The 2022 NFL regular season is over. Fourteen teams have emerged from the scattered wreckage of an 18-week chain reaction of explosions with Super Bowl 57 dreams still intact.
Wild Card weekend, split into a three-day, six game extravaganza, will be the end of the line for six of those teams. The Divisional Round will shed four more. There may be an odd contender or two in the mix of broken hearts — at least one of the AFC’s power broker contingent of the Kansas City Chiefs, Buffalo Bills and Cincinnati Bengals is guaranteed to be there. But for the most part, the teams who lose en route to the conference championships will be road underdogs whose promising stories were always a longshot to end in Arizona.
Who makes up the wheat and who is the chaff in this situation? Anything is possible in the NFL, particularly when the New York Giants are part of the mix. But a 14-team field with only one bye for either conference leaves few gilded roads to the Super Bowl and many more covered in potholes and broken plays.
Knowing that, which team has the brightest Lombardi Trophy hopes at the start of the 2023 NFL Playoffs? And who’ll need a healthy dose of turnover luck to fire off a Cinderella run to the biggest game of the year?