Sunday Wild-Card Liveblog: Bengals, Ravens Go for Round 3

We’re still not over that Jaguars comeback on Saturday night, as Jacksonville went from one of the more embarrassing showings we’ve seen in some time to the third-biggest comeback in NFL playoff history. Never doubt the Chargers’ ability to Charger!

Can any of today’s games live up to that one? We’re a bit skeptical. Two of them, disappointingly, will have backups starting. The Dolphins are forced to turn to Skyler Thompson to take on the Bills, while the Ravens look to start Tyler Huntley against the Bengals. With Tua Tagovailoa and Lamar Jackson, these would be more-or-less even matchups of the top teams in the conference. With the reserves, it becomes a pair of underdogs looking to make some history.

And then there’s the middle matchup today, a battle between two teams with negative DVOA. In most years, the New York Giants would be the luckiest team in the playoffs, with Brian Daboll standing on his head to propel an on-paper inferior team into the playoffs. But not in 2022, where the Minnesota Vikings managed to go 13-4 despite having a negative point differential. The Vikings managed to go 11-0 in one-score games, ending up as the ninth-worst playoff team in NFL history. And yet, they’ve been dealt a comparatively easy hand. One of them does have to win and move on — we know, we checked the rulebooks. It’s a golden opportunity for either team, and we’ll see who can best take advantage of it today!

And we’ll be covering today’s matchups live in today’s edition of the Football Outsiders liveblog. We’ll be here throughout all three playoff games, from the Dolphins and the Bills in the early window, through the Giants-Vikings game and to the end of the Ravens-Bengals nightcap. And because we’re live, you can participate in the discussion as well! Join in on the conversation — either in the comment section in this article, on Twitter by tagging @FBOutsiders or @BryKno, or on our brand new Discord server, where some of your favorite writers will be hanging out and reacting live.

Let’s keep this rolling!

Early Game Preview: Dolphins at Bills

No Tua Tagovailoa and new Raheem Mostert make Mike McDaniel something something.  Go crazy, perhaps? We wouldn’t mind if he did.

As Cale Clinton says in our preview, losing Tagovailoa means this game loses a fair bit of it’s luster. Rather than being the world-beaters we saw in September and October, the Dolphins staggered into the playoffs losing five games in a row before squeaking out a low-scoring victory over the Jets to qualify for the postseason. The Week 3 game against Buffalo was a tightly-fought contest with the Bills sweltering in the Miami sun.  The Week 15 game saw Mostert rumble for 136 yards as they nearly pulled off an upset. Now, instead of a real rubber match, the Dolphins will just have to see what McDaniel can scheme up. There are worse things than designing plays for Tyreek Hill and Jaylen Waddle, but there’s a lot to overcome here if the Dolphins want to make it a game.

As for the Bills, this is going to be another emotional game. Damar Hamlin is back; he visited the team on Saturday. There’s no word yet whether he’ll be at the game on Sunday or not, but if he is, and he’s introduced, he’s going to blow the non-existent roof off of the stadium. As if they needed any extra motivation in this one. Buffalo is coming in fully healthy, with massive momentum, and are huge, huge favorites in this one. Miami is a 13.5-point underdog; that’s the biggest spread ever for the wild card round. We’d love to say we had some deep reason to expect the result to be other than what everyone else is expecting, but no. This would be a massive upset over our preseason favorites.

We’ve yet to see a seventh seed beat a second seed since the playoffs expanded. If this ends up being that game, I will eat a hat.

Middle Game Preview: Giants at Vikings

I think Vince Verhei summed this up best in our stat preview this week:

Vince Verhei: DVOA tells us that the New York Giants are a bad team whose 9-7-1 record was built on good fortune. It also tells us that the Vikings are a terrible team whose 13-4 record was built on weekly cases of deus ex machina run amok.

Teams like the Giants make the playoffs on a semi-regular basis. At least one team with negative DVOA has made the postseason every year since 2008 — sometimes as a fluky, one-off team like the 2020 Browns, and sometimes as a team on the rise maybe a year before they’re really ‘ready’, like last year’s Bengals. Only time will tell what the Giants will be, but Brian Daboll has done a great job making lemonade out of a roster we all thought would be the absolute pits this season. They’re looking for their first playoff win since 2011, and might well get it. They’re peaking offensively at the right time, they have balance to attack the Vikings in different ways, and they don’t turn the ball over. They might be able to win this game if it ends up calm and orderly.

The Vikings do not play calm and orderly games.  Teams like Minnesota do not make the playoffs on a semi-regular basis; the last team with a DVOA below Minnesota’s to make the playoffs was the 2016 Texans. The Vikings exist on chaos and nonsense; fumbled plays at the goal line, unprecedented comebacks, last-second touchdown after last-second touchdown.  Going 11-0 in one-score games in unheard of; if you flipped every one-score game in the league, the Vikings would be picking first overall, not going to the postseason. Give Minnesota credit for not beating themselves and being in position to make take advantage of other people’s mistakes. And also give them credit for having Justin Jefferson, who can single-handedly destroy defenses.  But their success isn’t sustainable, and we’re all kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

The Vikings are three-point favorites, but the line might as well involve imaginary numbers or letters of the alphabet. Betting on any Vikings game this season is a fool’s errand; you can not predict chaos itself.

Late Game Preview: Ravens at Bengals

We avoided a coin flip!  Hurray!

Had the Ravens beaten the Bengals last week, they would have been 2-0 against Cincinnati and a half-game behind them for the division title. Because of the cancelled Week 17 game, the NFL decided that that situation would have required a coin flip, which would have sent the third seed on the road in the first round of the playoffs. Wild stuff. Fortunately for order, the Bengals won, and so this game is happening at their place.

This is the other game that’s affected by injury. It looks like Baltimore will ‘only’ be down to their backup quarterback, as the banged-up Tyler Huntley looks good to give it a go tonight. Not so Lamar Jackson, which is a shame — under Jackson, the Ravens are up there with the best of the best in the conference. But without him, the offense has collapsed to near-remedial levels. They haven’t scored more than 17 points in a game since November.

Our stat preview points out, however, that things are not entirely lost. Cincinnati is having offensive line issues, with the entire right side of the line out. Baltimore is getting healthy in the secondary, and they have the speed and talent to at least make things difficult for Joe Burrow and the Bengals’ offense. If they can shorten the game and take advantage of limited possessions, I wouldn’t rule an upset out here entirely. At the very least, it seems more likely than in the Dolphins game.

Still, Cincinnati is favored by 8.5 points. Hopefully, there’ll be some intrigue here, though it’s entirely possible the Bengals will just run up the score early and put this one out of reach.