Pats Pulpit
In back-to-back weeks, the New England Patriots managed to punch their ticket to the NFL playoffs and clinch the AFC East championship. With the regular season coming to a close, they have something else on the line: they are playing for the No. 1 seed in the AFC on Sunday.
In order to get it, though, the Patriots will not just need to beat the visiting Miami Dolphins but also hope for some help from the Los Angeles Chargers. As a look at this week’s clinching scenarios shows, after all, they cannot leapfrog the currently top-seeded Denver Broncos unless they finish with a better record. Why? Denver has a better record against common opponents and would therefore win in a tiebreaker scenario.
Given that only one of 256 games so far this season ended without a winner (0.4%), we can safely remove all the scenarios involving ties from the projection. If so, we can see that the Patriots’ paths to each available playoff seed are pretty straight-forward.
If they want to earn home-field advantage throughout the AFC playoffs, they need to win and hope for a Broncos loss on Sunday. The chances of the latter happening, however, took a hit recently.
For the Patriots to stay in the No. 2 seed, all they need to do is finish ahead of the Jaguars. The only scenario in which that does not happen is if they get upset by the Dolphins while simultaneously seeing Jacksonville beat the Tennessee Titans.
That Jacksonville vs. Tennessee game will already be over once the Patriots kick off their regular season finale against Miami; the two AFC South rivals are facing off at 1 p.m. ET on Sunday. New England and Denver, meanwhile, have both been scheduled into the 4:25 p.m. ET window.
