Week 11 Playoff Update: Eagles-Chiefs and the Race for the Bye Weeks

When the schedule was released in May, the first game many of us circled was the Super Bowl rematch.

On Monday, the Kansas City Chiefs (7-2) will host the Philadelphia Eagles (8-1) in a matchup between the two first-place teams in each conference – so, the same positions they found themselves in when they faced each other last year. We’d be very fortunate to get a game of the same caliber as the one we had last time.  Patrick Mahomes, running around on an injured ankle, throwing a pair of touchdown passes in the fourth quarter.  Jalen Hurts, setting Super Bowl records with 70 rushing yards and three rushing scores (oh, and going over 300 yards in the air, while we’re at it).  If we can just swap out the slip-and-slide turf and end the game on something other than a (real, but ticky-tack) holding penalty, then we’ll be golden.

You don’t need me to tell you why this is an exciting game.  It’s also arguably the most important game of the year so far, considering the impact it has at the top of both conferences.  It’s not the most important game this week for the AFC – that would be either of the two AFC North showdowns, as we try to sort through all that mess.  Nor is it the most important game in the NFC – that would be the 49ers, trying to keep up with Philly, against the Buccaneers scrapping for their place in the NFC South.  But when you combine both conferences, this is hard to top.  You have ten teams, nearly a third of the league, with legitimate rooting interests in this one, as the top teams in both conferences root for the win to get shuttled away from the guys they’re trying to catch.  By the end of Monday night, one conference will see the race for the top seed thrown into chaos; it’s just a matter of figuring out which one.

Let’s take a look at the matchup, and then at the race atop each conference to see just how this game will impact the standings.

Philadelphia Eagles (+3) @ Kansas City Chiefs

All DVOA numbers courtesy of FTN.

Interestingly, DVOA doesn’t view this as a battle between two tippy-top teams.  Oh, they have the Chiefs there, alright, even if the defense is doing more of the heavy lifting than we’ve come to expect from Kansas City.  But Philadelphia is hanging out in the good, but not great area at the moment despite only having one loss on the season. What gives?

Well, the Eagles’ secondary gives, that’s what gives.  It’s Philly’s 14.6% pass defense DVOA rating that is really killing them at the moment; the one aspect of the Eagles you could call legitimately bad at this point in time. While there have been bright moments – turning the Dolphins one-dimensional in Week 7, most notably – it’s been an ongoing struggle.  The problem isn’t the pass rush; the Eagles rank fifth in ESPN’s pass rush win rate and quarterbacks are predictably finding it very difficult to operate with Josh Sweat, Haason Reddick and Jalen Carter in their laps.  That will be strength-against-strength against the Chiefs, who rank first in pass block win rate thanks in large part to the interior line duo of Joe Thuney and Creed Humphrey.  Seeing them deal with Carter and the rest of Philly’s flotilla of pass rush specialists will be a great matchup to watch.

But no quarterback is better at getting out of pressure than Mahomes, and when he has time, the Eagles have problems.  The Eagles have an above average -8.0% DVOA when covering top receivers, but that falls to a very bad 22.9% against second receivers, 17.7% against “other” receivers, and a league-worst 47.9% against tight ends. These may not be the weaknesses you want to have with Travis Kelce!  Ideally for Philadelphia, the return of Bradley Roby to the nickel corner role will help staunch the bleeding, and another week of Kevin Byard practicing and adapting to the Eagles’ zone spacing should help. But that’s Philadelphia’s Achilles’ heel, and they start their second-half gauntlet with a stiff test indeed.

And in a game between teams this talented, that might end up making the difference.  The Eagles are going to get theirs on the ground as that offensive line crushes souls.  Jalen Hurts is going to look like an MVP candidate throwing to A.J. Brown and company.  The Chiefs’ swarming defense, living up their preseason billing, will get theirs, too – they won’t be able to shut down the Philly offense, but they may be able to slow it.  The Chiefs offense may not be up to Traditional Mahomes Standards, in part because their receivers get occasional bouts of Iron Hands Syndrome, but they’re still very good by normal human standards. In matchup filled with All-Pro caliber players on both sides of the ball, it sometimes takes just a slight gap in the armor to make the difference.  And, to this point in the season, the Eagles’ secondary has been that gap in the armor.

NFC Top Seed

While every team in the league is still alive for every seed, we can safely ignore most of them for the purposes of trying to sort through the contenders.  As it stands, there’s really only three teams with a legitimate shot at taking down the bye week in the NFC.

FTN lists three teams with at least a 20% chance of earning the #1 seed – the 8-1 Eagles, the 7-2 Lions and the 6-3 49ers.  Now, that’s far too many combinations to riffle through them all; even ignoring ties, there are just under 8.4 million combinations of results for the 23 remaining games involving at least one of the three.  And that’s before you get into some of the crazier, but not outright impossible scenarios – the Seahawks, Cowboys or Vikings winning seven+ games down the stretch and taking a run at things. But we can get at least a partial picture just by looking at the teams at the top.

The Eagles control their fate for the #1 seed; if they go undefeated the rest of the way, they get the bye week. Honestly, while it’s not a mathematical certainty, they’re basically in the same boat if they go 7-1, and they’re heavy favorites if they go 6-2, even if they lose their most important remaining games (San Francisco and Dallas). A 5-3 record would give Philly roughly a 50/50 split of possible scenarios, while 4-4 would be the bare minimum they need to really have a chance.  Not a terrible position to be in halfway through the season; just be slightly better than average and you’re golden.

The Lions and 49ers would each have to go undefeated from here on out to have a greater than 50% chance of earning the bye week; they both have to deal with closing the gap with Philadelphia and the fact that the other one might be matching them stride for stride. The Lions can afford one more loss than San Francisco can because San Francisco has one more loss already in the books; it’s likely 13+ wins or bust for the challengers, here.

We will get a better picture of just who the Eagles are after this five-game stand. They open with the Chiefs, follow that up with home games against Buffalo (which looked a lot harder a month ago) and an NFC Championship rematch against San Francisco. They then have to go back on the road against Dallas and Seattle.  Three games in five weeks against NFC playoff squads is going to be a true test of mettle for the Eagles – they currently stand 6-0 in the conference, but have the weakest strength of schedule of the top three teams, sitting at .459 to Detroit’s .488 and San Francisco’s .500.  Sure, their strength of victory is better, but that’s in part because they haven’t really had a chance to lose to a Baltimore, Seattle or Cleveland. In some ways, the Eagles’ NFC title defense starts now.

It helps, though, that they’re starting that ‘title defense’ with at least one extra win in the pocket. That’s the real problem the Lions and 49ers have right now – they have to keep up with Philadelphia.  If the Eagles get a win over Kansas City, and Detroit falls to Chicago or San Francisco falls to Tampa Bay?  Now you’re in trouble, dropping a game back overall and losing half a game in the conference, to boot.

The 49ers can’t afford that at all. They pretty much have to match the Eagles win-for-win, beat them in Week 13, and then hope that Philly slips up somewhere else along the line if they still want the #1 seed; that three-game losing streak has cut their margin of error out entirely.  The Lions could probably withstand one week of Philadelphia pulling away, as they’re a game closer, but they don’t have the benefit of going up against Philly head-to-head.  That, then, is the real prize for the Eagles this week – not so much proving they can beat a top team (Dallas says hello!), but by forcing their rivals to win or bow out alongside them.  If Philly can march through these next five weeks with a winning record, they will likely be your NFC champions.

A 49ers-Eagles tie will be decided by the Week 13 match between them.  The Eagles do not play the Lions, so right now they’re leaning on that conference record advantage, sitting at 6-0 to Detroit’s 4-1.  The 49ers and Lions do not play each other either, so that would go to conference record as well – right now, both are at 4-1, but the 49ers have four more games against sub-.500 NFC teams; Denver just three – advantage, San Francisco.  The three-way-tie is a bit more complicated; it will come down to conference record but the 49ers-Eagles game will still matter; if Detroit ends up at the bottom of that trio and gets eliminated by conference record first, than the 49ers/Eagles winner will in fact end up taking everything home.

NFC East

Excluding the Giants (who can be eliminated this week), Commanders and ties, there are 32,768 remaining possible outcomes in the NFC East.  The Eagles win 27,097 of them (or 82.7%); the Cowboys win 5,587 (17.1%), and 84 scenarios go to the strength of victory tiebreaker.  The Eagles’ odds only go up to 86.7% with a win, because this is the least important possible game in the NFC East race – the cross-conference game selected by record. It’s just important because, well, it’s another game Philly can win to put the screws into Dallas just that little bit more.

Philadelphia is kind of coasting to a division title at this point. If they manage to win and the Cowboys lose to Carolina, somehow, then the Eagles’ share would jump to over 90%, and most of the remaining scenarios would involve the Eagles dropping a game to the Giants or Cardinals at the end of the year.  Dallas can maybe afford to lose two more games to take the East if Kansas City has a meltdown during this gauntlet.  Meanwhile, Philadelphia clinches the division at 7-1, realistically clinches at 5-3, is still favored at 3-5, and has a shot at 1-7.  But I suppose that’s why they play the games.

AFC Top Seed

Baltimore’s loss last week has given the 7-2 Chiefs a clear half-game lead over the field at this point. That’s great, but it doesn’t exactly slam the door on anyone at the moment.  FTN lists six different teams with at least a 2% chance of winning the bye week – the Chiefs, the 6-3 Dolphins, the 6-3 Jaguars and, deep breath here, the 7-3 Ravens, 6-3 Browns and 6-3 Steelers in the quagmire that is the AFC North.

To have six teams within a game of first place at this point in the season is nuts. Because this thing is wound so tightly, it leads to some odd seeding results. For instance, the Chiefs still control their fate for the #1 seed, but nobody controls their fate for #2 — there are loops of tiebreakers, depending on who beats who elsewhere. The 7-3 Ravens are still a half-game ahead of the division, but they don’t control their own fate. If both they and Cleveland wind up winning out, Cleveland would win the tie at 14-3 thanks to the Browns’ superior conference record.

The Browns are the only team in the AFC to control at least the #3 seed, but they don’t go any further than that; the Dolphins could beat them to the #2 record thanks to their superior common games record (they could go undefeated against the Jets, Broncos, Ravens and Titans). But the Dolphins can’t clinch anything better than the #4 seed by winning out, because the Jaguars would have them over the barrel in common games, and the Steelers are way ahead of them in strength of victory. But the Steelers and Jaguars can’t control anything better than #4, because the three-way tie between them and Miami would come down to that strength of victory, which is as of yet unsettled.

So, yeah, untangling this knot is going to take a lot of time and effort.  Fortunately, the advantage of there being six teams with at least six wins is that the margin of error vanishes. You can’t afford to fall two games behind the leader, because the odds are one of the other teams you’re competing with won’t – even a small mountain becomes much tougher to climb when there’s a line ahead of you. So if Kansas City knocks off Philadelphia, everyone else is going to need to win to catch up.  And they can’t all win; Cleveland is playing Pittsburgh this week. So if Kansas City manages to repeat their Super Bowl victory, they’ll drop at least one straggler from the works behind them. Everyone else is favored (Ravens versus Bengals, Jaguars versus Titans, Dolphins versus Raiders, Texans versus Cardinals), but a single slip-up would put them in the same boat as the Browns/Steelers loser, with the Chiefs becoming the favorite versus the rest of the field.

If the Chiefs lose, however they…can’t fall any further than second at the moment. The Ravens can catch them, because they’re only a half-game back, but Kansas City would stay ahead of the Jaguars and Dolphins because they only have the one conference loss, to Denver three weeks ago.  Still, a five-way knot at three losses isn’t an ideal situation for anyone involved.  Man, the AFC is complicated.

This week should bring us some much-needed clarity

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Bryan Knowles

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