I'm doing something here that never, ever works, and that is predicting what will happen in the NFL playoff bracket by running through the entire thing. Yes: I'm picking winners for the six wild-card games, the four subsequent divisional-round contests, the two conference championships and then Super Bowl LVIII. That's 13 game previews, seven of which are for games that might never actually occur.
Will this be the actual bracket? No. Do not waste your time getting mad. If we treat my chances of getting each game right as a coin flip, the odds of me making 13 correct picks are 8,192-to-1. And if I get even one wrong in the early rounds, the seedings are thrown off, which would ruin the entire bracket I've predicted.
Subscribe: "The Bill Barnwell Show"
Instead, I hope you'll treat this as a thoughtful look into what might transpire if and when these teams do match up in the playoffs. I've done my best to break down how each team lines up against one another, what might represent obvious points of strength and weakness and what history tells us about their chances, including one matchup that just about everyone would expect to be a blowout.
I'll be up front: I made a preseason prediction on a Super Bowl matchup, and as I'm lucky enough to have both of those teams in relatively strong positions as we begin the postseason, I'm sticking with that prediction here. First, let's make it through the wild-card round before getting deeper into the postseason:
Jump to a round:
Wild-card weekend: NFC | AFC
Divisional round: NFC | AFC
Conference title games: NFC | AFC
Super Bowl LVIII
NFC wild-card weekend
(7) Green Bay Packers at (2) Dallas Cowboys
Sunday, 4:30 p.m. ET on Fox
Spread: DAL -7.5 (50.5)
On "Around the Horn" on Monday, ESPN's Ramona Shelbourne wondered whether the Eagles might have been laughing on the inside about losing out on the division title to the Cowboys. The 2-seed means at least one home game and avoiding the 49ers until the conference finals, but playing the Packers feels a lot more dangerous than playing the Buccaneers, given how Green Bay has won three straight to advance to the postseason.