After the frigid opening weekend of the NFL playoffs — the highlight of which was the Dallas Cowboys suffered a stunning blowout loss to the Green Bay Packers, plunging that entire organization back into its default (and truthfully, most comfortable) state of chaos and drama — we are now down to eight teams left in contention. Over the next two weeks, they will compete for the right to play in the first-ever Las Vegas-hosted Super Bowl on February 11, an event that seems genetically engineered to attract the absolute worst people in the world.
If you are a fan of any of those eight teams, you will spend the next two weeks obsessing over game film, pacing back and forth, pulling out your hair, and drinking. But if you are not a fan of any of them, you may need a rooting interest outside of simply “who will help me crawl out from under these crippling gambling debts that have imperiled my family’s entire financial future?” Allow me to be of service. Here are your NFL Playoff Rootability Rankings, a guide for the unaffiliated fan. Want to know where to direct your temporary, entirely fungible loyalties? Read on:
It was assumed that the Buccaneers, in the wake of Tom Brady’s (second, and final) retirement, wouldn’t be very good this year. This assumption was correct: The Bucs were uninspiring and dull for most of the last few months. Fortunately for them, they play in the NFC South, a division that somehow featured three teams even more uninspiring and dull than them. In another stroke of luck, their opponent in the Wild-Card Round was a rapidly disintegrating Eagles team that started the season 10-1 but fell apart so dramatically afterwards that even their own fans ended up cheering against them. The Buccaneers are happy to still be here, and in many ways exist only as a foil to the sentimental favorite Detroit Lions, whom they face on Sunday. It would be amusing if the Bucs won the Super Bowl the year after Tom Brady retires, but they won’t. And you’ll forget they were ever in the playoffs at all roughly 45 minutes after they’re eliminated.
The Texans are not inherently unlikable. They’ve had one of the more surprising arcs in the NFL this season; a team that seemed to be starting a long, presumably ugly rebuilding process by hiring a rookie coach (former Texans player DeMeco Ryans) and drafting a rookie quarterback (Ohio State’s C.J. Stroud) ended up winning a division championship and a resounding victory over the Cleveland Browns in round one. Ryans and Stroud have stabilized a notoriously chaotic franchise—the team’s owner, Janice McNair, is currently fighting legal claims from her son that she is incapacitated and needs guardianship, so that’s a nice family story — and have the team one win away from their first AFC Championship Game in franchise history. Houston is easy to root for, but they also feel a year or two out from being considered a serious contender; they’re the classic just-happy-to-be-here team. Also, it’s been 21 years since they joined the NFL and it’s still a travesty that their name is the Texans. One of the finalists was the “Wildcatters.” Who wouldn’t root for the Wildcatters?
The NFL’s most famously sun-kissed team, the Niners are well into their fifth decade of sustained success despite a revolving door of coaches and quarterbacks. The Patriots reached 11 Super Bowls because of Bill Belichick and Tom Brady; the 49ers made it to seven with Joe Montana and Steve Walsh, but also with Colin Kaepernick and Jimmy Garoppolo, with Bill Walsh and George Seifert but also Jim Harbaugh. (Though they haven’t won one since 1995.) This current incarnation might be their least likely. Yes, Niners coach Kyle Shanahan made it to the Super Bowl in 2020—in a loss that may have, weirdly, saved thousands of lives—and has reached the last two NFC title games. But this year, Shanahan has steered his team to the league’s No. 1 overall seed with none other than Brock Purdy as his quarterback. We’ve heard a lot about Tom Brady’s rags-to-riches story, starting out as the 199th pick of the 2000 NFL Draft. But Purdy has him beat there. He was in fact “Mr. Irrelevant” —the last overall pick in the draft, a spot with a storied and amusing history—in 2022 after a fine but not particularly revelatory college career at Iowa State. Despite his weak arm and limited mobility, Purdy ended up going the full Brady, taking over the starting spot after injuries to teammates further up the depth chart and proving himself to be the most efficient, reliable quarterback in the game. A storybook tale like Purdy’s is inspiring until it isn’t—I swear, people loved Tom Brady back when he was Brock Purdy—and it feels almost churlish for a franchise that has already won so much to get another stroke of good luck. . Couldn’t a tortured fan base like, say, the Browns have gotten a Brock Purdy at some point? Fine, it has been almost 30 years since they last won a title. Still: Why do the 49ers get all the spoils?
I’m sorry to keep bringing up the Browns here, but when you’re talking tortured fan bases — and reasons to cheer against teams more fortunate—the Browns are the ultimate control group. The Ravens, of course, were the Cleveland Browns before then-owner Art Modell moved the team, in the dead of night, to Baltimore, an offense so egregious that Browns fans were still actually urinating on Modell’s grave 20 years later. Well, the Browns famously have never even reached a Super Bowl in their entire history, while the Ravens have won two and are consistently more successful than their sad division rivals. Baltimore is a city that’s easy to cheer for, though, and is clearly in a sports renaissance right now, with their baseball neighbors the Orioles winning 100-plus games for the first time in 45 years last year. Quarterback Lamar Jackson, who every team spent the offseason blackballing in contract negotiations, has had a career season (and is far more likable than the guy the Browns signed, DeShaun Watson) and could work his way toward an eventual Hall of Fame case with a win in this game. On the other hand, the Ravens’ coach is still a Harbaugh.
he most surprising team to reach the final eight, the Packers are here thanks to their stunning blowout win over the Cowboys. Knocking Dallas out of the playoffs is a civic duty that shouldn’t be underappreciated, but there are other reasons to get behind Green Bay. While the commonly held belief that they are publicly owned is very much overblown — those “ownership” shares are one of the biggest scams in sports — the Packers are the biggest underdog in the playoffs, a team that started the year 2-5 and had to scramble and win its final three games just to sneak in. They’re led by Jordan Love, a very likable young quarterback with a professional volleyball-playing girlfriend who giddily (and hilariously) mocked Cowboys fans during the Packers’ victory, which, again, is all Americans’ civic duty and social responsibility. But the best reason to cheer for the Packers is that it will make Aaron Rodgers mad. Rodgers, whose descent into full-blown nutterdom remains truly remarkable to behold, left the Packers in large part because they drafted Love as his replacement. Love is now two wins away from appearing in as many Super Bowls as Rodgers has managed in his entire 19-year career. Though in his spirit, you should probably do your own research to be sure that’s true.
As someone who has been writing about the intersection of sports and popular culture for (gasp) more than 20 years now, allow me to say this: I actually think we’re all being pretty cool about the Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce thing. Sure, there are the constant shots (and subsequent memes) of Swift in the luxury box at Chiefs games, and it can be pretty exhausting to hear announcers uncork various tortured Swift puns throughout their broadcasts. But all told, the sports culture has gotten a lot more mature. If you watched Netflix’s Beckham, you know the fact that David Beckham was dating (and later married) a Spice Girl was used as a constant cudgel with which to bludgeon him during his playing career; every time he missed a shot, wags would blame his celebrity relationship. Maybe Becks should spend more time on the pitch and less time on the gossip pages — that sort of thing. This is exactly how Kelce—who is actually having the worst year of his career, on a team that, despite its No. 2 seed, has felt like a slight bit of a disappointment in its quest to defend its Super Bowl title—would have been treated 20 years ago. Heck, the great ESPN writer Seth Wickersham just wrote a big piece about Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes in which multiple observers at least obliquely place some of the blame for the Chiefs’ underwhelming season on the Swift-Kelce circus, and you still haven’t seen much blowback. It’s fair to say: This is not what would have happened in 2005. Perhaps this is progress? Anyway, don’t tell me you’re not curious what a Super Bowl in Vegas with Swift in town would be like. You’d watch the shit out of that; we all would.
With apologies to the Browns, Bengals, Commanders, Vikings, Jets, Cardinals and any of the NFL’s other historically frustrating franchises, with the possible exception of the Bills (who, uh, we are about to get to), there may be no better example than the Lions. The division title they won this year was their first since 1993; before Sunday, they had won one playoff game since 1957. They’re one of four franchises to have never reached the Super Bowl, despite having been around since 1930. Being a fan of this franchise — and it retains a fierce fanbase despite everything — has meant nothing but pain for a very, very long time. Which is why the Lions’ victory over the Rams Sunday at Ford Field, in front of a roaring, joyous crowd couldn’t help but make you emotional even if you’ve never been to Detroit.
The only reason the Lions aren’t No. 1 here is because this feels like the start of their journey, with a coach and a staff that is building something that won’t reach fruition for a couple more years. They’re well positioned to win their division, and return to the postseason, for years to come, as opposed to our No. 1 team, which may have no better chance than right now. But if you’re rooting against the Lions right now, you’re either a Buccaneers fan, or you have a heart of stone.
After the Chicago Cubs won the World Series in 2016, you could argue there are only two long-suffering-team-finally-wins-championship happy-sports stories that would be big enough to be, say, the lead story on the cover of The New York Times the next morning: The Browns win the Super Bowl, or the Bills do. You can make a strong argument a Bills victory would be bigger. After all, this is the franchise that notoriously lost four consecutive Super Bowls, one that represents a city and a region that in many ways would be entirely lost without it. (As I’ve written before, the state’s public financing of the new Bills stadium is both indefensible and entirely understandable when you consider how much the team means to Buffalo.) The Bills are in many way a synonym for “pain” among NFL fan circles. This year, they have one of their best teams ever, one that struggled for most of the season before finding itself late, with a quarterback in Josh Allen who is both brilliant and mercurial — and whose legacy will prove to be glorious or particularly torturous, depending on whether he ends up bringing the Bills a Super Bowl. There’s no bigger story in sports right now than this. It makes you want to jump through a table, doesn’t it? How could it not?
GO BILLS pic.twitter.com/EpHXy5MM1C
God bless those beautiful lunatics. Go Bills.
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