Culture
Projecting each NFL playoff team's odds to win Super Bowl, with divisional matchup analysis
Thirty-two teams embarked on a mission this season to win Super Bowl LVIII. Eight teams remain.
Jeff Howe breaks down each of the four divisional-round matchups this weekend before The Athletic’s projection model, created by Austin Mock, reveals each team’s odds of winning the Super Bowl.
AFC
A look at the AFC playoff bracket after the Bills’ win over the Steelers.
◽️ Ravens-Texans: Saturday, 4:30 p.m. ET
◽️ Bills-Chiefs: Sunday, 6:30 p.m. ETWho do you think advances to the Conference Championships? pic.twitter.com/fsz3vSg6bP
— The Athletic (@TheAthletic) January 16, 2024
No. 1 Baltimore Ravens vs. No. 4 Houston Texans, 4:30 p.m. ET, Saturday
Texans rookie quarterback C.J. Stroud dazzled in his playoff debut by completing 16 of 21 passes for 274 yards and three touchdowns. Stroud’s poise has been remarkable at this early juncture of his career. He has completed at least 75 percent of his passes in three consecutive games and hasn’t thrown an interception in six straight.
Perhaps no one strengthened their head-coaching candidacy more over wild-card weekend than Texans offensive coordinator Bobby Slowik, and teams with vacancies will be monitoring his chess match against Ravens defensive coordinator Mike Macdonald. The Ravens have allowed an average of 15.5 points over their last four games against quality competition (the Jacksonville Jaguars, San Francisco 49ers, Miami Dolphins and Pittsburgh Steelers).
GO DEEPER
What C.J. Stroud and his parents saw early, the world is seeing now
Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson has a strong chance to claim his second MVP Award next month, but there’s pressure on him to perform in the playoffs, where he has lost three of his four career starts and completed less than 60 percent of his passes in each loss.
The Ravens won these franchises’ only playoff meeting 12 years ago.
No. 2 Buffalo Bills vs. No. 3 Kansas City Chiefs, 6:30 p.m. ET, Sunday
The weekend’s marquee matchup will mark Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes’ postseason road debut. The Chiefs have been spottier than usual this season, but their defense doesn’t slump; it hasn’t allowed more than 20 points in six consecutive games.
The Bills’ six-game winning streak began in Kansas City in Week 14, and they’ve been knocking off quality opponents along the way. Four of those six wins came against playoff teams, including Monday’s victory against the Steelers.
Of course, the biggest story here is the rematch between two of the AFC’s most prominent powers in recent years. Mahomes has knocked off quarterback Josh Allen’s Bills twice in the playoffs since the 2020 season, and both games were entertaining offensive affairs.
The Chiefs are trying to reach their sixth consecutive conference championship game, and the Bills are hoping to avoid their third straight loss in the divisional round.
NFC
The NFC Divisional round is set.
◽️ 49ers vs. Packers
◽️ Lions vs. BuccaneersCall it now. Who advances to the NFC Conference Championship? pic.twitter.com/D2RzHcRhYe
— The Athletic (@TheAthletic) January 16, 2024
No. 1 San Francisco 49ers vs. No. 7 Green Bay Packers, 8 p.m. ET, Saturday
The Packers, who now have as many playoff wins at AT&T Stadium as the Dallas Cowboys (three), delivered the biggest upset of the wild-card round behind big-time performances from quarterback Jordan Love and running back Aaron Jones. They had an incredibly disciplined game plan to control the game on the ground, take their shots when necessary and prevent big plays on defense, and they executed it to perfection. The combination of great coaching and high-level production should make the 49ers nervous because those traits can carry over in the playoffs.
The 49ers allowed the third-fewest rushing yards in the regular season, but that’s because their opponents were forced to play from behind so frequently that the Niners faced the least amount of rushing attempts in the league. They allowed 4.1 yards per carry, which ranked 14th and was just marginally better than Dallas (4.2).
GO DEEPER
Cracks in the 49ers’ playoff machine? Yes, but you have to squint to find them
The Niners are the well-earned No. 1 seed and have legitimate Super Bowl aspirations, but there’s cause for concern as they prepare for a hot and confident Green Bay team that has won four in a row and seven of nine. The Niners sat several of their starters in the regular-season finale, so they’re about to find out if they’re rested or rusty after many of their stars haven’t played since New Year’s Eve.
The 49ers have won four consecutive playoff meetings against the Packers.
No. 3 Detroit Lions vs. No. 4 Tampa Bay Buccaneers, 3 p.m. ET, Sunday
Nobody threw a bigger party over the weekend than the Lions, who won their first playoff game in 32 years and captured just their second postseason victory since 1957. They’ll host multiple games in one postseason for the first time in the franchise’s 94-year history.
GO DEEPER
Lions’ first playoff win in 32 years was pure grit, followed by tears of joy
This will be a rematch between two tough teams, as the Lions won in Tampa 20-6 in Week 6. The Buccaneers just beat up the Philadelphia Eagles on Monday night and won’t back down against the favored Lions in a hostile environment. It’s also a matchup between quarterbacks Jared Goff and Baker Mayfield, each of whom was taken with the No. 1 pick but has since found success with new organizations.
These teams have met once before in the playoffs, with the Buccaneers winning 20-10 in 1997.
GO DEEPER
Does offense or defense win Super Bowls? How the best teams perform in the NFL playoffs
(Photo of Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen: David Eulitt / Getty Images)
“The Football 100,” the definitive ranking of the NFL’s best 100 players of all time, is on sale now. Order it here.
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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