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Martin Rogers
FOX Sports Insider
Ready for chaos?
I hope so, because Week 18 in the National Football League is here and ready to unleash its fury, to break some hearts, scratch some heads and generally provide football’s most entertaining two-day thrill ride.
Assumptions mean nothing going into the wrap-up stages of this, or any other NFL season. The unexpected occurs so frequently that we should have learned our lesson about how, as the regular season culminates, things like win-loss records, prior logic and statistical precedent all add up to precisely naught.
It is when we are forced to consider all kinds of permutations and possibilities, and we scoff at the most outlandishly unlikely ones, only to be simultaneously entertained and proven foolish when the near-impossible becomes mind-bending reality.
Across Saturday and Sunday, a whopping 13 of 16 games carry some sort of postseason relevance, whether in the form of jostling for seeding position or just trying to secure a place in the field, the latter of which is the case for 11 teams battling for the five spots that are yet to be locked.
It is numbers and action and tiebreakers and much more. It is dramatic and its blink-and-you’ll-miss-it. It is complicated, too, even when it appears to be chillingly simple.
It is not especially common for winner-take-all games to occur on the final day, and the Houston Texans’ clash with the Indianapolis Colts will be just the 31st in the entire history of the league.
It is straightforward in that the winner is guaranteed a spot in the postseason and the loser is assured of a one-way ticket to vacation, but — and there is almost always a but — the only way both could potentially make it would be in the case of a tie.
A tie, you say? As if.
That’s what most said back in 2021 ahead of a Week 18 clash between the Las Vegas Raiders and the Los Angeles Chargers. The mutually-beneficial-tie scenario was an implausible asterisk,…
Source link : https://www.foxsports.com/stories/nfl/nfls-loaded-week-18-slate-opens-up-a-vast-array-of-possibilities
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Publish date : 2024-01-04 17:54:23
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