Acme Packing Company
I know that 6-3-1 isn’t the position that Green Bay Packers fans wanted to see the team in going into Week 12, but I do want to look at the NFC playoffs with sober eyes for maybe the first time all season. Yes, the Packers are currently sitting in the seventh seed, but what does that even mean? Who is the team trying to nudge for playoff position? What do their postseason paths look like? Let’s take a look at who the real playoff contenders are in the conference.
According to NFL Pro, seven NFC teams have a playoff percentage of 72 percent or higher. There are only two more who have a playoff percentage of over 7 percent.
In short, we kind of know already who is going to make it into the playoffs. The gulf between teams gets wide very quickly.
The division I really want to focus on here is the NFC South, because they are sort of the key to understanding how the NFC race will play out. An NFC South team must make the postseason, by rule, even though the division-leading Tampa Bay Buccaneers actually have a worse record (6-4) than the Packers at the moment.
NFL Pro gives Tampa an 85 percent chance of making the playoffs, the Carolina Panthers a 22 percent chance of advancing and the Atlanta Falcons just a 1 percent chance. The New Orleans Saints, along with the Arizona Cardinals, Washington Commanders and New York Giants — funny enough, three teams that the Packers have beaten this year — are already functionally eliminated from postseason contention in mid-November.
Why does this matter? Because in the 15 percent of simulations where Tampa doesn’t make the postseason, another NFC South team has to step in for them. That exhausts 15 percent of the combined 23 percent of times that the Panthers and Falcons make the playoffs in 2025, bringing down Carolina’s ability to impact the Packers’ postseason chances down the line, as they’ll be fighting for different things — in the Panthers’ case, mostly the NFC South title, and in the Packers’ case, either an NFC North title or a wildcard spot. In only 8 percent of simulations does a second NFC South team get into the playoffs as a wildcard. That’s really important to understand.
So the truth of the landscape right now is that there are really seven teams fighting for six spots, and then one team has to win the NFC South. Outside of those limited paths, there’s less than a 7 percent chance of any individual team in the NFL making the postseason as a wildcard team. That’s another really important thing to understand from a Packers perspective.
On paper, the Philadelphia Eagles, Los Angeles Rams and Seattle Seahawks all have over a 90 percent chance of making the playoffs. So you can really make the case that there are four teams (the 49ers, Detroit Lions, Packers and Chicago Bears) fighting for three open seats in this NFC...
