Wild Card Weekend is about to kick off a frenzied, action-packed scramble for a spot in Super Bowl LIX, which will end in one of the 14 playoff teams claiming the Lombardi Trophy. Get ready to go on a heck of a ride!
Or if you want to know how it’s all going to play out right now, just scroll down to the see the predicted outcome of every postseason game, right down to the eventual champions, presented in one handy graphic.
Of course it is folly to actually expect this exact sequence of events to unfold. Some years, a top-seeded team rolls unimpeded to a title, as happened in five consecutive years (from the 2013 playoffs through ’17). Other years, the champion has had the No. 2 seed or lower, as happened in all but five of the past six postseasons. And the opening weekend nearly always features an upset; for seven straight seasons, at least one lower-seeded team has defeated a higher-seeded team to advance out of the Wild Card Round, including last year, when the Packers (No. 7) stunned the Cowboys (No. 2).
In short, when the editors behind NFL.com’s weekly game picks file (Brooke Cersosimo, Dan Parr, Ali Bhanpuri, Gennaro Filice and Tom Blair) convened to fill out the entire playoff bracket, we did not expect to get everything right. As you’ll see in our breakdowns of our predictions below, we even have a sense of what we might have gotten wrong. We did want to make a reasonable, informed forecast, with a consensus drawn from group deliberation, of how the next few chaotic weeks will unfold.
Without further ado, the road to Super Bowl LIX: