giants are essentially rounding errors at this point in time.
So, for the moment, let’s pretend the Commanders and Giants do not exist. And, furthermore, let’s also, for the moment, pretend ties don’t exist, just to make things a little less complex. What’s the state of the NFC East race under those conditions?
With 17 games left for the Eagles and Cowboys, there are 131,072 possible combinations of results. As things stand now, the Eagles win the NFC East in 93,419 of them, or 71.3%. The Cowboys win 37,643 of them, or 28.7%. The other 280 would go down to at least the strength of victory tiebreaker, which we will leave alone at the moment.
If Dallas manages to win, however, their division odds jump up to 45.7%. DVOA has it even higher than that, because it’s factoring in Philadelphia’s rougher schedule going forwards, but the general point stands – if Dallas wins on Sunday, the NFC East basically becomes a coinflip, even though the Eagles would still have a half-game lead.
If, however, Philadelphia wins, the division is almost, but not quite, locked up. The Eagles control 88.0% the remaining scenarios with a win on Sunday, and would be basically a week or two away from locking things up before November even ends. So, the stakes are fairly high, here.
We can winnow things down a little further if you make some more assumptions. The numbers we’ve been giving here treats all 17 remaining Cowboys and Eagles games as 50/50 toss-ups, which is of course a bit silly. While anything can happen on any given Sunday, Eagles/Cardinals shouldn’t be a 50/50 proposition, and neither should Cowboys/Giants. So let’s spot each team some results and focus on the matchups most in question. For Dallas, that means crediting them wins against the Giants, Panthers, Seahawks and Commanders (at home), but losses on the road to the Bills and Dolphins, penciling them in at 9-4. The Eagles have a tougher road ahead, but let’s, for the moment, assume they beat the Giants (twice) and Cardinals, but lose to the Chiefs, putting them at 10-2.
Here’s how the remaining seven games would shake things out atop the NFC East.
The left image features what would happen if the Eagles win on Sunday; the right image contains the scenarios if Dallas wins, instead. From there, you can trace along through the Eagles’ gauntlet, picking winners along the way until you get to the end and discover your division winner and, if applicable, the tiebreaker that got them there.
You can see that an Eagles win this week doesn’t quite lock up the division for the Cowboys – there’s exactly one outcome there where Dallas escapes – but that pretty much any other win in a contested game wraps things up for Philadelphia. If the Eagles beat Dallas, go on a bye, and then win any of their murder’s row set of five – at Kansas City, versus Buffalo, versus San Francisco, at Dallas and at Seattle – they can, in all likelihood, pop their division championship corks.
You can also see the tiebreaker edge Philadelphia has already pulled out over Dallas. They have an additional division win already banked (2-0 to 1-0). They only have one common games loss (Jets) while the Cowboys have two (49ers and Cardinals). They have a three-win lead in the conference (5-0 to 2-2). That’s a lot of ground to have to make up for Dallas. That’s why in all of these so-called ‘likely’ scenarios, Philadelphia wins ties unless Dallas managed to sweep the Eagles.
The Cowboys don’t strictly need to sweep the Eagles to take home the division, but without it, they’re in significant trouble. They would essentially need to sweep all their closed matchups and the Eagles to lose all their close matchups, and that’s just not particularly likely. It’s not quite a must win, but it’s the next closest thing.
NFC Top Seed
The game will also have significant implications for the top seed in the conference, though that race is still to complicated to really go through every possible permutation at this point. FTN gives five teams at least a 5% chance at taking the #1 seed – the Eagles, Cowboys, Lions, 49ers and Seahawks. All of them have a stake in this game, though not all of them have the same stake.
The Lions, Seahawks and 49ers would all like to see Philadelphia lose. Teams trailing a 7-1 team would like to see that team fall; these are the kinds of incisive insights you’ve come to expect from PlaySheet. But this is far more important for Detroit than the other two, for the simple reason that they don’t play Philadelphia.
Detroit can’t knock the Eagles down by themselves, and they can’t clinch a head-to-head tiebreaker over them; they need other teams to do their dirty work for them. In addition, the Lions seem almost sure to win the NFC North at this point, thanks to their two-game lead and Kirk Cousins’ injury, so they don’t need to worry about the consequences of the fifth seed; they can just focus on the NFC East winner losing as many games as possible. There’ll be nearly a 10% probability swing in Detroit’s odds for the bye week based on who wins this one, with a Cowboys win helping them the most.
The 49ers and Seahawks, meanwhile, do have to care about that fifth seed, and so any benefit they get from Dallas winning and cutting into Philly’s lead is at least somewhat offset by the corresponding drop in wildcard chances. A trip to play the NFC South winner in the first round would be a decent consolation prize for not winning the West, so a Dallas loss is far from a bad outcome. Seattle probably needs the Dallas win a little more because they have worse tiebreakers at the moment, but it’s a negligible difference. No one on the West coast should be too concerned about who wins this one, all-in-all; not like they are in Detroit.
Miami Dolphins (+2.5) vs. Kansas City Chiefs
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All DVOA numbers courtesy of FTN
Willkommen, meine Damen und Herren, zum größten europäischen NFL-Spiel aller Zeiten. Tyreek Hill trifft seine alten Freunde, wenn die Miami Dolphins in einem Spiel zwischen zwei der Top-Teams der AFC gegen die Kansas City Chiefs antreten.
Not everything up there was all correct, but that’s OK – it was performance art, as the Kansas City Chiefs weren’t exactly entirely correct last week, either. A winning streak that stretched bacy to the Peyton Manning era was finally broken, as the Broncos beat the flu-riddled Chiefs – and convincingly, too. And everyone knows the best way to get over an illness is to board an international flight and engage in strenuous physical activity, so I’m sure the Chiefs will be just fine.
The Dolphins, meanwhile, look to be getting stronger, with tackle Terron Armstead traveling with them and with a real chance to play. Mike McDaniel’s offensive powerhouse has been the talk of the league this season, even if they’re not scoring 70 points a pop anymore. To see them against the standard-bearers of the AFC? It’s a matchup worth waking up early for. The big knock against the Dolphins at the moment is that they ain’t beaten nobody yet; their .283 strength of victory is the second-worst in the league ahead of only the Giants. They failed their tests against Buffalo and Philadelphia, both on the road. Will a neutral site game in Frankfurt be their chance to finally show their offense can work against a good team?
It’s actually the Dolphins defense that concerns me in this one more than anything else. Both teams are more than capable of racing up and down the field; it’s two of the top five offenses in the league going at it, for goodness sake. The problem is Miami’s defense isn’t up to the same caliber as Kansas City’s; ranking 17th against the pass when you have Mahomes on the other end is a problem, even if the Kansas City receiving corps can’t catch a cold at the moment. On the other hand, Kansas City ranks 23rd against the run, so as long as Miami can keep within one score, Raheem Mostert might be able to run the Dolphins right into a win. Either way, this is worth getting up early for.
AFC Top Seed
We’re covering this game second even though it has the better teams in it because it’s playoff implications aren’t quite as cut-and-dry; there’s no relevant two-horse races we can really dive into. Instead, we can talk about the four-way tie at 6-2 atop the conference, as the Chiefs and Dolphins share the best record in the AFC with the Ravens and Jaguars. It’s safe to say that these four teams are the only ones with a realistic shot at the bye week; no other team reaches 4% odds in FTN’s playoff simulations. Big ties mean big potential tiebreakers, and that’s the kind of stuff we love.
The winner of this one will be in first place in the AFC at the end of Week 9. The Jaguars aer off and can’t get to seven wins this week, while the Ravens‘ 4-2 conference record would keep them behind the 5-1 Chiefs or Dolphins even if they do manage to beat Seattle later in the afternoon. Right now, the Chiefs and Dolphins are one and two in the conference because they only have one loss in the AFC; that’s an ace up their sleeve that one of them will lose this week.
And the Dolphins can ill-afford to lose it. As mentioned, they have a terrible strength of victory at the moment, and a loss to the Chiefs would further hammer home the narraitive that they just can’t beat anyone. In multi-way ties, it increases the odds that we drop down the SoV, and that’s just not something Miami can afford to have happen. In the absolute best case scenario, with the Dolphins winning out and all their opponents winning wherever possible, they would only get to a .600 strength of victory. That is the lowest maxiumum in the conference; they don’t have that many more chances this season to face off against a top-caliber team. Miami also does not play Jacksonville and Baltimore does not play Kansas City, so any three-way tie is likely to skip past head-to-head results and get into the nitty gritty tiebreakers.
If it does, the advantage goes to Baltimore. While Jacksonville currently leads the quartet in strength of victory (.489), the Ravens have the highest potential there (.647 maximum!) thanks to the strength of the AFC North in general. If the Ravens end up in a tie atop the conference after battling through the Steelers, Browns and Bengals (all of whom are 4-3 and tied in playoff position at the moment), their resume is going to be absolutley top notch. They’ll need the Chiefs and Dolphins each to lose at least one conference game to make that a possibility, and hey, how convenient they’re playing each other this week.
While both the Ravens and Jaguars would prefer the Dolphins to win overall, Baltimore could use it a little bit more. Jacksonville doesn’t play either Kansas City or Miami, so their just stuck watching both of those teams race at the top of the conference. The Ravens get Miami at home in Week 17 but won’t see the Chiefs; they’d like Miami to borrow a win here that they can take back in January, thank you very much.
AFC East
The Chiefs, barring a crazy finish from the Chargers, are going to win the AFC West. But the Dolphins‘ spot atop the AFC East is a little more precarious, thanks in part to their loss to Buffalo back in Week 4. We can’t do the same thing we did with the Eagles-Cowboys, however, as this isn’t just a two horse race.
It was ugly as hell, but the Jets did win against the Giants last week, and are sitting at 4-3, just a game and a half back of Miami. FTN only gives them an 8.1% chance of winning the AFC East, but that can’t be entirely written off like the Commanders or Giants can. The Jets are an average team going up against two very good-to-great teams, and while that’s not a great situation to be in, they’re not out by any means. And remember, they have a win over the Bills. So if it was a three-way-tie at the moment, the Jets would be in first, the Bills second, and the Dolphins third. Not a bad card to have in your back pocket.
That leaves the AFC East as a whole too complicated to break down at the moment, but we can note a few things. The Bills could take the division lead back this week; they’re coming off of their mini-bye to play the Bengals. If they win and Miami loses, both teams will be 6-3 and that Week 4 loss to Buffalo will be the temporary deciding factor, putting even more pressure on the Week 18 game between the two teams to decide things.
As for the Jets? Well, they get the Bills and Dolphins in back-to-back weeks in Weeks 11 and 12, at which point we will likely be able to leave what’s left of their divisional title hopes in the dust. But to even stay in the picture this long after losing your starting quarterback in the first quarter of Week 1? That’s impressive, and New York should be lauded for it. Just so long as they can be lauded somewhere other then my teleivion screen, as watching them actually play football is a painful experience.
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