Divisional Round delivers best playoff games so far
49ers-Packers' Saturday night classic and Bills-Chiefs in primetime Sunday highlighted the weekend games
Fans of the NFL were the real winners this weekend as they got four good games to make up for a lackluster Super Wild Card weekend. Honors of best game of the Divisional Round went to the one played in sloppy conditions in Santa Clara, Calif. between the Green Bay Packers and San Francisco 49ers.
But before we get to that let’s recap each of the games in order and rank them based on their Excitement Index (GEI)1 like we did last week.
Houston vs. Baltimore
Along with the 49ers the Baltimore Ravens entered this weekend’s games fresher than all other playoff teams by virtue of their first round bye last weekend. And a fresh set of wheels for quarterback Lamar Jackson makes his team virtually unstoppable.
Jackson threw two touchdown passes and ran for two more, as the Ravens pulled away from the Houston Texans in the second half for a 34-10 win to advance to the AFC championship game. One-sided games like this are typically unremarkable from a watchability perspective — it came in well below the NFL season average of 3.75 GEI.
Onwards.
GEI Ranks: 4/4 Divisional | 164/282 Season
Green Bay vs. San Francisco
The 49ers entered their game against the Packers as 10-point favorites, the largest of any team going into the Divisional Round. But a combination of rain, Brock Purdy miscues and an injury to Deebo Samuel made it feel like the 49ers were on the ropes to the seventh-seeded Packers the entire night.
But the No. 1 seed wound up mounting a late-game comeback, a feat that has been suspiciously missing from San Francisco’s success formula under head coach Kyle Shanahan.
Running back Christian McCaffrey capped a game-winning, 69-yard drive by running for his second TD with around a minute left to play, and linebacker Dre Greenlaw picked off Jordan Love for the second time on the ensuing drive as the 49ers held on to beat the Packers 24-21 in a thriller Saturday night.
“We’re built for those moments,” McCaffrey said in the postgame press conference. “We didn’t play well at all but still had a chance at the end. To go out there and execute is a sign of a high character team.”
The 5.41 GEI for this game was 1.66 above the NFL season average, which slated it as the 41st best game of the year (out of 282). When you account for the raised stakes given it was a playoff game it was one of the best of the season, and easily the best game of the playoffs so far.
It also projects to be the most-watched Saturday telecast on any network since the 1994 Winter Olympics, according to Awful Announcing.
GEI Ranks: 1/4 Divisional | 41/282 Season
Tampa Bay vs. Detroit
Detroit’s storybook season is going to continue as the Lions took care of business at home against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to advance to the NFC championship game Sunday. Jared Goff and company out-battled Baker Mayfield for a 31-23 win at Ford Field.
Goff, who was cast away by the Los Angeles Rams in favor of former Lion Matthew Stafford, can claim redemption as he’s proved his new team belongs deep in the playoffs. The Lions will be going to their second-ever conference championship game and their first in 32 years. A franchise known for losing is now one of the last four left.
Detroit will travel to Levi’s Stadium to face the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday afternoon where the Lions will likely be big underdogs for the first time these playoffs.
GEI Ranks: 3/4 Divisional | 123/282 Season
Kansas City vs. Buffalo
This matchup is getting to be a postseason staple at this point. In what was famously Patrick Mahomes’s first true road playoff game, the result was the same as always: a Kanas City victory that helped the Chiefs move on to the AFC Championship game.
Mahomes threw two touchdown passes to Travis Kelce to help the defending Super Bowl champions advance to their sixth straight conference championship with a 27-24 win over the Bills on Sunday night.
It didn’t quite reach the climax of the 2021 rendition, which ended with a 6.93 GEI and is widely considered an instant classic. In that game the Bills and Chiefs played a back-and-forth affair that saw 25 points scored after the two-minute warning, and included two of the best quarterback performances in playoff history.
Nevertheless the result on Sunday was the same: Kansas City moving on, and the tortured fans in Buffalo packing it in for the winter. The Chiefs will now travel to Baltimore to face the Ravens on Sunday afternoon.
GEI Ranks: 2/4 Divisional | 73/282 Season
The opening odds for the conference championships, per DraftKings:
Chiefs at Ravens -3.5; Total: 50.5
Lions at 49ers -7; Total: 50.5
If you’re a stathead like me and want more win probability graphs and game excitement rankings check out my NFL Win Probability app, as well as my NFL analytics website for a deeper dive into league, team and player trends from this season.
I compute Game Excitement Index (GEI) to measure how exciting an individual game is, as the name implies. I calculate it similar to what Luke Benz has done in college basketball. The approach is to sum the absolute value of the win probability change from each play and multiply by a normalized time parameter. This gives us an index by which we can rank each game’s excitement factor. The way to interpret, for example, a Game Excitement Index of 4.0 is that the win probability changed by a total of 400% over the course of that game. The higher the number, the more exciting the game.