The playoffs are here and I, for one, can’t wait. Less than five weeks from now we’ll know who won the Super Bowl. Isn’t that kinda neat? So much will happen in the remaining 13 games. As sports fans, we do all this world-building, keeping track of the backstories of 32 teams and the countless players and personalities involved, and every year we get this month-long crucible that we place so much importance on.

I was thinking recently about how I’m now at the age where I can remember watching more than half of the Super Bowls that have ever been played. Sometimes I count them backward like sheep when I can’t fall asleep. We’re about to add another one.

One of these teams will go on a magical run that its fan base will cherish forever. Some other historically significant figures (as far as football players go) will have a career-defining moment—positive or negative. We may see an all-time game or highlight. There are kids who will someday think back to these playoffs as the first games they can remember.

It’s the best.

In that spirit, here are four story lines I’m looking forward to that will be fun about this season’s playoffs.

Will a post-2018 quarterback finally win the Super Bowl?

One of my favorite random fun facts about the NFL right now is that no quarterback drafted in 2018 or after has won the Super Bowl. This is not a commentary on the quality of the quarterbacks who have entered the league in the past seven draft cycles. It’s largely a Patrick Mahomes stat.

Mahomes and his achievements (three titles, two MVPs, six consecutive AFC title games, various records) hang over everybody else in the league. In the seven completed seasons since he was drafted, the Super Bowl–winning QBs have been Mahomes three times, Tom Brady twice, Matthew Stafford and Nick Foles. And this is despite a glut of spectacular young quarterbacks, some of whom already look like they’ll be no-doubt Hall of Famers.

Here are some quarterbacks drafted after 2017 that Mahomes has personally taken out of the playoffs: Josh Allen three times, Joe Burrow, Lamar Jackson, Jalen Hurts, Trevor Lawrence, Baker Mayfield, Brock Purdy and Tua Tagovailoa.

It reminds me of the way some all-time NBA stars of the ’90s never won any titles, and Michael Jordan is the reason. Will we someday look back at a few of these quarterbacks as Mahomes’s Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing, John Stockton and Karl Malone?

Speaking of: This summer, I asked my MMQB colleagues to go through an exercise where we all predicted who will win the next five Super Bowls. It sounds easy, but if you take the thought exercise seriously, it’s harder than you might think.

You may believe that Burrow, Allen and/or Jackson will surely get one. Maybe the Philadelphia Eagles, Detroit Lions or some other frequent contender. But they can’t all win. Plus, of course, how many more trophies will Mahomes get? Someone will get shut out in the next five years. Some may get shut out in their whole careers. Drew Brees and Aaron Rodgers are all-timers, and both only played in one Super Bowl. (By the way: I invite you to take part in the exercise, too. You can find me on Twitter or Bluesky if you want to go on the record with your picks.)

Ringz Culture has infected sports debate, and in that respect, Mahomes has already gotten a massive head start. He has another great shot to knock some young guys out and win the thing again. If he doesn’t, I’ll be interested to see whether one of these post-2017 contemporaries will finally get on the board.

Dan Campbell’s game-management decisions

As the Lions have risen to prominence, Campbell has threaded an interesting needle. He’s been an obvious darling of the league; and yet, even though what he’s done has clearly worked, he has also become a bit of a lightning rod for his aggressive decision making.

I think it hit a tipping point with two games in early December. Against the Green Bay Packers in Week 14 (in a prime-time game, which always adds to the scrutiny), he went for a fourth-and-1 inside of field goal range, in a tie game with under a minute left. The following week was the loss to the Buffalo Bills, in which he was down 10 points with 12 minutes left and called for an onside kick that was returned to the 5-yard line.

I loved the call against the Packers, though I know many people didn’t. And I didn’t hate the onside kick as vehemently as most people after the Bills game. Both were during a stretch of the season when injuries were really piling up and the team hadn’t quite stabilized things on that side of the ball. Needing one yard against the Packers, Campbell let his offense win the game. And the onside kick was a disaster (and Campbell took the blame for it immediately), but I thought that was less about being aggressive and more about being desperate. He saw the writing on the wall and was willing to try anything to keep somewhat slim hopes alive.

Campbell found his way back in the debate show crosshairs when his team went all-out to win a meaningless (in the standings) Week 17 game against the Niners instead of resting up for the crucial showdown against the Vikings for the NFC’s No. 1 seed. I think people conflate all these very different situations and detect a sort of willy-nilly, be-aggressive-for-the-sake-of-being-aggressive attitude that I don’t think is really his angle. 

Anyway, to my point: Campbell is maybe the most self-assured man in the NFL. He doesn’t need anyone to protect him from himself. And again, what he’s doing has worked really well!

I tweeted this a month ago, and it may be what drove me to write this whole post.

It really is beautiful the way these tiny moments and decisions hold vast sway over how the history of the league unfolds. This is what makes it all so compelling. Sometimes big risks work out (Philly Special, Saints’ surprise onside kick), sometimes they don’t (Kyle Shanahan taking the ball first in overtime). But Campbell facing game-management decisions will be one of the most exciting subplots of these playoffs. I’m ready to watch how far he’ll take things, whether the moves work out and whether his counterparts on the opposite sideline feel compelled to be more aggressive to keep up with him (I thought Kevin O’Connell did early in the Week 18 game).

I’m not saying I agree with every decision Campbell’s ever made or will make in the future. But I support his decision to do it his way and I think the league is more exciting with a character like him in it. 

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The Vikings won 14 games this season, but will begin the playoffs on the road. | Matt Krohn-Imagn Images

Defending the NFL’s playoff format

This may be the least popular note in this column, but I like the NFL playoff format as it is. (I thought it was perfect when it had 12 teams. I loved the bye weeks for No. 2 seeds and the symmetry it created with tiers of the top two division winners in each conference getting byes, and the other two playing on wild-card weekend and then having to go on the road the next week … but that’s a topic for another day.)

But one complaint that crops up most years when applicable is the idea of wild-card entrants going on the road to face division champions with worse records than they have. This year is notable, with three such matchups, one involving a team with a particularly gaudy record. As you probably know by now, the 11–6 Los Angeles Chargers will visit the 10–7 Houston Texans, the 12–5 Washington Commanders will visit the 10–7 Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the 14–3 Minnesota Vikings will visit the 10–7 Los Angeles Rams.

I like it! I like that winning your division means something. The NFL has unbalanced schedules, and intra-division rivals have very similar slates of opponents—only three games per year against teams the rest of your division doesn’t face—which can have a significant impact on your season win total. Those teams should be compared to each other with a reward for the winner.

I wrote a piece in January 2016 defending the idea of division champions getting to stay home on wild-card weekend no matter what. To update a few of the numbers: Since the NFL realigned into its current divisional format in 2002, there have been 29 playoff games in which a division champion hosted a team with a better record. The division champs have gone 16–13. That’s hardly a death sentence (and it was 14–13 until two division champs won those types of games last season).

Another point I made in 2016 is that this stuff often evens out over time. If you are part of a fan base complaining about it one year, you may benefit from it the next. So just give in to a fun quirk of the format and enjoy the ride. This year the Buccaneers get to host the Commanders. In January 2021, the same two teams met in the reverse situation, with the 7–9 Commanders hosting the 11–5 Bucs. Tampa took care of business on the road and went on to win the Super Bowl.

I get that it may look strange and feel unfair, but I do think the Texans, Rams and Buccaneers deserve home playoff games. I also think the heat gets turned up more when it’s a bad division champion with a below-.500 record hosting a playoff game. But that’s not the case this year.

If you fancy yourself a Super Bowl contender, you should be able to beat a 10–7 team on the road. Seeing some good teams having to go on the road is one of the things I’m looking forward to this year.

Kicking questions

This one might not be fun for a few fan bases, but shaky kicking has the chance to introduce a dash of unpredictability as the playoffs unfold. This season began as the year of the kicker, until suddenly a lot of big names started missing halfway through the year.

Three of the best teams in the postseason have kicking issues worth noting. Justin Tucker’s struggles this season have been well documented, though he has not missed a kick since the Baltimore Ravens’ bye week (three field goals and 18 extra points). Harrison Butker has a new form in which his follow-through takes his plant leg all the way down to the ground. It may have contributed to a knee injury and an IR stint. Either way, he has not hit at his usual high percentage this year. And Jake Elliott, a longtime reliable leg who kicked in both of the Eagles’ recent Super Bowls, went just 1-for-7 on field goals of 50-plus yards this season, finally making one from exactly 50 yards in Week 16.

While the Super Bowl will be indoors at the Superdome (not that that makes every kick a gimme), weather may be a factor in the earlier rounds of the playoffs. With Kansas City, Buffalo and Baltimore the top three seeds in the AFC, Tucker and Butker are guaranteed to be outside for every AFC playoff game, likely in some cold weather. And the Eagles’ first two games would be outside in Philly, with the only possibility of playing indoors if they face Detroit in the NFC championship game.

Some of you may not see the idea of the whole season coming down to a kick in inclement weather as fun, but it will definitely add to the drama. Even in clear skies, we’ll have not just the specter of a missed kick, but the coaches faced with decisions about whether to kick at all. Get ready for zoomed-in camera shots of players at the NFL’s loneliest position taking those heavy sighs as they stare across half the field in the game’s tensest moments.

There are so many other stories that’ll be fun to track. I feel like many of the top story lines have been written and talked about all year, which is natural when you’ve got the Kansas City Chiefs going for the first Super Bowl three-peat, a Lions team that’s 0-for-the Super Bowl era coming in as a No. 1 seed, a possible Super Bowl matchup between Bills and Vikings teams that are both 0–4 in the big game, a possible Harbaugh brothers rematch and so much more. If the Chiefs win it all, there will be a lot of talk about what a fourth ring does for Mahomes and Andy Reid. But did you know that if the Chiefs even make the Super Bowl, Reid will top Bill Belichick for the most playoff games ever coached at 45?

I love this time of year, as you can probably tell. I’ll get into so much more of all this next week with my annual ranking of the 16 possible Super Bowl matchups after the wild-card round. But let’s see how these six games play out first. 


This article was originally published on www.si.com as Four Fun Story Lines Heading Into the NFL Playoffs.