The NFL’s Super Wild Card Weekend, replete with the first-ever Monday Night Football playoff game, was a bust.
The 2022 playoff debut was a smorgasbord of sloppy play and blowout wins. The Cincinnati Bengals won their first playoff game in three decades because the Las Vegas Raiders spent much of the first half finding new and creative ways to shoot themselves in the foot. The Dallas Cowboys lost for several reasons, chief among them a quarterback draw play called with 14 seconds left and zero timeouts in a six-point game. Two-thirds of the games in the opening round of the playoffs were decided by 16 points or more.
The landscape is much more appealing in the Divisional Round. The Tennessee Titans and Green Bay Packers join the fray after earning byes through the regrettable three-day appetizer of bean curd and expired string cheese the Wild Card round cooked up. Matthew Stafford’s prove-it tour takes a detour though Tampa against a quarterback with 34 more playoff wins than he has. The Buffalo Bills and Kansas City Chiefs may be the truest Super Bowl of 2022.
This weekend isn’t just about compelling matchups; it’s also an opportunity to find some value in the betting and daily fantasy landscape. Wild Card Weekend was a fairly predictable slog for the chalky teams out there, but it threw some curveballs our way when it came to prop bets and unheralded players rising to the top (Jerick McKinnon!).
Let’s see if we can’t hammer down a few solid predictions for the Divisional Round. All odds via Tipico.