After a wild-card round with two upsets, a back-and-forth shootout in New Orleans and a playoff game straight out of 1977 in Jacksonville, let's plot out each team's path to the Super Bowl and figure out who has the most generous route to Minneapolis for Super Bowl LII.
I'll include Kyle Anderson Youth jersey each team's chances of winning the Super Bowl, according to ESPN's Football Power Index, as well as one result that would make their lives much easier. Over the past two seasons, our top-ranked teams in 2015 (Denver) and 2016 (New England) were able to make it to the big game. Our No. 1 pick will need to do something no team has ever done before to keep that up for the 2017 postseason.
The Titans are the worst team left in the bracket, although their 18th-place finish in DVOA gives them a much better playoff floor than the Texans (29th) and Lions (27th) had a year ago. You can't help but http://www.authenticnikegiantshop.com/John-Jerry-Jersey wonder if they would have beaten the Chiefs on Saturday night if a strip-sack of Marcus Mariota hadn't been Dan Hampton Authentic Jersey bizarrely stopped by what Jeff Triplette referred to as forward progress, but in a game with at least half a dozen mistakes from the officiating crew, Triplette's bumbling invoked Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice what could more easily be explained by incompetence.
There is a reason to think that the Titans, as currently constructed, could be Authentic Mark Fayne Jersey better than the inconsistent unit we saw tiptoe through the regular season because of one player: Derrick Henry. With DeMarco Murray sidelined, Mike Mularkey has been forced to turn to the former Heisman Trophy winner as his feature back, and Henry delivered. He gashed the Chiefs for 191 yards from scrimmage on 25 touches and put the game away with runs of 10 and 22 yards on Tennessee's final possession.
Fans have been clamoring for the second-year back to get a bigger role, and with good reason. The Titans are a fundamentally better offense with Henry as a feature back, with Henry offering both more consistency and big-play ability. Football Outsiders tracks a statistic for running backs called success rate, which measures how frequently a running back keeps his team on schedule by gaining a prescribed amount of yardage on each down. Henry's 48 percent success rate is 15th in the league. Murray, at 39 percent, was 43rd among 47 backs.
The passing game also has been more productive with Henry around. With the former Alabama star on the field this season, Mariota & Co. have posted a 105.3 passer rating and averaged 8.1 yards per throw. With Murray in the backfield, though, the passing game has been brutal, averaging 6.3 yards per attempt with a passer rating of just 65.1. Mariota's sack rate has been slightly higher with Henry on the field, but he has thrown one interception on 128 pass attempts with Henry and 16 on 323 throws with Murray.
Henry gashed a Chiefs run defense that ranked dead last in DVOA on Saturday. If that seems like a one-off, consider that he'll be facing a Patriots run defense that wasn't much better in the regular season; Matt Patricia's unit was 30th in rushing defense DVOA, just four-tenths of a percentage point ahead of Kansas City. If the Titans can somehow carry a lead or keep the Pats game close into the fourth quarter, it would hardly be a surprise to see Henry breaking off steady chunks of yardage.
Of course, as 13-point underdogs, the Titans are unlikely to be all that close deep into the second half against the top seed in the AFC. Even if they somehow pull off an upset and beat New England, Tennessee would still be on the road, facing either the Steelers or Jaguars. Tennessee has beaten Jacksonville twice this season, but when the best-case scenario is a trip to play the best defense in football, the Titans aren't going to be thrilled about their chances. Tennessee also would be a comfortable underdog against any of the remaining NFC teams in the Super Bowl, barring an Eagles win combined with a season-ending injury to Nick Foles. The Titans are in with a fighting chance, but they have the toughest slate of any remaining team.
What would help: Jacksonville upsetting Pittsburgh. There's no truth to the old adage about teams struggling to beat their opponents three times in one season, as the Saints http://www.authenticcoyotestore.com/-50-antoine-vermette-jersey_c-449.html proved on Sunday by beating the Panthers and taking teams with a 2-0 record over one opponent to a 12-5 mark since 1990 when they play those same foes a third time in the postseason. The Titans match up well with a Jaguars team whose primary weakness is stopping the run.
The Jags won their first playoff game since 2007 by overcoming the Bills in what might be charitably defined as a defensive struggle. Both defenses played well, but neither team's quarterback or offensive coordinator came to play, producing the lowest-scoring wild-card game in league history.
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