Hello everyone and welcome to wildcard weekend!

It’s been a crazy season, with some very bipolar teams, at least going by the swings in rankings.

The playoff seedings are finally all put in place. But I find it interesting every year to examine the playoff seedings according to the Beatpaths Power Rankings. According to the end-of-regular-season rankings, the rankings would be as follows:

AFC:
#1: San Diego
#2: New England
#3: Indianapolis
#4: Cincinnati
#5: Pittsburgh
#6: Tennessee

So, this week we’d be seeing Pittsburgh@Cincinnati, and Tennessee@Indianapolis. It’s obvious that if the seedings had been threatened, Indianapolis would have played harder the final two weeks of the season – since the Beatpaths graph is so interdependent, it would be one way to ensure that teams play hard through the final week. And so maybe we’d be seeing Tennessee@New England instead, a fascinating rematch given the blowout earlier this season. Overall, I think this is a much more interesting set of matchups than what we actually have. Also, Pittsburgh and Tennessee are both ranked ahead of the NY Jets and Baltimore. Miami is also ranked ahead of Baltimore. Overall though, it’s hard to say that any particular teams got screwed, though – both Pittsburgh and Tennessee underperformed their potential this season, significantly at times.

NFC:
#1: New Orleans
#2: Philadelphia
#3: Minnesota
#4: San Francisco
#5: Dallas
#6: Atlanta

The NFC continues to be fascinating because of the structural deficiencies of the scheduling system and the NFC West. Like the last two seasons, there are several teams that are more deserving of being in the playoffs than the NFC West champion. But that’s not the only oddity. Dallas is actually the 3rd-ranked NFC team. Atlanta is ranked ahead of Green Bay. San Francisco actually outranks Arizona by one slot, so they are the NFC West champion. But the other teams that get screwed by the NFC West include Carolina and the NY Giants. And if you add in the AFC, we’re looking at even Houston and Denver being ranked ahead of the NFC West champs. At any rate, this week we’d be looking at a couple of intriguing games – Atlanta@Minnesota, which I think would be a quite entertaining matchup, and Dallas@San Francisco! That’s practically a throwback game. It’ll be a good day for the NFL when San Francisco is back in the playoffs.

On to the picks. Isaacson-Tarbell and Beatpaths were 8-8 last week, while ITB went 9-7. All were slightly hurt by the unpredictability of Week 17, but overall this was a good season in terms of accuracy. There are no BeatPicks for the wildcard round. Enjoy!

	Isaacson-Tarbell	Beatpaths	Isaacson-Tarbell-Beatpaths
Record So Far	157-99	167-89	165-91
Last Week	8-8	8-8	9-7
NY Jets (9-7) at Cincinnati (10-6): We’ve got #13 at #8 here. All the methods would agree that Cincinnati is the clear pick here. It’s hard to go against that pick – I’m one to believe that revenge games one week later are always going to greatly advantage the team that lost the first week. And Cincinnati is at home now.	CIN	CIN	CIN
Philadelphia (11-5) at Dallas (11-5): We have another revenge game here, and again I think that Philadelphia will have the advantage here, despite Dallas playing at home. Isaacson-Tarbell would pick Dallas just because they’re the home team, but both Beatpaths and ITB pick Philadelphia for being more highly ranked. Dallas is closely ranked behind Philadelphia, close enough that home field advantage could mean Dallas is a higher percentage pick, but the official pick is Philadelphia, and I think they’ll bounce back anyway. Still, this is a close one.	DAL	PHI	PHI
Baltimore (9-7) at New England (10-6): New England is very highly ranked at this point in the season – weird that it’s New England that feels like they’re sneaking to the top. Baltimore is ranked quite far back at #15. This is a clear pick for New England.	NE	NE	NE
Green Bay (11-5) at Arizona (10-6): Yet another rematch. I don’t know if other people find this exciting, but it kind of bores me. Arizona took quite a tumble in the rankings recently, and so we have #11 at #21 now. Still, Arizona has been one of the leapfrogging teams this season, so who knows what team personality will become dominant. All three methods pick Green Bay.	GB	GB	GB