Conference Championship Picks
Well, picking straight up wasn’t a disaster for me in the divisional round. So I’ve got that going for me, even if I came out looking like an idiot with my picks against the spread. (The real reason I don’t gamble may turn out to be not that I’m too smart to bet but that I’m too stupid to bet successfully.)
I finished 3-1 straight up for the second week of the postseason, which gets my overall playoffs picking record to 7-1. That ain’t bad. Against the spread, I was 0-3-1 in the divisional round, which gets me to 2-5-1 overall. Ugh.
Maybe this is where it gets better. Probably this is where it gets worse.
What not to expect in the conference championships.
New England (-3) at Denver
This is what I wrote last week as I looked ahead to the Chiefs-Patriots divisional round game: “Whichever team comes out on top in this match is going to end up the AFC champion. … These are the two best teams remaining in the AFC playoffs — and I don’t think three and four are terribly close.” Then I watched the games. And at the end of the Broncos’ win over the Steelers Sunday evening, I felt even better about that statement than I did when I wrote it.
The Broncos have a great defense. And it’s served them incredibly well. Hell, the fact that the Broncos are hosting the AFC Championship is almost entirely attributable to the fact that their outstanding D has more than compensated for quarterback play that has ranged from depressingly bad with the guy who used to be Peyton Manning behind center to periodically adequate in games when Denver had Brock Osweiler taking the snaps. Almost entirely, I say. Because there’s one specific step in the Broncos’ path to the AFC one seed that needs to be considered: The week 12 victory over the Patriots, which ultimately determined the seeding order among teams that finished the regular season with identical 12-4 records.
I’m sure I don’t need to walk anyone through the details at this point, but just the same, let’s review the circumstances of that game. The Patriots were playing without Julian Edelman, who had been injured two weeks earlier. They were without Danny Amendola, who was hurt the previous week. They were still adjusting to playing without Dion Lewis, who’d been having a breakout season running the ball and, more important, catching passes out of the backfield, until he suffered a season-ending injury in week nine. And, as they’d done all season, the Patriots were forced to juggle the offensive line in response to an unending string of injuries. The Pats also faced some meaningful injury issues on defense, both before and during the game. And still, as the fourth quarter began, Tom Brady threw his third TD pass of the game, giving New England a 21-7 lead. And the Pats D held the Broncos without a yard on their next possession, forcing a punt that it appeared for a second would give New England possession at their own 35 and a chance to chew clock, add points and put the game away. Except that rookie receiver Chris Harper, who had been pressed into returning punts because of injuries, muffed the punt, giving Denver the ball at the New England 36 and new life in the game. And even then, even though the ensuing Patriots meltdown allowed the Broncos to surge to a 24-21 lead, New England was able to force overtime with a field goal at the end of regulation — and may have been in a position instead to put the winning TD on the board in those final seconds if not for the fact that Rob Gronkowski had been knocked out of the game during New England’s previous possession. It’s also hard not to wonder whether the Patriots might have been able to move the ball with the first possession of OT if they’d, you know, had anyone for Brady to throw to.
Denver won. And the Broncos are hosting the championship as a result. And it’s just as well for the NFL, I suppose, since home field advantage is about the only reason Denver has any hope in this rematch.
The simple realities of this game are this: The Patriots offense that put 24 points on the board vs. Denver’s D in week 12 now has a full complement of players, including Edelman, Amendola and Gronkowski. James White has become a meaningful pass-catching thread out of the backfield. The O line is more stable than it’s been all season. And that offense is balanced by a defense that is considerably healthier this time around and that has given up an average of 19.7 points per game through the regular season and one postseason game (1.3 points per game more than Denver’s vaunted D). And just as the Patriots offense faces a D that it has already shown an ability to overcome short-handed, the New England D faces an offense that is relying on a broken down quarterback who finished the season with a passer rating of 67.9, the worst of his career (and worse by far than all except his rookie season, when he was thrown to the wolves as the #1 overall draft pick by a bad Indianapolis team) and, more important, worst in the league and worst by far among the QBs participating in this weekend’s games.
You can talk all you want about the Patriots’ difficulties in Denver over the years. You can talk about Manning’s success in his last two conference championship matchups with New England. You can find all kinds of magical reasons to like the Broncos. But the meaningful facts all point in one direction.
On that subject, here’s how the holy trinity of predictive stats lines up (and keep in mind, Denver’s offensive passer rating is pulled up by the games started by Osweiler): Scoring differential, Patriots +2.7; passer rating differential, Patriots +9.6; takeaway-giveaway differential, Patriots +11. (Denver, by the way, is the only team among the final four with a negative turnover differential, -3 through the divisional round.) That’s a formula for a decisive victory.
New England by 10.
Arizona (+3) at Carolina
It will shock you to know that I’m not going to go into nearly as much detail with this pick as I did with the AFC game. Please don’t take that to mean I’m overlooking this game. I’m not. I think this is going to a fantastic football game, likely a much better game than the AFC Championship. Because these are both phenomenal football teams, either of which I could envision taking home its first Lombardi Trophy in a couple of weeks.
The predictive stats say this is Carolina’s game. But only narrowly. Scoring differential, Panthers +0.5; passer rating differential, Panthers +2.6; takeaway-giveaway differential, Panthers +14. That last one’s pretty big, but it has to be considered in context. The Panthers picked off 24 balls during the regular season, most in the league, and another two against the Seahawks last week. But Carson Palmer this season hasn’t been given to throwing a lot of interceptions (though he did manage two against Green Bay in the divisional round). And most of those Panthers picks came against QBs who either aren’t terribly good or who were having bad seasons. That’s not to dismiss Carolina’s impressive turnover differential. It’s simply to say I’m not sure that one big area of statistical differentiation between these two teams can be taken to point to a likely blowout.
This is a close matchup. And those typically come down to home field and/or quarterback play. And since I suspect Cam Newton can likely accomplish more against the Arizona D than Palmer can against the Carolina D, I believe the Panthers have the edge in both areas. So I’m taking the Panthers straight up and looking for a push with the points.
