NFL Playoff Rooting Priorities for the Apathetic Fan, Ranked

A quick and handy reference for those without a shit to give

Hey, holy cow, is it really time for the NFL playoffs again, already? God, I wish they’d just go away! Nobody cares! Football is bad and these playoffs are #cancelled.

No, I kid. Like death itself, these playoffs are coming whether you’re ready or not. We might as well have some fun and just give in and watch them, right? It’s January, what the hell else are we doing? Eating less?

Fortunately, I’ve cobbled together a loose guide for like-minded hoot-withholders that goes over which teams are worth rooting for and against. After all, if we’re going to watch these games regardless, we might as well find a reason to care about them.

If you feel personally invested in the outcome of any of these games — if any specific team winning or losing an NFL playoff game will affect your personal sense of self and overall happiness one iota — then stop reading this and go study for the SATs.

For the rest of you, the adults in the room who just want to see some good games and fun teams: hello! Welcome. Let’s get going. And remember, as always, this list is indisputable and you’re dead to me if you disagree with anything I’ve written.

12. New England Patriots

No explanation needed, right? Cards on the table: I’ve lived in Massachusetts for my entire life and have celebrated all six of this repugnant team’s Super Bowl wins without remorse or regret, but not even I can resist taking some delight and glee in how quickly and joylessly everything is falling apart for the Patriots. They went 11–5 in 2018 in an incredibly frustrating year that every fan was ready to call the team’s worst season in over a decade only to win the fucking Super Bowl three games later, their third in a decade for the second decade in a row. Perfect time for all involved to call it quits, right?

Apparently not! Since then? Let’s see, the owner got busted for getting too many handjobs at the seediest Floridian massage parlor you can imagine, the team signed the most volatile player in the league and then cut him only after a second rape allegation surfaced within a week, the fortysomething quarterback and “team leader” has spent the season blaming the rest of his offense for his plummeting performance metrics, and the infamously sportsmanship-challenged organization got caught taping the worst team in the league doing playcalls on the sidelines a week before playing them. I don’t know if they’ve ever been more unlikable than they are this season, and that’s quite a bar! The one argument you could kinda sorta make in favor of rooting for them is that it’d be nice to see the GOAT go out on top — except, he’s already had more than one chance to do that, and some combination of vanity and quack science salesmanship has kept him going every time.

11. San Francisco 49ers

On the one hand: a 25-year title drought is nothing to sneeze at and this team’s been a generally fun story, a young group which has wildly exceeded preseason expectations after circling the toilet drain for six years. Maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing if they won the #BigGame and took home the #Bacon this February.

On the other hand: this is one of the most successful franchises in all of American sports and the Bay Area isn’t exactly hurting for championships — thanks to the baseball Giants and basketball Warriors they’ve got a Boston-matching six banners in the last ten years. No one who wants this really needs this!

On the third hand, balled into a fist and mashing away on the other two hands until it’s the only hand left and the only salient point that matters here: fuck Jed York for relocating this team fifty miles away into the bowels of Silicon Valley so they could play in a legitimate convection oven of an empty stadium.

10. Philadelphia Eagles

Remember when this team won its first Super Bowl two years ago and the fans were so confused about how to celebrate that they ran into subway poles and ate nuggets of horse shit? That’s one aspect of an Eagles title run we could all appreciate! Another is, I dunno, something or other about how much adversity Carson Wentz would have overcome en route to winning a title after watching the last one injured from the sidelines.

But no one actually wants to see this extremely mediocre 9–7 crew hoist a second Lombardi in three years, right? They may be the most likable team in the NFC East, but, holy smokes is that a low bar.

9. New Orleans Saints

Fourteen years after Katrina, New Orleans still feels like a city generally worth rooting for, and if we’re doing the type of weird and gross karmic math that compensates regional tragedies with sports trophies, then it stands to reason that the Saints deserve another one (or two, or three) for the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Drew Brees also seems like one of the more likable quarterbacks in the league, mostly by virtue of being a total bore instead of an immense shithead, and unlike Tom Brady he just might actually, you know, go out if he ends up on top.

There are still some very good reasons not to root for the Saints, though! Chief among them: they have the softest, whiniest, most aggrieved fans on the planet. (And that says a lot coming from a New England man like me!) When the team was docked a few draft picks after the defensive coordinator was caught running a bounty program in which players were paid bonuses for injuring high-profile players on opposing teams — let me repeat that —after the defensive coordinator was caught running a bounty program in which players were paid bonuses for injuring high-profile players on opposing teams, Saints fans lost their collective minds! Since then, not a single screwy call has gone against the Saints without half of Louisiana crying about collusion and fixes and Goodell screwing them over for — one more time — the defensive coordinator running a bounty program in which players were paid bonuses for injuring high-profile players on opposing teams.

These fans complained so hard about a single blown call in the playoffs last year — the fucking newspaper fake-newsed the Super Bowl! — that the league did what it does best and changed the rules to provide less clarity and even more margin for interpretation on the very rule the Saints fans were screaming about, as if to say, “don’t worry, we’ll fuck this one up for everyone, forever, we promise!” There are still Saints fans who think that the Superdome power outage during Super Bowl XLVII was an inside job by the NFL just to further tweak the team over the bounty program. Imagine Patriots fans, but living in a bayou. Christ!

8. Seattle Seahawks

You can tell we’re hitting that middle portion of these rankings because I’ve got no compelling reasons to root for or against Seattle this postseason beyond “because Pete Carroll and Russell Wilson are a likable duo deserving of a second ring” and “because they just won the damn thing like six years ago or whenever that was,” respectively. I guess maybe you love Marshawn Lynch? Or — or! — maybe you hate him? Also Pete Carroll is a 9/11 truther. Take that in whatever direction you want to go with it, I guess? I dunno, you figure out whether or not to root for the Seahawks, I ain’t your father.

7. Green Bay Packers

It’s easy to argue that with four Super Bowls to their name, including one just nine years ago, the Packers belong at the bottom of this list with New England and San Francisco. And you can put them there if you want to! But there are two key elements of a potential Packers Super Bowl victory that I think would make it easier to swallow.

One is that Aaron Rodgers is on the back half of his career and inarguably — but weirdly, kinda quietly, lately? — he is an all time great QB. He should enter the Hall of Fame with at least a second ring! Eli Manning has two rings — Rodgers should have two rings!

The other is that evergreen “power to the people” fun fact where the Green Bay Packers are owned by the city of Green Bay*, which means a win for them is truly a triumph for the common man (and not just for a committee of, say, six rich white guys with a token women in there for good measure). There is no such thing as America’s team, but the Packers at least lay the groundwork for nationalizing the, uh, National Football League. Bully for them.

*This is not actually true, you sap!

6. Tennessee Titans

On paper, these guys ought to top this list. You’ve got the league’s current comeback story at quarterback, a former first-rounder who flamed out badly and came in as a backup; he took the starting job when the team was 2–4 and he went 7–3 down the stretch, lifting his team into the playoffs to pursue its first Super Bowl win ever in their sixty-year history. What’s not to love?

Well, pump the brakes and I’ll tell you what’s not to love! That quarterback in the midst of a heart-warming comeback story? Yeah, that’s just that old shitbag Ryan Tannehill, the guy who got corncobbed by practice squad players for seven years in Miami. And that sixty-year history? More than half of it belongs to Houston; the team’s only been underachieving in Tennessee since 1996.

All that and the 9–7 record leaves me both accepting that there could be joy to find in an improbable Titans championship, but refusing to wish for such a thing to come to fruition. See? Nuance.

5. Houston Texans

Hey, speaking of Houston — it really ought to be these guys who own the rights to the Titans’ “sixty years without a ring” pity party, like how the new Cleveland Browns took on all the failures of the old Cleveland Browns and let the old Cleveland Browns start over entirely as the Baltimore Ravens back in 1996. I mean old Houston didn’t even move to Tennessee until 1997, after Cleveland and Baltimore had established that you can abandon a legacy of losing when you relocate; you can just leave it behind for the next team who comes through.

Anyway, these Texans. I dunno! With Watson and Hopkins, they’re a lot more fun to watch than they were when that try-hard doofus J.J. Watt was the face of the franchise, right? I still think this team has the least-inspired name and logo in the league, never really shaking that “create-a-franchise” vibe they’ve had going for them since 2002, but who cares? No, really, I ask that non-rhetorically — does anyone have any strong feelings one way or the other about the Houston Texans?

4. Baltimore Ravens

With two Super Bowl wins and twelve postseason appearances sine 2000, the Ravens have a great case to make for “second-best team of the millennium,” and that becomes pretty ironclad should this 2019 team bring home a third title. (Again, that these are the former Cleveland Browns is plainly and flatly hilarious.) In most cases, there’d be no good reason to root for such a team to succeed.

Thing is, the 2019 Baltimore Ravens aren’t most cases. For five, ten, maybe even twenty years now, conventional wisdom has held that the NFL is an increasingly pass-happy league, and that the days where teams could line up, plow forward, and just run the ball to win are long gone. But then along came these Ravens, who broke the NFL record for rushing yards in a single season — held since the friggin’ Carter Administration— on their way to taking the AFC’s top overall seed. Running the ball is back, baby!

“Oh that’s nice,” you might be thinking, “so they’re a one-trick pony of an offense? Shut down their running backs and you’re good to go?” You simpleton, you dullard, their leading rusher was no running back, it was their goddamn quarterback! Lamar Jackson — remember his name!

“Ah okay, interesting,” you might be thinking, shifting the goalposts on your overall strategy for dismissing this team, “so this is Mike Vick again? Cam Newton? A running quarterback who can’t really throw the ball?” You dipshit, you willfully obtuse moron, Lamar Jackson threw for 36 touchdowns and 3,000 yards this year. He had just six interceptions. His passer rating was third-highest in the league. The Ravens were the first team in history to average both 200 yards rushing and 200 yards passing. They are utterly dominant both on the ground and through the air because Lamar Jackson is utterly dominant both on the ground and through the air.

“Well, yeah, sure,” you might be thinking, now conceding that you’re wrong on this point but holding firm in your resolve not to be impressed by Lamar Jackson and what he’s done, “but guys like him never last. Get back to me in five years and let’s see where he’s at.” You absolute pig, you horse’s ass, you’re just changing the subject and creating a new argument out of thin air to protect your casually racist but deeply held opinions on what type of athlete can excel as an NFL quarterback. That a guy like Lamar Jackson “won’t last” in this league is more or less a foregone conclusion — but it’s all the more reason to root for this historic team to finish strong and win the whole damn thing!

You strawmen make me sick!

3. Minnesota Vikings

The thing about the Minnesota Vikings is that they’ve never won the Super Bowl. At first glance, that’s not much of a thing! A lot of teams have never won the Super Bowl. But the thing about the Vikings that really makes “never winning the Super Bowl” their thing is that they’ve been to the playoffs 29 times. That’s no easy feat! For roughly 60% of their history, the Vikings have been better than roughly 70% of the other teams. But they’ve never managed to be the last team standing.

To continue to put this in perspective, only the Cowboys, Packers, Giants, and Steelers have more playoff appearances than the Vikings, and each of them have four or more Super Bowl wins. The Vikings have lost four Super Bowls. They’ve lost six NFC Championship games. They haven’t made it to the Super Bowl since 1976; the median birth year of a Minnesota resident is 1981.

To zoom out a bit, Minnesota is represented in all four of the big North American sports leagues. The Wild and the Timberwolves have existed for fifty years combined and neither team has ever once been nationally relevant. The Twins have been around for sixty years and have two World Series rings to show for it. That’s it. That’s all they’ve got in Minnesota between these four teams: two banners, thirty years ago.

It is extremely easy to root for and extremely difficult to root against this franchise in general. But! Is this iteration of the Vikings really the one you want to see break through? On their 30th go-round, at 10–6, led by Kirk Cousins — are these Vikings really the ones to root for? After Cunningham, Carter, and Moss, after Peterson and Favre, after that team a few years ago that went 13–3 the season after Teddy Bridgewater nearly lost his leg — are the 2019 Vikings truly deserving of your support?

Reader — yes, they are! They are just less deserving than the top two teams on this list.

2. Buffalo Bills

Of all the perennial laughingstock teams in the NFL, the Bills might have the deepest hole to climb out of when it comes to gaining national respect. The Jets are unlovable losers who you can reliably expect to look like a dominant team for a few years every decade, the Jaguars have always been just kind of a punchline conceptually, and think about how much the whole world wanted the Cleveland Browns to be good this year. Cincinnati and Detroit have longer playoff droughts than Buffalo, sure, but the Bengals are more of an afterthought than a punching bag and the Lions have a sad handful of vestigial pre-Super Bowl era championships to their name. Any of these teams would immediately gain some semblance of leaguewide respect by winning a few playoff games or even making-but-losing a Super Bowl. (Just look at what doing exactly that — in humiliating fashion — has done for the Atlanta Falcons. Three whole years after 28–3, and people are still surprised when the Atlanta Falcons stumble out of the gate and completely suck, even though they’re still the Atlanta Falcons.)

The Bills, on the other hand, stand to gain nothing by making-but-losing a Super Bowl. They did this four times already, consecutively, back in the ’90s. And that’s it! That’s the high-water mark for the Buffalo Bills, who spent twenty years prior to the ’90s being forgettably bad and twenty years since the ’90s being memorably bad. They have nothing else to hang their hats on. They can’t even celebrate their greatest historical players like the rest of the league can because the best player in their history is O.J. fucking Simpson.

Two years ago, a 9–7 Bills team backed into the playoffs in Week 17 and the fans in Buffalo went absolutely apeshit. No one has ever been happier to watch their team lose 10–3 to Jacksonville in the Wild Card round. And why not? It was the team’s first playoff appearance in 18 years. Two years later they’ve got their first 10-win season since, holy shit, 1999. They’re no longer a surprise Week 17 back-in, and they’re no longer just happy to be here. No one needs a Super Bowl ring more than this franchise, and the Bills Mafia, bless their hearts, can already smell it. You would have to be a monster not to root for them.

1. Kansas City Chiefs

In a sense, everything leading up to this point has been meaningless. There can only be one Super Bowl champion, and as such you can only truly root for one team to win it all. And of course, the only correct team to root for in these 2019 playoffs is the Kansas City Chiefs.

Consider the quarterback. Patrick Mahomes was last year’s runaway MVP, but through a combination of factors — a midseason knee injury, an expected statistical regression, the emergence of Lamar Jackson and our collective inability to focus on the last big thing once the next big thing arrives— he’s entering this postseason weirdly under the radar. Not quite as an underdog, but certainly not as the undisputed story of the year that he was last season. That said, he’s still the same player he was last season! The best way to describe his playing style is “Brett Favre, but less shitty” — a proverbial gunslinger with incredible arm strength and athletic capability, but with a proverbial game manager’s ability to avoid making mistakes. He’s confident but not cocky, dedicated but not dour, young but “poised” both in the pocket and in front of a microphone — essentially, he is the easiest quarterback in the league to root for.

Consider the coach. Andy Reid ranks sixth on the all time win list, but he has never won the Super Bowl. This is his twenty-first season in the league and seventh with Kansas City. He has three losing seasons to his name and none with Kansas City. Thing is, he’s just 2–5 in the postseason with the Chiefs! Let’s take a look at those five losses and experience his agony, shall we? In 2013, to the Colts, by one. In 2015, to the Patriots, by seven. In 2016, to the Steelers, by two. In 2017, to the Titans, by one. And in 2018, to the Patriots, in overtime. Good God! How has this man — specifically, this man — avoided a heart attack? By all accounts, what you see with Andy Reid is what you get: not a surly asshole treating football like a military operation, but a jolly old fat man with a walrus mustache, loved by his players. His complete inability to manage the clock is an almost affable Achilles heel at this point. In a league where teams are run by guys like Gregg Williams and Greg Schiano, how could you not root for this friggin’ Kool-Aid Man?

Lastly, consider the fanbase. The Chiefs’ lone Super Bowl win came fifty years ago. It was in 1969, and as such it predates the AFL-NFL merger and the so-called “modern era.” It also predates the end of the Apollo program and the invention of the floppy disk. Moreover, this was the last time the Chiefs so much as made the Super Bowl, which is particularly tragic when you consider that they’ve got the eleventh best all time record out of the 32 teams in the NFL. There are forty-five year-old Chiefs fans who’ve never even seen their team play in the Super Bowl. There are sixty-year-olds who can’t remember doing so. It’s easy to picture it: somewhere in the center of the country, a ten-year-old, his thirty-five-year-old father, and his fifty-five-year-old father are all sitting down to watch the Chiefs in the playoffs, each of them hoping to see something they’ve never seen before, one or two of them knowing they might never see it at all. Surely we can all get behind those three and root for the goddamn Kansas City Chiefs to win the Super Bowl!

And now, for my coup de grâce, picture the same three people… but they’re women! Why wouldn’t they be women? Of course they’re women, it’s 2020, Chiefs fans can be women. Rooting against the Kansas City Chiefs is rooting against women. These women and all women. Grandmas, single moms, little girls, the whole lot. Don’t do that. It’s a bad look and a no growth and you should be ashamed of yourself. This is my fight song.

Thank you for reading! This has been NFL Playoff Rooting Priorities for the Apathetic Fan, Ranked, a non-recurring feature I will surely never do again. Enjoy the games and have a happy new year — you’ve earned it!