Super Bowl 50 Preview

There is one game left on the season, so let’s use this opportunity to get the last of the football out of our systems. We have witnessed 266 games so far this year (332 if you count the Pro Bowl and the preseason), but this is the only one that really matters. These two teams have followed very different paths to make it here, and Sunday’s game will be a classic matchup of strength versus strength. On each side of the ball I’ve highlighted a pair of matchups that will go a long way to deciding the outcome, followed by my prediction for who will come away as Super Bowl Champions.

Miller and Ware vs Newton

The performance of Carolina’s offensive line has been one of the biggest reasons for their surprising success this year. A unit that was expected to be a major liability turned into a moderate strength, thanks to the growth of young players like Trai Turner and Andrew Norwell, as well as surprise contributions from a mediocre veteran in Michael Oher.

As a unit they are better in the running game, but they’ve improved as pass blockers over the past couple months. They stymied Seattle’s potent pass rush and held their ground against Arizona’s ferocious blitz attack. They’ve kept Cam Newton clean in the pocket all season, giving him the time and space to shred opposing defenses.

But they’ve never faced anything like Denver’s pass rush. What the Broncos did to Tom Brady in the championship round would have been hard to watch if it was anyone other than Tom Brady, and with two weeks to prepare Wade Phillips will definitely have something cooked up for Carolina. DeMarcus Ware and Von Miller get all the attention, but it’s the versatility of this pass rush that makes it truly dangerous. Derek Wolfe and Malik Jackson are known primarily for their ability to stuff the run, but they can get after the passer as well, and Phillips always knows how to put them in position to be productive.

On the perimeter the Broncos have a clear advantage. Carolina’s receiving corps isn’t scaring anyone, and they definitely aren’t a serious threat to the best three deep rotation of cornerbacks in the league. There is always the risk that Ted Ginn can beat them over the top, but I’m guessing Denver will sacrifice a play here or there in order to play tight press coverage across the board. Aqib Talib will be grabbing and shoving on one side while Chris Harris sits in the hip pocket of the receiver on the other, and there will be very few immediate windows for Newton to throw the ball into.

The Broncos have the best defense in the NFL, and Carolina will be facing a major challenge trying to move the ball against them. It will be interesting to see what their running attack can do against the formidable interior of Denver’s defense, but even if they can generate occasional yards on the ground, they will still need to find a way to pass the ball.

Newton has been the best player in the NFL this season, but beating the Broncos will require him to do something he hasn’t done all year. He is one of the most mobile quarterbacks in the league, but there is a sharp divide in his game. On any individual play he is either a runner or a passer, and he very rarely blends the two on a single play. His passing attack comes primarily from the pocket, while his running game is almost always called in the huddle.

The designed running game will be crucial for the Panthers on Sunday. A few zone reads or designed quarterback keeps will definitely slow down Denver’s edge rush, forcing them to play with discipline that will give Carolina’s offensive line an extra half a second to cut them off. But they will still eventually get home, and when they do, the Panthers will need Newton to step up to keep their offense moving.

Improvisation is not a major part of Newton’s game, but it will have to make an appearance on Sunday. Two weeks ago Denver feasted on a quarterback who was trapped in the pocket, and they will do the same if Newton doesn’t make an occasional break with the ball and use his mobility to his advantage.

Getting outside the pocket will give his receivers more time to work their way open downfield, and will force the defense to bend to respond to the threat of a run. Carolina’s offense has been a smooth and efficient machine for most of the season, and it’s very possible that they can impose their will in the same way on Denver. But, more likely than not, this game will be a low scoring contest, and will come down to a big play here or there. Newton is capable of making those big plays, but he has to be more aggressive when he has the ball in his hands.

Thomas  and Sanders vs Keuchly, Davis, Coleman, and Harper

You can throw the ball on Carolina’s defense. This is a very good unit, good enough to overshadow one of the best offenses in the league, and it has been extremely hard for any opponent to score points or move the ball on them. They are stout at every level on the field, they play with a nearly perfect blend of aggression and discipline, and they generate offense on their own by forcing the other team to give them the ball. 

But you can throw the ball on Carolina’s defense. Josh Norman deserves nearly all of the praise he has received this season, and he will be a nightmare for whoever he ends up facing. It will be interesting to see how Carolina plays this, whether they keep him on one side of the field or choose to have him shadow one of Denver’s receivers. And if they do stick him in a classic man on man battle, which receiver will they choose? 

Demaryius Thomas is the bigger name, a physical marvel who developed into one of the best receivers in the NFL after being selected in the first round in 2010. But over the past two years, it’s become increasingly clear that Denver’s best wide receiver is Emmanuel Sanders. He doesn’t have the sheer physicality of Thomas, but he is more versatile in his route running, giving the offense the ability to attack underneath and over the top. More significantly, he has much more reliable hands than Thomas, who quietly suffers as many drop issues as an receiver in the NFL.

Whoever he ends up facing, the battle of Norman versus Denver’s receivers will be one to watch. He has shut down most of the receivers he’s faced this year, though he was exposed at times by both Odell Beckham and Julio Jones. His biggest vulnerability is the same as Carolina’s as a whole, a weakness to the deep ball. They play tight coverage, and they count on being able to run with receivers, but their safeties are below average, and quality receivers can beat the coverage over the top.

This is one area where things do not break in Denver’s favor. The best way to attack Carolina is the one thing Denver cannot do. Manning has played well since returning from injury, but he still isn’t a threat down the field. He doesn’t have the arm strength to launch the ball high into the sky and let his receivers run underneath it, and he will struggle to zip balls through the windows down the field. His lone remaining strength is his ability to get the ball out of his hands quickly to underneath targets, judging the defense before the snap and trusting his mind over his body.

This plays right into Carolina’s hands. With no fear of being beaten over the top, they will be able to play even more aggressively against Denver’s receivers. And no team is better suited than the Panthers to take away the middle of the field, the easiest spot for Manning to hit. Luke Keuchly and Thomas Davis are the best pair of coverage linebackers in the league, and the windows across the middle may be too tight for Manning to fit the ball through.

Davis is the wild card in this game. Against Arizona just two weeks ago he suffered a fractured arm, which after a surgical procedure he insists won’t keep him out of the game. But we don’t know how effective he’ll be playing with it, how he’ll be able to hold up taking on blockers in the running game or making plays on the ball against the pass. Fully healthy, this Panthers linebacker corps would be a death sentence for Denver. As things are, there might just be a chance for the Broncos to hit a few windows and keep their offense on the field.

Short and Lotulelei vs Manning

Peyton Manning was very good against the Patriots. He clearly wasn’t the Manning of old, and he clearly wasn’t the main reason they won the game, but he was better than most people are giving him credit for. It seems strange to think that only a month ago we were debating whether he should even start for the Broncos in the playoffs, and now we are trying to rationalize that argument again, despite the fact that Denver would not have made it this far without the contributions Manning is still making.

He was better early in the game against the Patriots than he was late, partially due to a change in offensive style. Gary Kubiak is not the sort of coach who goes for an opponent’s throat, and he let New England claw their way back into the game with a watered down second half attack. Manning missed a couple big throws, but he still did more than enough to win the game early on and could have done even more if given a chance.

When he ran into trouble against the Patriots, it happened because of pressure. And not just any pressure either, but pressure up the middle. Interior pressure is always a bane of quarterbacks, and it is a particular problem for Manning, who has lost the pocket mobility that so defined him early in his career. The subtle shifts to the side simply aren’t available in his game anymore, and pressure in his face destroys any hope he has of completing a ball downfield.

The criticism has gone over the top, but where the doubters have a point is how Manning handled the pressure he faced in New England. In short, it was ugly. The Broncos saw multiple possessions end due to Manning’s lack of mobility, as his response to interior pressure was to scramble backwards a couple yards then fall flat on the ground (a trick I’m guessing he learned from rookie backup Trevor Siemian. Go Cats.)

Denver’s offensive line isn’t very good, so there is going to be pressure in Manning’s face no matter who the opponent is. And in this case, the opponent is Carolina, a team that has just come off back to back games beating up Russell Wilson and Carson Palmer. Their edge rush is not particularly frightening (though Kony Ealy has been coming along, and I still believe in Jared Allen to make a couple plays in this game). But their interior is among the best in the league, with Kawann Short and Star Lotulelei shredding the interior of every line they’ve faced this season.

The Broncos aren’t built to handle any quality defensive lines, but this one is particularly suited to hurt them. Manning doesn’t have the mobility to escape pressure in his face, and he doesn’t have the arm strength to complete a throw without being able to push his whole body through it. In short, Denver’s only hope is to keep the pocket clean.

The way to do this is through the running game. Penetration is the great weapon of interior rushers, but it can also be a vulnerability, one that Kubiak’s famous zone running scheme is designed to exploit. As the tackles of Carolina’s defense come bursting up the field, they will open lanes up behind them, lanes that CJ Anderson and Ronnie Hillman have to be able to see and exploit.

The Broncos need to break a couple big runs this way, but even that threat probably won’t be enough to slow down Carolina. The athleticism and range of their linebackers gives their defensive tackles great freedom to play with aggression, and they aren’t going to sacrifice this out of fear of runners like Anderson or Hillman. Short and Lotulelei will be coming after Manning all game long, and it may very well be too much for the veteran quarterback to handle.

Greg Olsen vs TBD

Above I mentioned that I thought the Broncos wouldn’t have any trouble staying with Carolina’s receivers, and I stand by that down here. There might not be a more lopsided possible matchup in the NFL than Denver’s cornerbacks against Carolina’s receivers, and after shutting down Julian Edelman and Danny Amendola two weeks ago, things should only be easier against Ted Ginn and Devin Funchess. They can play matchups, they can play alignment, they can do anything they want, and barring spectacular plays by Cam Newton the Panthers wide receivers will not pose any threat in this game.

Carolina’s receiving corps has been miserable all season, but they’ve managed to put together a solid passing attack. Newton deserves most of the credit for this, but we also need to acknowledge the performance of Greg Olsen. The former Bears first round pick is coming off the best season of his career, responsible for 77 receptions and 1106 yards.

The Panthers passing game revolves around Olsen, and this is one area where they are set up to take advantage of the Broncos. Denver’s defense doesn’t have a weakness, but they don’t quite have the same level of stars up the middle as in other places on their team. Brandon Marshall, Danny Travathan, TJ Ward, and Darian Stewart are all extremely good football players who would be top of the line starters on just about any other team in the league. But when surrounded by Miller, Ware, Wolfe, Jackson, Talib, Roby, and Harris, they are the clear weakness of this strong team.

I bring this stat up fairly often in my posts, but just for those of you who aren’t familiar, here’s a refresher on DVOA. DVOA is a competition adjusted metric that measures play by play success and uses this to compare the overall value of a unit on the field. Unsurprisingly, Denver finished number one defensively in this category this year. (Carolina was number two defensively, while the Panthers and the Broncos were 8^th and 25^th respectively on offense.)

DVOA also goes into a bit more depth, comparing how defenses fare against different types of wide receivers. When looking at the Broncos, it’s clear that this is a very talented defense across the board. They were fourth in the league against number one receivers, fourth against number two receivers, fourth against all other receivers, and second against running backs out of the backfield. And against tight ends, they were a lowly eighth.

Yeah, I know. Hardly a disappointment. But it’s something, and it certainly showed up against New England. The Broncos had no answer for Rob Gronkowski (few teams do), and the best tight end in the league nearly single handedly dragged the Patriots back into the game. Olsen isn’t on Gronkowski’s level, but he is in the next tier down, and he will be even more crucial than normal to Carolina’s passing game.

The most interesting part of this matchup is how the Broncos will choose to play him. The obvious solution is to use Talib, a big, physical cornerback who can body Olsen when he lines up in the slot and prevent him from creating quick separation. They would still have Harris and Roby to play on the outside, and keeping Talib closer to the middle of the field would give them an extra big body against the run. This probably won’t end up happening, and I will absolutely defer to the judgment of Wade Phillips on this one. But this is a matchup that could very easily swing the game for Carolina’s offense, and Denver has an appetizing potential solution available if they want to take it.

Carolina Panthers vs Denver Broncos

Breaking down matchups is a lot of fun, but it cannot tell a complete story by itself. If you read just the first section above, you would think that Denver’s pass rush would swarm Carolina and win them the game. If you read the next three sections, you would think that Carolina’s strength up the middle would allow them to run away with things. And if you skipped down to just this part, you would see that I gave Carolina the edge in three matchups to Denver’s one and assume that I was picking them.

Well, I am, but there’s more to it than just what I discussed above. As far as those particular matchups go, here is how I see it playing out. Denver will be able to generate pressure on Newton, and Carolina’s offense will struggle. They’re talented enough that they won’t be completely stymied, but they will have trouble to consistently move the ball. Greg Olsen and their running game will give them some life, but Denver’s defense is like nothing else they’ve faced this year, and even the highest scoring offense in the league will struggle to generate points.

The end result of this will be a low scoring game, which plays into Denver’s hands. They can’t possibly win a shootout with Carolina, but if they can keep things below 20 points for most of the game, they can pull out just enough offensively to keep themselves alive. Manning’s deep ball is probably the worst in the league, but I think he completes at least one long pass to Sanders, and their running game can stitch enough together to get them a couple scores.

In the end, I think this game will come down to two factors. The first is productivity in the red zone. Denver’s running game can be effective, but it will struggle when Carolina is able to truly stack the line, closing off the cutback lanes their zone blocking scheme relies on. The Broncos offensive line isn’t good enough to generate the sort of push needed to clear space in the red zone, and Manning doesn’t have the zip on his passes to fit them between the tight windows in Carolina’s back end. Denver will end up settling for field goals, while Carolina and Cam Newton will be their usual dominant selves in forcing their way into the end zone.

The other factor that will decide this game is turnovers. Peyton Manning has kept things remarkably clean since returning from injury, but he still had 17 interceptions on the season, and he would have had a game losing pick against the Steelers if not for a great play by Sanders to knock it loose. Sooner or later the pressure will get to him, he won’t be able to step into a throw, and he’ll float the ball into the middle of the field for someone like Keuchly or Davis to grab.

This game could easily turn into a blowout for Carolina, but I think Denver’s defense is strong enough to keep them in the game. It isn’t good enough to win it by themselves, not unless the offense plays the best game possible. In the end, Carolina's balance on both offense and defense will be too much for the Broncos to handle, and they will claim their first Super Bowl  title.

Final score: Carolina 24 – Denver 16

2015 Prediction Wrapup

I suppose I should probably wait another week for this, but for all intents and purposes the NFL season is over. There’s still one game to wrap up, and I’ll have more to say about it later this week, but right now is as good a time as any to take a broader look back at how the season went.

Just like last year, I started the season with a long list of predictions, and just like last year, I’m going to hold myself accountable for what I said. This is both to pat myself on the back and to lower my eyes in shame, going over how this season proved me right as well as how it proved me wrong. As you will probably notice, the latter category is a bit longer than the former. Because, you know, football is complete nonsense and no one knows what they’re talking about..

Just in case you’re curious, here are the links to the posts I made prior to the season:

NFC East and AFC East Preview 

NFC West and AFC West Preview 

NFC South and AFC South Preview 

NFC North and AFC North Preview 

Final Preview 

Players to Watch

What I Got Right:

Before the season I did a breakdown of each and every team, writing three paragraphs for each. The first was a best case scenario, the second was the other end of the spectrum, and the third was a player to keep your eyes on. The first two categories were hardly predictions (though they do contain some interesting thoughts if you’re interested in reading over them), so I’ll focus on the players I picked for each team.

I’m not going to get into each and every one of them, so here’s just a handful that turned out well. The Redskins were one team that I (and everyone else) got completely wrong, but one thing I nailed was predicting Jordan Reed to play a major role. Reed came on strong down the stretch, finishing with 87 catches for 952 yards and 11 touchdowns. He was the biggest non-Kirk Cousins reason for their late season surge, and at only 25 years old, he’s one of their most important pieces to build around.

I wasn’t alone in predicting breakout seasons for Latavius Murray and Allen Robinson, but they still exceeded most people’s expectations. A less obvious but still very strong pick was Mitchell Schwartz for Cleveland, who emerged this year as one of the best right tackles in the league (and he’s nearly as good on Twitter).

Perhaps my best pick was Sean Smith, who I talked about at greater length in a post a couple weeks ago. His return from suspension isn’t the only reason for Kansas City’s turnaround, but it certainly played a part in making them one of the best defenses in the league over the second half of the season. Marcus Peters got all the attention, but Smith is the best cornerback on the team, and together they are a duo that few teams in the league can match.

What I Got Wrong:

Okay, so let’s start with the players who are no longer on the teams I matched them with at the beginning of the season. Duron Carter was cut by the Colts before playing a single game (which, to my credit, I at least mentioned as a possibility). Quinton Coples was cut by the Jets and picked up by the Dolphins, and Cary Williams was released after a disastrous stretch in Seattle.

These were the bottom of the barrel, and there are plenty of other miserable examples to choose from. Alterraun Verner is still technically on the Buccaneers, but it would be a surprise to see him back next year. Former Steelers first round pick Jarvis Jones destroyed what little hope remained of him turning into an elite pass rusher, and veteran free agent Stevie Johnson provided very little for the Chargers before going down with an injury.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment was Kenny Stills. In a way Stills was the embodiment of the entire Dolphins season, an exciting talent rendered worthless by poor coaching and a toxic environment. His abilities to stretch the field were wasted with a regressing Ryan Tannehill, and the team that looked so promising five months ago has been rendered a joke thanks to a number of disappointments like Stills.

Playoffs

What I Got Right:

Pittsburgh, Denver, New England, Minnesota, Green Bay, Seattle.

Fifty percent isn’t bad. Of course, four of these were obvious, Pittsburgh barely snuck in, and I had the Vikings pegged as a Wild Card team rather than a division winner. But you’ll find predictions out there that did much worse, failing to see the strength of Pittsburgh’s roster or the potential of Minnesota’s.

Just as important were the teams that did not make it into the playoffs. I had the Jets finishing with nine wins and ending up just outside the playoffs (they actually had ten wins, but I’m counting it anyway). I didn’t buy into any of the strange hype for the Giants, the Chargers, or the Saints, and I didn’t outsmart myself going for a longshot sleeper like St Louis or Tampa Bay. I played it a bit safe with my predictions, and it came back to bite me on a couple cases, but this is one example where, over a sixteen game season, you can usually count on the law of averages.

What I Got Wrong:

Baltimore, Miami, Indianapolis, Atlanta, Dallas, Philadelphia

Just in case you didn’t figure it out, those are the other six teams I predicted to make the playoffs. Some of them I don’t need to say that much about. Baltimore and Indianapolis suffered disastrous seasons largely due to injuries that spiraled out of control, and two preseason Super Bowl favorites ended up missing the playoffs. I thought that this would be the season that the Falcons broke out of their funk, but after a hot start to the year, it became clear that this team is exactly what it’s shown over the past couple seasons. And the Dolphins were just a total mess, as everyone knows by this point, a young and talented team that simply could not put the pieces together.

So let’s talk about the other teams, the pair from the NFC East. Dallas probably belongs in the same category as the Colts and the Ravens, but I’m going to address them more in depth, since they will come up again a couple times down the list. I went heavy on them in my predictions, picking them to win the NFC East and make the Super Bowl while Tony Romo won MVP. Clearly that didn’t happen, and I think it is fair to put this mostly on injuries. Had they stayed healthy, they would have run away with the NFC East, and Romo could very easily have challenged Cam Newton for MVP.

Philadelphia is a different story. Philadelphia is a team I didn’t believe in at all prior to the season, until it came time to make my final picks. By then we’d seen a couple explosive preseason games from this team, and I put my faith in Chip Kelly to pull it out. Well Kelly is in San Francisco now, and the Eagles are picking thirteenth in the draft. I bought into the hype on this one, and it bit me back. Hopefully I can learn a lesson from this, and not pay any attention at all to the preseason next year.

Awards

What I Got Right:

These awards haven’t been handed out yet, but we have a good idea who will win most of them. More importantly, we know who won’t win most of them, which makes this section rather quick to get through.

I picked JJ Watt to win Defensive Player of the Year because he is the obvious candidate, and because after whiffing on Kenny Vaccaro in 2014 I didn’t feel like being bold. This one could be a contentious race, but Watt is probably the favorite end up with the award. So I’ll count this as a victory, even if the votes end up going against it.

Similarly, I’m going to give myself credit for picking Jameis Winston to win Offensive Rookie of the Year. Right now it’s down to him, Todd Gurley, and Amari Cooper, and if I had to put money on it, I’d put it on Winston. I correctly predicted that he would get better as the season went along, behind a young but improving offensive line that would slowly coalesce to give him time to launch the ball down the field. Tampa Bay put together a surprisingly competitive run down the stretch thanks to him, and he is more than deserving of the award.

What I Got Wrong:

I predicted the winners of six awards, and I’m counting two as correct, so you do the math. My Coach of the Year winner got fired (Kelly), and my MVP candidate played in only two full games. In both cases I undersold the Panthers (which we will get to, I promise you), not giving the due credit to Ron Rivera or Cam Newton.

The other two awards were a bit tougher. I was hardly going out on a limb when I predicted Vic Beasley as Defensive Rookie of the Year, and many people have singled him out as the most disappointing first year player. While his sack numbers don’t look particularly impressive, he was better than most people realize, generating consistent pressure without quite being able to take the quarterback down. He still has a bright future ahead of him, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see eight or nine sacks from him next season, after he’s added some muscle and worked more at finishing plays.

The other prediction was Comeback Player of the Year. This turned into one of the most competitive races of the season, with a number of players fighting to finish runner up to Eric Berry for the award. And while “cancer survivor” should have instantly drawn my attention, I find myself surprisingly not regretting my pick, despite what some people may think. I picked Sam Bradford to win this award, and as much criticism as he’s gotten, he wasn’t the biggest problem in Philadelphia this year. If their defense had been able to come together like I expected, if they had won a couple more games and pulled out the division, more people would realize that Bradford just finished the best season of his career. He played very well this year and, under other circumstances, he absolutely could have claimed this award.

Super Bowl Matchup

What I Got Right:

This is one I’m actually pretty proud of. I managed to correctly predict one of the two Super Bowl participants, a pretty impressive feat with sixteen teams competing in each conference for the spot. It was up and down over the course of the season, enough that I definitely didn’t expect this to actually come true, but, as I predicted, the Denver Broncos are now representing the AFC in the Super Bowl.

As for the NFC, I’m going to drop this into this part of the conversation as well. I’m not backtracking on my pick by any means, but here’s exactly what I wrote when I selected the Cowboys to make the Super Bowl.

“Picking the Cowboys to come out of the NFC could very easily be something I come to regret. I’m high on Dallas coming into the season, but I’m not going to dismiss the possibility of a total collapse. The loss of Murray could be more devastating to their running game than we expect. Their defense could struggle with the offense no longer dominating time of possession. Tony Romo could get hurt. Any number of things could sink this team’s season.”

So yeah, even though I totally blew this one, I still had some idea what I was talking about. Of course, it would be a lot easier to justify if it wasn’t for the other end of the situation, the team that made the Super Bowl after I picked them to finish with the third worst record in the league.

What I Got Wrong:

It isn’t quite as bad as I made it sound in the previous section. I picked Carolina to finish 5-11, better only than Washington and Buffalo. But I picked a lot of teams to finish 5-11. It was my go to record for teams that I thought were bad but not bad enough to end up with the first overall pick, and I ended up slotting Cleveland, Jacksonville, Houston, Oakland, and San Francisco there as well. So in reality, I only had Carolina as one of the eight worst teams in the league.

But yeah, that’s still not very good. Carolina won ten more games than I expected, and they are now the favorites heading into the Super Bowl. Their performance this year surprised everyone, but I was among the most negative voices heading into the season, far and away the biggest mistake I made all year.

Let me start by trying to explain why I was so low on the Panthers prior to the season. When I looked at Carolina, I saw a team heavily reliant on star power. They had Cam Newton on offense, Thomas Davis and Luke Keuchly on defense, and not much else. With Kelvin Benjamin gone, they had no NFL caliber receiver on their roster. Their offensive line was a mess, Jonathan Stewart’s strong push at the end of 2014 wasn’t enough to convince me he could carry the offense, and their defense didn’t have the depth necessary to be an elite unit in the league.

As it turns out, I was wrong on just about every count. The easiest way for a team to outperform expectations is to have players who come out of nowhere to become stars, and Carolina had that happen at multiple positions. Michael Oher was a disaster a year ago in Tennessee, but this year in Carolina he was one of the better left tackles in the league, one part of an offensive line that was significantly better than I expected. Ted Ginn had his ups and downs, but his speed added a deep passing element to the offense that helped open things up in the running game.

These contributions were the sort of thing that no one could have seen coming, so I don’t feel too bad for missing them. I can’t say the same about the defensive side of the ball. Perhaps I underestimated the value of players like Davis and Keuchly, but I think the biggest factor was the emergence of a couple young stars. Josh Norman had shown flashes of brilliance in the past, and in retrospect it seems obvious that he would improve again this year, even if no one could have predicted he’d become one of the best cornerbacks in the league. Similarly, Kawaan Short had been an impressive young defensive tackles over his first two seasons, and I was incorrect to dismiss him as just another body on the roster.

For the first half of the season everyone kept expecting the Panthers to reveal themselves as a fluke. And now that they’re in the Super Bowl, it seems clear that we had no idea what the hell we were talking about. This team has been the best in the league from almost start to finish, and they only need to wrap up one more game to show all of us just how wrong we were.

Adapting to Survive

Well, we’ve almost made it. One meaningful game remaining, two teams left to fight for the title of the best in the league, a matchup that for the next two weeks will be driven into the ground as the old guard versus the new. The veteran Peyton Manning playing in what is likely the final game of his career, against the emerging superstar Cam Newton who is looking to cap off his breakout season.

Only two teams remain, and by this point I don’t have to point out that there is more to each of these teams than just the quarterback position. No one makes it to the Super Bowl on the performance of one individual, and this year is an excellent example of that, with arguably the two most complete teams in the league facing off against each other. On Carolina’s side we have the league’s most productive offense supported by a playmaking defense, and on Denver’s we have an efficient offense keeping things going for the best defense in the league. Both teams have superstars on each side of the ball, and neither has a single glaring weakness.

I’ll get into the actual matchup of these teams next week, but for now I want to focus on how they got here. A week ago I wrote about how games at this stage of the year are often decided by the smallest of factors, events or aspects of the game that give the winning team the slight edge it needs. We saw this again this weekend (even in the blowout Panthers victory). Both of these teams have benefited from luck, health, and coaching down the stretch, but in each case their greatest asset has been their adaptability. The strength and depth of the Broncos and the Panthers have allowed them to reshape how they play from game to game, giving them the needed edge to make it as far as they have.

This is a topic I’ve covered before, but it’s something we have to come back to time and time again. We get so caught up in discussing systems and schemes that we often forget the value of flexibility. Truly great teams can impose themselves on lesser opponents, but by this point in the year, there aren’t really any lesser opponents to face. At this point, the most valuable thing a team can have is flexibility, the ability to adjust what they do to attack the other team’s weaknesses.

The Undoing of Arians

We’ve seen plenty of examples over the years, but we may never again see a team as doomed by its lack of flexibility as the Arizona Cardinals. Bruce Arians has received almost nothing but praise since getting his first opportunity as a head coach with the Colts in 2012, and it is almost universally agreed that he is a top five head coach in the league. And while I absolutely agree with this assessment, I also acknowledge that Arians isn't flawless. His problems go back to his days as an offensive coordinator, where in Pittsburgh and then again in Indianapolis he put together potent offenses that were never consistent enough to take the next step, largely due to struggles to protect the quarterback and run the ball.

Arians was dealing with terrible offensive lines in both those situations, but he has to absorb part of the blame for not doing anything to compensate for their flaws. His scheme relies on constant deep passes, which leaves his offense nonfunctional when an opposing defense generates pressure.

He didn’t adjust then, and he didn’t adjust on Sunday. Arizona’s offensive line has been steady all year, but against Carolina’s front seven they were absolutely dominated. The first couple turnovers by Carson Palmer were the result of a collapsing pocket, and he wasn’t helped by having to hold onto the ball. The deep passing game can beat Carolina’s defense, but it wasn’t working for Arizona, no matter how many times the Cardinals tried to force the ball down the field.

The other side of the ball was a very similar story. Arizona’s defense has been one of the most aggressive in the league for the past two years, as evidenced by the blitz after blitz they sent to unsettle Aaron Rodgers in the Divisional Round. At this point we know what we’re going to see from Arizona’s defense. They are going to send constant waves of pressure, and they expect that their blitzers can get to the quarterback before he can find the holes behind them.

This has worked for the past two seasons, but it failed on Sunday. Carolina’s offensive line is better at run blocking than protecting the passer, but they played the best game of the season in the Championship Game. Cam Newton had a clean pocket to throw from the entire game, and with only a few defenders left on the back end, even his mediocre receiving corps was able to find separation. And when he did get the ball out, there weren’t enough tacklers on the back end to corral Carolina’s receivers, leading to big play after big play.

Even with all of this, the game was a lot closer than the final score indicates. Arizona was still very much in it late in the first half, as they stopped Carolina a couple times and managed to get their offense going by feeding the ball to David Johnson. But after the turnovers in the final two minutes, they entered the second half in full panic mode. Suddenly they had no choice but to abandon the run and attack downfield, playing right into what had been failing for them all game. Things spiraled from there, Carolina continued to break off big plays, and we ended up with the 34 point margin, far from indicative of the team that Arizona was this year.

Out of Options

The result of the Panthers-Cardinals game is easy enough to explain by looking at the coaches involved. The same can’t be said about the other game. On one side you have Gary Kubiak, a slightly above average coach whose career has been defined primarily by his consistent mediocrity. And on the other you have Bill Belichick, the best coach in the league and arguably the greatest of all time, a coach who has proven over and over again that he can find ways to win with whatever roster is put on the field for him.

The edge in coaching is the primary reason I picked the Patriots to win this game. Because outside of that and the quarterback position, Denver has the edge at every spot on the roster. It may have been a more competitive matchup early in the season before the Patriots were decimated at running back and across the offensive line, but coming into this game it was clear that the Broncos had the edge in depth.

This proved to be the difference in the game, but it didn’t have to be. New England’s defense did more than enough to keep them in the game, holding the Broncos to only twenty points (with some help from a highly conservative strategy by Kubiak in the fourth quarter), and in the end it was the offensive side of the ball, the strength of the Patriots for the past five years, that cost them the game.

The matchup of Belichick and Kubiak seems like an obvious mismatch, but it is mitigated somewhat by the presence of Wade Phillips on the Broncos side. Phillips has a shaky reputation based on his struggles as a head coach, but the fact that he keeps getting opportunities demonstrates just how good he is as a defensive coordinator. Denver’s defense is loaded with talent, but Phillips deserves credit for shaping them into the best unit in the league.

On Sunday he reminded the NFL once again just how brilliant he is. He designed the perfect scheme to go after New England, completely changing his tactics on the defensive side of the ball and exploiting weaknesses that the Patriots had managed to cover against almost every opponent so far this season.

I mentioned above the injuries that New England had suffered on the offensive side of the ball, but I think we need to go into more detail. Without both Dion Lewis and LeGarrette Blount, the Patriots were forced to resort to bottom of the roster player James White and off the street veteran Steven Jackson in their backfield. Against Denver’s defense they had no hope of running the football, and their rushing game actually outperformed my expectations by putting up 31 yards (not including Brady’s rushing total).

They had similar problems on the offensive line, where over the course of the year they saw an astonishing 37 different combinations play at least one snap. Part of this is due to an unusual substitution pattern, but a lot of it has to do with the constant injuries they’ve faced. And yet, they did a fine job keeping Brady upright, finishing near the middle of the pack in sacks allowed.

The key to New England’s offense is a quick passing attack. They spread the field, they give Brady lots of options to choose from, and they let him pick the defense apart with slants and screens. Teams try to bring pressure at Brady, but he is always able to find the hole behind them before he can get hit, getting the ball to Julian Edelman, Danny Amendola, or Rob Gronkowski and trusting them to do the rest.

The Broncos could very easily have tried the same strategies that had failed for every other team. They were a heavy blitzing defense this year, as all Wade Phillips defenses usually are, and with a strong and deep secondary, they had reason to believe they could hold up in man coverage on the back end.

But that’s not what the Broncos did. Not only did they avoid blitzing, they actually went a step further, sending only three men after the quarterback repeatedly in the first half. I usually despise a three man rush, but in this case it was spectacularly effective. A three man rush fails because it gives the quarterback all the time he needs to search the field for a hole in the coverage, but for a passer like Brady, time is not the issue. His entire game is based on rhythm, and once that rhythm is disrupted, he struggles to improvise outside the normal framework of the play.

This is something that the Patriots obviously saw as the first half progressed, and the big question coming out of the break was how the Broncos would hold up once New England adjusted. And yet, for some reason, the Patriots really didn’t mix things up. They kept running their offense into the teeth of a defense designed to stop it, leading to stalled drives and ill timed turnovers.

The Broncos ramped the pressure up in the second half, even if that only meant sending four rushers. After spending a lot of the first half in coverage, Von Miller and DeMarcus Ware were unleashed around the edge, wreaking havoc against New England’s trash heap of an offensive line. The Patriots could not create separation to throw the ball underneath, and they couldn’t hold the ball long enough to go deep. And without any running game to turn to, their offense was rendered helpless.

There are still steps they could have taken, and it is strange that Belichick wasn’t able to make it work. The obvious solution when a team is getting pressure off the edge is to keep additional blockers to help, either by keeping a running back in the backfield or chipping with a back or tight end as they go out on their route. Yet for some reason, Miller and Ware played nearly the entire game facing only single blockers, a matchup the Patriots had no chance of winning.

Part of this may come back to the injuries at running back. Blount has his flaws as a runner, but he is a damn good pass protector, and Lewis was a nearly unstoppable weapon out of the backfield during the first half of the season. The Patriots tried to replicate this sort of player with White, but he only managed to haul in 5 of the 16 passes thrown his way. I haven't seen enough of him to judge his pass protection abilities, but judging by the way the Patriots used him, I have to assume he is totally ineffective as a blocker. But even if this is the case, at a certain point simply having his body in there would have been more valuable than throwing incomplete passes his way over and over again.

This was the close game of the weekend, and there are any number of places we can put the blame for the Patriots defeat. We can give it to Stephen Gostkowski for the missed extra point in the first half (we could, but we shouldn’t). Similarly, we could misplace the blame at Belichick’s feet for passing up multiple field goal opportunities in the fourth quarter (correct decisions both times). We could even blame Brady for not seeing Gronkowski wide open in the back of the endzone on the two point conversion (though I would rather question the playcall that has Brady rolling out of the pocket).

But if I had to identify the main cause for the loss, it has to be the inability or unwillingness to adjust their scheme. Had they been healthy, they would have had more flexibility to adjust to what the Broncos were doing. But as it was, they could only make the same mistakes over and over again, costing Belichick and Brady a shot at another Super Bowl title.

First Overall

As we approach the Championship Round, we find ourselves once again reminded of the greatness of Tom Brady. This is the tenth time that Brady has made it this far in the playoffs, by far an NFL record. This level of consistent success is particularly impressive, considering where Brady started. As the 199^th pick in the 2000 NFL Draft, he was never supposed to be a starting quarterback, much less a first ballot Hall of Famer. And as we enter draft season, Brady stands once again as a reminder that a team can solve their quarterback problem anywhere in the draft.

Of course, if you’re a fan of this argument, you probably shouldn’t look too closely at the other three quarterbacks playing today, each of whom was selected with the very first pick in the draft. In fact, more than a quarter of the starting quarterbacks in the NFL were selected first overall, and over the past five years it has become increasingly clear that the surest way to solve a quarterback problem is to end up with the worst record in the league.

So I decided to have some fun on this occasion. Below I’ve gone through and ranked every quarterback selected first overall between Peyton Manning and Cam Newton, starting from the worst and working my way up to the very best. It is a very interesting group, with a wide variety of career paths, and three of the most interesting will be on the field today, fighting for a chance to make it to the Super Bowl.

2007: Jamarcus Russell

When talking about the biggest draft bust of all time, there are only two possible answers. The first is Ryan Leaf, picked second overall after a player you’ll find lower on the list. The other is Russell, the very first player off the board in 2007.

The debate between who was a bigger disappointment is actually very interesting. Both players were as big a problem off the field as they were on it, so I can’t give either an edge there. Leaf put up worse stats during his time in the NFL, but he played in a more difficult era for quarterbacks, so simply having worse numbers might not do it.

In the end, I think the difference comes down to two things. Leaf was picked second overall, ahead of two surefire Hall of Famers (Randy Moss and Charles Woodson) and a pretty good collection of players. Russell went first overall, ahead of Calvin Johnson, Joe Thomas, Adrian Peterson, Patrick Willis, and Darrelle Revis, all of whom have earned their places in Canton. Add to that the difference in their contracts ($13 million guaranteed to Leaf vs $32 million guaranteed to Russell), and I have to call Jamarcus Russell not just the worst pick on this list, but also the worst of all time.

1999 and 2002: Tim Couch and David Carr

I’m putting these two together because they both belong in the same category, the “what might have been”. These two quarterbacks followed remarkably similar paths, as they were drafted to be the face of an expansion franchise and failed miserably. Based solely on their accomplishments, they should be considered busts, but the circumstances around their careers make these cases more like tragic accidents than cautionary tales.

Prior to the return of the Browns to Cleveland in 1999, the NFL’s last expansion had come in 1995, when Jacksonville and Carolina entered the league. These two teams had remarkable immediate success, both reaching the championship round by their second season. As quickly as they rose, the NFL decided that they had to reevaluate the expansion process during the next round, giving Cleveland and Houston significantly less to work with.

Of course, their course correction went too far in the opposite direction, and when the Browns and Texans spent their first ever selections on quarterbacks, they immediately set up these two players for failure. Carr is the obvious example everyone thinks of, and he is still responsible for two of the three worst sack seasons by a quarterback in NFL history. But Couch was victim of the same circumstances, and under better conditions he may very well have lived up to his draft slot.

It is, of course, impossible to say, which is why I have to put them below every other quarterback on this list. Perhaps it was the team around them, or perhaps these were just two players incapable of playing at a high level in the NFL. Maybe Carr was never good enough to adjust to the talent jump between Fresno State and the NFL. Maybe Couch was another example of a quarterback who put up big numbers in college but failed once he was taken out of his system. I’m tempted to move them past the next quarterback on the list, but as unlucky as they were, I still have to give the edge to someone else lingering on the edge of bust conversation.

2010: Sam Bradford

I’ve never liked Bradford. I didn’t like him coming out of college, I didn’t like him after his Rookie of the Year season, and I don’t like him now, after he put together arguably the best season of his career in Philadelphia. I’ve been consistent on Bradford, but everyone else seems to have changed their positions two or three times.

There are multiple possible narratives we can fit Bradford into. The first is the talented quarterback whose career was ruined by poor coaching and health issues. A fantastic rookie season quickly evaporated behind uninspired play calling and injuries that robbed him of his physical gifts. Another version is that of a fundamentally limited passer who showed flashes when he first entered the league but never had the tools to grow into something more. The league probably should have given up on him years ago, and the fact that he’s likely going to open next season as a starting quarterback is an indictment of the talent in the league right now.

I think it’s a little bit of all of this. Bradford is undoubtedly talented, but he thrived in very specific conditions in college, conditions that couldn’t be replicated in the NFL. Everyone talks about “system quarterbacks” when a player is mobile like Tim Tebow or Robert Griffin III, but Bradford was every bit the system quarterback in Oklahoma’s spread passing attack. When he got to the NFL and was suddenly not standing behind a behemoth wall and throwing to the best athletes on the field, he lacked the tools to take over a game himself.

This is all true, but I do believe there is an alternate reality in which Bradford is a successful NFL player. The scheme he ran in college isn’t all that different from the one New England is running now, and even though he clearly isn’t Tom Brady, the Rams could have found a better way to use him. Chip Kelly actually managed to pull some of that off down the stretch in 2015, but by this point it is too late. Bradford is what he is, a bust of a first overall pick.

2001: Michael Vick

At his best Vick was the most exciting player in the NFL, but excitement was never enough to revolutionize the game in the way many people expected when he was selected first overall. The talent was always undeniable, the arm strength and the elusiveness as a runner, but he wasn’t able to put the full package together.

It’s impossible to talk about Vick without mentioning the dog fighting conviction, which cut into the prime of his career and permanently tarnished whatever legacy he was building. But even if he’d remained in Atlanta, I think he had established the sort of player he was.

His athleticism was always an asset, and he certainly could make enough plays to win his team any game. But in the end, he never had the discipline to truly refine his game, and he was never able to mesh with the NFL as it existed ten years ago. Perhaps things would have been different if he entered the league now, when coaches are more open to trying innovative schemes to support unique talents. But I think the reality is that Vick was always limited, and that as fun as he was to watch, he wasn’t worth the pick that was used on him.

2005: Alex Smith

 

Aaron Rodgers was supposed to be the first overall pick in 2005. This isn’t something I’m just saying in hindsight, not an idea I’m just coming up with after seeing how their careers progressed. For most of the predraft process, Rodgers was the favorite to go first off the board. He was better in college than Smith, from a system that was more suited to an NFL transition, and he had all the local connections to San Francisco.

So why did Smith end up going first? There were a number of factors, all of which seem stupid now. For one, people were worried that Rodgers was just a system quarterback. Cal coach Jeff Tedford had produced five former first round picks, and by this point all five had been ruled off as busts. There were worries that Rodgers would be just another Trent Dilfer or Joey Harrington. The 49ers also wanted someone more mobile, and after succeeding in Urban Meyer’s system at Utah, Smith’s versatility moved him up to the first pick.

Smith is another one who has had an interesting career. I honestly don’t know whether or not to call him a bust, but for his first six years in the league there was absolutely no debate about it. He was bad from the moment he stepped onto the field, and he stayed bad until his career was rescued by Jim Harbaugh. We know what happened after that of course, with an injury leading to his replacement by Colin Kaepernick and eventual trade to Kansas City.

It would have surprised no one if he regressed after leaving Harbaugh, but it turns out that Andy Reid is a pretty damn good coach too. Smith had the best year of his career in 2015, carrying the Chiefs to a ten game winning streak and a playoff victory. He has proven to be worth the two second round picks Kansas City gave up for him, even if he was never worth the pick San Francisco used to take him.

2009: Matthew Stafford

It’s hard to say anything decisive about the career Stafford has put together so far. A couple years ago it looked like he had a chance to become one of the best quarterbacks in the league, as he threw for over 5000 yards and led the Lions to the playoffs. With Stafford at quarterback, Calvin Johnson on the outside, and Ndamukong Suh anchoring the defense, the Lions looked like a team ready to break out.

But they didn’t, and Stafford’s stagnation bears a lot of responsibility for that. His numbers have always been fantastic, but they are propped up by playing in a pass heavy scheme with a truly dominant wide receiver. And now that the Lions look like they’re on a downward trend, with Johnson nowhere near what he used to be and even discussing retirement, there are questions about whether or not they should stick with Stafford as their long term solution at quarterback.

The contract situation is a bit of a problem, but other than that I can’t imagine any reason to part ways with Stafford. This is a team about to enter another rebuilding phase, and I can understand why they wouldn’t want to stick with a big money quarterback through that. But Stafford is still only 27 years old, and if the Lions do things right, they can rebuild the team around him while he’s still in his prime. Things are looking bad for Stafford right now, but he is the sort of player I can see having a late career resurgence, much like one of the quarterbacks we’ll get to further down the list.

2011: Cam Newton

Newton is the most recent draft pick on this list (I decided to exclude Andrew Luck and Jameis Winston because they haven’t been around long enough), but he has already earned a high spot, and could climb even higher by the end of his career. He is likely to walk away from this season with the league’s MVP, one of only two players on this list to claim that award. After some ups and downs over his first few seasons, he has developed into one of the best players in the NFL, and he has a chance to earn a championship this year to further his growing legacy.

I have to admit that I was wrong about Newton. I thought he was a borderline first round pick, a quarterback who dominated by running in college but would struggle when forced into the NFL’s pass heavy system. I underestimated him on two counts. First of all, he was a much better passer coming into the league than I realized, as he demonstrated by setting an NFL record for passing yards in a debut. And second, he has grown better than I expected, in five years turning into one of the preeminent passers in the league.

I cannot stress this last point enough. Newton has a reputation as a mobile quarterback, and he certainly has the skills to justify this. He is an absolute weapon in the running game, either through read option plays or designed quarterback keepers. But unlike some other mobile quarterbacks (notably Vick), he is at his best when throwing from the pocket.

Carolina isn’t a very heavily watched team, so it’s understandable that people have some misconceptions. But if you really watch the Panthers this weekend, you’ll be surprised by what you see from Newton. Unlike other mobile quarterbacks like Alex Smith and Russell Wilson, the majority of the damage Newton does with his legs comes on designed carries. When a play is called as a pass, he almost always completes the play from the pocket. In fact, he actually could probably benefit from being more aggressive with his legs, not that he needs much improvement. Newton was the best player in the league this season, and he could very easily hold onto that title for the next five years.

2003: Carson Palmer

The two quarterbacks facing each other in the NFC Championship Game find themselves back to back on my rankings, and in truth I could have put them in either order. I gave Palmer the edge for now due to longevity, but I think before long Newton will climb past him on the list. But for now I give the edge to Palmer in this one, even though I think Newton will beat him for the MVP this year and for the game this weekend.

Of all the players on this list, Palmer may have had the most fascinating career. He’s the only one not to start a game his rookie year, sitting for an entire season on the bench behind Jon Kitna. But when he did make it onto the field, he absolutely exploded, quickly earning the title of best young quarterback in the league. In 2005 he finished fourth in the league in passing yards, second in quarterback rating, first in completion percentage, and first in touchdowns. He led the Bengals to the playoffs for the first time since 1990, and on his very first pass of the game he completed a 66 yard bomb to get the Bengals in position to take an early lead.

Unfortunately, he also suffered a torn ACL on that play, ending any hopes the Bengals had of a playoff run. The Steelers went on to win that game and eventually the Super Bowl, and Ben Roethlisberger took over as the preeminent young quarterback in the AFC North. Palmer came back in time to start the opening game of the next season, but he was never the same in Cincinnati. He toiled along as a slightly above average quarterback for the next five years, another case of what might have been.

In 2011 the Bengals used a second round pick on Andy Dalton, signaling the impending end of the Palmer era. For obvious reasons, this upset Palmer, and he announced that he would rather retire than play for the Bengals. And for the first half of the 2011 season, that’s exactly what he did, until Jason Campbell’s injury in Oakland forced the Raiders to sell everything they had to get Palmer. But that was the era of Oakland as a death trap for veteran players, and after a year and a half there he was shipped out to Arizona for a sixth round pick.

That was supposed to be the end of Carson Palmer, but clearly it wasn’t. Somehow, ten years and two torn ACLs removed from his breakout year, Palmer finally became one of the best quarterbacks in the league. While he isn’t a Hall of Famer, he has certainly shown himself to be one of the best of the next level, and even though he’s put together a damn fine career (which definitely still has more to be written), it’s hard not to wonder what he could have been.

2004: Eli Manning

Eli Manning is the quarterback for the New York Giants, which means everyone already knows everything there is to know about him. Younger brother of a superstar, he went first overall to San Diego, then was immediately shipped to the Giants. He got off to a slow start to his career, not truly breaking out until the Super Bowl run in 2007. He’s been up and down since then, putting together some very good seasons to go along with some decidedly mediocre ones.

Manning is the third best quarterback to come out of his draft class, but when the time comes for the Hall of Fame to give him consideration, his two championships will likely get him in. And he has certainly earned those championships, playing at a spectacularly high level in both games (even if he probably doesn’t deserve two Super Bowl MVPs). This is a rare situation where things worked out for everyone. Eli got to play in a big market, the Chargers got the superior player in Rivers, and the Giants got two championships. If Manning has been disappointing at times, that’s only reasonable. It’s a rare quarterback who can constantly live up to the superstar billing.

1998: Peyton Manning

And now we come to it, that rare quarterback. There isn’t much to say about Manning that hasn’t already been said. He struggled some at the very start of his career, but for nearly fifteen years he was among the five best quarterbacks in the league, often at the very top of the list. Five MVPs, just about every passing record you can name, and insane success during the regular season. He is the greatest quarterback the NFL has ever seen, and I almost wish I didn’t have to address the one thing everyone will continue to hold against his legacy.

But in the end, it is about Super Bowls, and over the course of his career Manning only has two appearances and a single victory. Time and time again he came up short in the playoffs, a blemish that stands in particularly sharp contrast to his contemporary Tom Brady. The two face each other once again today to decide which of them will make another appearance in the Super Bowl, and right now everything seems to be in Brady’s favor, with Manning playing like a shell of his former self.

But that’s the thing about judging quarterbacks by championships. While it certainly helps to have a superstar under center, no single player can win a championship by himself. And for the first time in nearly a decade, Manning is actually at the head of a more talented team than Brady. If the Broncos manage to win a championship this year, it will be because of their defense and their running game, not because of the Hall of Famer they have at quarterback.

And that would be as fitting an end as any to Manning’s career. His teammates have held him back for far too long, and if he was put in the exact same situation as Brady he likely would have just as many Super Bowls, perhaps even more. A second ring wouldn’t be diminished at all by his ineffectiveness this year, because he has already done more than enough to earn it. Football is a team sport, and there is no greater example of this than Manning, the most valuable individual player the league has ever seen stuck with only a single championship as he draws near the end of his career.

The Slimmest of Margins

When you actually sit down and think about it, the NFL playoffs are kind of ridiculous. In every other professional American sport, the playoffs are conducted as a series of games, either five or seven contests to pick out the better team. And more often than not, the better team is the one that advances, and the champion is usually the most deserving team in the field.

That isn’t the case in the NFL. In the NFL you only get one shot, and it only takes one game to end a team’s season. Looking at the playoff field now, with the top two seeds remaining on each side, it’s easy enough to proclaim them the four best teams in the league, that this was inevitable over the entire course of the season.

This ignores the reality of just how close each of the four games were on Sunday. In every one of the games, the final margin of victory was within a single score, and in every one of the games, the losing team had an opportunity to pull it out late, either with the ball in their hands or a chance to get it back. In all four games the two teams that played were extremely evenly matched, and in the end it came down to a few small factors to decide that New England, Arizona, Carolina, and Denver were the ones to advance while Kansas City, Green Bay, Seattle, and Pittsburgh were sent home for the season.

Luck

The first factor is one I’ve discussed often enough before, and one every losing fan ends up grumbling about at the end of the game. Sometimes (a lot of the time) a football game can come down to a few lucky or unlucky bounces. Fumble recoveries, deflected passes, onside kicks. There is so much randomness involved in a game that it often becomes difficult to extract who got lucky and who got screwed.

There may not be a game in the history of the league that exemplifies this better than the contest between Green Bay and Arizona. This game was sheer lunacy, from the very beginning and ramping up as it reached its conclusion. Plenty of Packers fans (and players) have complained about the outcome of overtime, in which Arizona won the coin toss and proceeded to score without giving the ball back to the Packers.

There are a couple of things I want to go into here. First was the coin toss. In a game as ridiculous as this, it actually doesn’t seem that absurd that something as simple as throwing a coin into the air would go awry. Somehow the referee managed to toss the coin up into the air without getting it to turn over even a single time (I just spent ten minutes trying to pull this off in my apartment, and it is actually pretty doable). The first toss came up in Arizona’s favor, and the Packers demanded it be redone, which the referee did without much hesitation. In this case I think the referee actually screwed up, since there’s no reason to believe the initial throw was in any way biased. Fortunately, the second toss came up for the Cardinals again, so no one could complain. Except for Aaron Rodgers, who protested that he wasn’t given a chance to pick another random outcome after the first random outcome failed to go his way.

And then there is the overtime rule. A lot of people were upset after the Cardinals scored, angry that the Packers didn’t have the opportunity to get the ball themselves. This happens every time a game goes like this, and I have a feeling we’ll eventually see the overtime rules tweaked again, either giving both teams a chance to possess the ball or going to the idiotic college system.

But as the system works right now, I don’t think it needs any changes. A couple years ago there was a problem, as kickers became so strong and so accurate that a team realistically only needed to reach the opponent’s 40 yardline to have a chance to win the game. They changed the rule, and now on the first possession a touchdown is required to end things, a system that should be perfectly acceptable. If a team is told that all they have to do is keep the opposing offense out of the endzone and their offense will come on the field with a chance to win the game, that should be a perfectly reasonable request. If they can’t do this, then they don’t deserve to win the game. And if it really is such a guarantee that the first team will score a touchdown, then we need to look at the rules that make it so easy for them to score, not the rules that reward them for doing so.

The Packers may complain about luck going against them in overtime, but they got plenty that went in their favor in regulation. The Hail Mary is the obvious example, but even before that they got a ten point swing after Rodgers’s brutal pick-six was erased by a penalty that had no effect on the play. And the Cardinals had their share of luck as well, with the dropped Carson Palmer interception on the goalline followed by miraculous deflection touchdown.

And that’s the truth about luck. Here or there it may swing a game, but the breaks we remember are always the breaks that go in the favor of the winning team, when in truth a football game has so much randomness that it usually balances out in the end.

Health

Football is a brutal game, and every team suffers injuries over the course of the season. But each year there are some that have it worse than others, and some that have to deal with injuries at the worst possible time. The Cincinnati Bengals are a perfect example of this, a team that was rolling steadily along until Andy Dalton went down with a broken thumb and left them with no choice but to start AJ McCarron in their playoff loss.

We saw a couple more examples of that in the first round of the playoffs. The Panthers-Seahawks contest was the only one of the weekend that wasn’t competitive from start to finish, thanks to an explosive first half from Carolina that allowed them to endure a second half surge from the Seahawks. Carolina’s offense definitely deserves credit for how they were able to ram the ball down the throat of Seattle’s defense, but a bigger factor was the utter domination of the Seahawks offense. The very first series set the tone for what we would see the rest of the half, as Carolina started by stuffing a run in the backfield followed by a pick-six that was caused by pressure in Russell Wilson’s face.

For the first half of the game, Carolina absolutely dominated Seattle’s offensive line. This is a unit that was bad from the start of the season, then had to deal with injuries, which only got worse when Russell Okung went down in the first half. At full strength this line might have been able to at least hold their ground, but as they were there was nothing they could do to stop Carolina from sprinting out to an insurmountable lead.

Green Bay was hurt by injuries as well, and like Seattle’s theirs were at one particular position. By the end of the game the best receiver they could put out on the field was James Jones, and they were stuck throwing to Jeff Janis down the stretch. (Random trivia: Janis had 101 yards receiving on the final drive alone, which isn’t actually an NFL record. That record belongs to Mike Evans, who had 104 yards receiving on a single drive in 2014.) It certainly didn’t help matters, but their passing offense wasn’t the reason they lost the game, and it’s unlikely that the presence of Randall Cobb or Davante Adams would have significantly swung the outcome. If both had been healthy and Jordy Nelson was still around, maybe things would have been different, but that was a ship that sailed a long time ago.

The one team that can truly point to injuries as the reason for their loss is Pittsburgh. Coming into the game everyone’s focus was on the previous weekend’s injuries to Antonio Brown and Ben Roethlisberger, and those certainly did have an impact on the game. Roethlisberger looked mostly fine despite playing with ligament damage in his shoulder, and even though their passing offense worked to surprising effectiveness against the Broncos defense, Brown is the sort of player who can’t be replaced. The Steelers moved the ball thanks to big plays to Martavis Bryant, Darrius Heyward-Bey, and Sammie Coates, but they didn’t have a reliable underneath threat to keep their offense running smoothly from the beginning to the end of the game.

When it comes to injuries we tend to turn our attention to whatever is most recent, and this is a case where we overlooked the biggest hole on Pittsburgh’s offense. Fitzgerald Toussaint and Jordan Todman performed effectively enough against Cincinnati, but it was inevitable that the absence of Pittsburgh’s top two running backs would come back to bite them. And it certainly did, with a game changing fumble by Toussaint as Pittsburgh was driving at the edge of field goal range with the lead in the fourth quarter. This is the sort of play that likely wouldn’t have happened with DeAngelo Williams in the game, and certainly wouldn’t have happened with Le’Veon Bell. Through three seasons in the league Bell has fumbled exactly one time, and his reliability as a ball handler is just another part of what makes him the best back in the league.

A season ruined by injuries sucks, but the Steelers have to be optimistic going into next year. If they can keep their offense healthy—including the return of Maurkice Pouncey and Kelvin Beachum on the offensive line—this could be a historically great group. Against Denver they showed that they have the best and deepest group of receivers in the league, to go along with a quarterback who just makes plays no matter what is happening around them. Their defense looked strong as well, and if they can make some improvements to the secondary, this team has a very reasonable case to make as the Super Bowl favorites going into 2016.

Coaching

So far I’ve talked about luck and injuries, two factors outside a team’s control. But now I get to something that is entirely within a team’s control, yet something that can be just as enigmatic. Coaching is the great immeasurable of the NFL, but it should surprise no one that arguably the three best coaches in the league are among the four left alive. (Gary Kubiak is an exception, but you could make an argument that Peyton Manning is a great enough football mind to lift a mediocre coach.)

This past weekend, we saw excellent examples of just what a difference coaching could make. The most obvious was in the one game I haven’t touched on yet, the contest between Bill Belichick’s New England Patriots and Andy Reid’s Kansas City Chiefs. Late in the game down by two touchdowns, the Chiefs showed a stunning lack of urgency in getting the first score they needed, letting the clock run down to the two minute warning then actually huddling up with time running after that. The odds were always long against them, but their use of the clock stripped them of whatever hope they had, letting New England’s defense off the hook and pushing them to the next round.

Reid has been an NFL coach for a very long time, and at this point everyone knows about his shortcomings in clock management. But Saturday’s defeat was astounding even for him, and he needs to spend this offseason seriously reconsidering how he manages games. Because Reid is a very, very good coach, as evidenced by the consistent success he’s had at both of his stops, and this one major flaw may be the only thing holding him back from competing for a championship. The Chiefs are probably still a step below New England on a talent level, but Reid’s coaching kept them in the game, until his coaching knocked them out of it.

The one game in which the better coach lost was the Pittsburgh-Denver contest, and in a lot of ways it swung on a poor decision by Mike Tomlin. Tomlin has done an underrated job this season, leading his team to the playoff despite all the injuries I mentioned above plus four regular season games without Roethlisberger. He was the only coach in the league to truly embrace going for two, and his aggression in playing for a touchdown on the final play against San Diego got Pittsburgh a win that proved crucial to making the postseason.

And yet, he still has occasional lapses in decision making that are as baffling as they are misguided. In the cases I mentioned above he showed aggression that helped push his team over the top, but he also has a conservative streak that holds the Steelers back. We saw this in Sunday’s game, when he elected to punt the ball from the 34 yardline rather than trying a long field goal.

Tomlin has always been strangely reluctant to trust his kickers on long field goals, and even though Chris Boswell has been playing extremely well, he didn’t get the chance for a makeable kick. 52 yards is definitely within his range (I personally saw him put a 60 yarder off the crossbar in a game between Northwestern and Rice in 2011), and he was absolutely booming the ball in the high altitude of Denver.

It’s impossible to say exactly what would have happened the rest of the game, but if he had made the kick it would have extended the Steelers lead to four points. When the Broncos scored later, they would have kicked the extra point rather than going for two, and the Steelers would have gotten the ball back needing a field goal to tie rather than a touchdown. And even if they had failed on the ensuing drive like they did in reality, a Broncos field goal would have kept it to a one score game, giving Pittsburgh the ball back with an opportunity to win it with a touchdown.

Lapses like these are difficult to defend, not like the grayer circumstances we saw in the two NFC games. There’s been some talk about whether Green Bay should have gone for two after completing their Hail Mary pass, and while some very strong cases have been made, I am still rather ambivalent on the subject. I don’t think the percentages are strongly weighted in one direction or the other, and I wouldn’t have had any problem with either decision McCarthy made.

Instead I want to talk about a decision made by Bruce Arians on the play before, the completed Hail Mary that allowed the Packers to be in that situation. I’ve looked into Hail Mary passes a bit in the past, and I have some very strong opinions about how they should be defended. I despise teams that send only a three man rush, and I was excited as anyone when I saw the Cardinals lining up to bring seven rushers. This is a strategy that should be able to work, getting to the quarterback before the receivers have a chance to make it to the endzone.

It failed in this situation because Rodgers managed to escape the pocket. If they had kept him contained, there is no way he could have completed the pass, and at first I blamed poor design for sending such a lopsided blitz. With seven players rushing, they could easily have spared two to keep contain. As someone who despises the Packers, I was furious with the Cardinals coaches, until I saw a replay of the play in question. It turns out that they did have someone in contain, one of their best players Calais Campbell. He came up the field and bent inwards, keeping his outside arm free in textbook technique. And it would have worked too, if it wasn’t for one of the most egregious holds I have ever seen by David Bakhtiari.

Again, it comes back to luck. Sometimes the ref throws the flag, sometimes he doesn’t. It worked out for Arizona in the end thanks to some more aggressive coaching, and I hope in the future they don’t let this one failure stop them from using similar tactics in the future.

Another difficult and controversial decision occurred in the Seahawks-Panthers game. Late in the first half, Pete Carroll elected to send his offense out for a fourth and 5 rather than attempting a field goal. They failed and went into halftime down 31-0, in a decision that seemed meaningless at the time. It didn’t seem quite so meaningless late in the fourth quarter, when the Seahawks were down ten and a field goal would have made things a one score game.

This is a case of hindsight ignoring some very important details. Seattle was down 31 points at the time of the decision, and Carroll knew that he had to be aggressive if he had any hope of getting back into the game. This same aggression that failed him in the first half proved to be vital in the second half, as the Seahawks launched deep shot after deep shot to claw their way back into the game. That’s the thing about aggressive coaching decisions. Sometimes they don’t work out, and the coach has to face the blame for the consequences. But in the long run they average out to help a team more than they hurt it, and that’s why three of the most aggressive head coaches in the league are still alive right now.