Key takeaways
- Both No. 3 seeds lost at home. Buffalo won 27-24 at Jacksonville and San Francisco won 23-19 at Philadelphia, which is the headline result of a weekend full of wild card upsets.
- Pittsburgh got wrecked 30-6 by Houston at home. A day later, Mike Tomlin stepped down after 19 seasons. He never had a losing year.
- Baltimore had already fired John Harbaugh on Jan. 6 after 18 seasons. The AFC North lost 37 combined years of head coaching stability in eight days.
- Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti found out about Tomlin live at his own press conference and responded with "Holy [expletive]." That is the most relatable anyone in an ownership box has ever been.
- Only two home teams won in six games. If your bracket pool rewarded chalk, this weekend was a bloodbath, and the divisional round is not obviously safer.
Wild card weekend delivered upsets, a blowout, and then an aftershock nobody had on the board. Six games, four road winners, both No. 3 seeds knocked out at home, and by Tuesday afternoon the two longest-tenured head coaches in football were both out of their jobs within eight days of each other.
The AFC North had been the most stable division in the sport. John Harbaugh had been in Baltimore since 2008. Mike Tomlin had been in Pittsburgh since 2007. Both are gone. One was fired, one walked, and both exits trace back to a season that refused to respect anybody's résumé.
Let's take the football first, because the football set all of it up.
The wild card upsets: both 3-seeds went down
Six games, and the seeding barely mattered in any of them.
- Saturday: LA Rams (5) 34, Carolina (4) 31. The 8-9 division champion hosted a 12-5 team and very nearly won anyway.
- Saturday: Chicago (2) 31, Green Bay (7) 27. The only home team that won and had to sweat it.
- Sunday: Buffalo (6) 27, Jacksonville (3) 24. A 13-4 team out in its first game.
- Sunday: San Francisco (6) 23, Philadelphia (3) 19. The second 3-seed down, same day.
- Sunday: New England (2) 16, LA Chargers (7) 3. The most predictable result of the weekend and also the ugliest.
- Monday: Houston (5) 30, Pittsburgh (4) 6.
Two home wins in six games. Both No. 3 seeds lost in their own buildings on the same afternoon, which is the kind of thing that gets described as unprecedented right up until somebody checks. Jacksonville finished 13-4 and played one playoff game. Philadelphia won its division and played one playoff game.
None of this should have been shocking to anyone who read the bracket carefully. As we noted in the regular season wrap, four of the six wild card games featured a lower seed with a better record than its host. Seeding this year was a formatting artifact. The market treated it as a ranking, and the market got taken apart.
Home field is worth points. It is not worth four wins in the standings. Every year a pool crowd forgets the difference, and this year the format made forgetting unusually expensive.
Pittsburgh 30-6, and then Tomlin walked
The Steelers won the AFC North at 10-7 and hosted a 12-5 Houston team. It was 30-6. There is no charitable reading available.
That loss extended Pittsburgh's playoff winless streak to seven games. On Tuesday, Jan. 13, Mike Tomlin stepped down after 19 seasons. Not fired. Stepped down.
Tomlin never had a losing season in 19 years. Not one. In a league engineered from top to bottom to drag every franchise back to 8-9, one man kept a team above water for nearly two decades, through quarterback changes, roster turnover, and multiple eras of how football is played. That record is going to look more impressive every year that passes, because it is the kind of thing that cannot be planned for or replicated on purpose.
The seven-game playoff drought is the other half of the ledger and it is why this ending was not a surprise to anybody who follows the team. Consistency without a January is a hard thing to keep selling. But there is a difference between a coach running out of results and a coach deciding for himself when it is finished, and Tomlin got the second one.
Baltimore fired John Harbaugh eight days earlier
The Ravens went 8-9 and lost the AFC North on a Tyler Loop field goal that missed. That is the entire margin between a home playoff game and a coaching search. Baltimore fired John Harbaugh on Jan. 6 after 18 seasons.
Eighteen years. Most head coaches do not get eighteen months. Harbaugh was in Baltimore long enough that the franchise's institutional memory and his tenure are basically the same thing, and it ended over a kick that sailed wide in a season where the entire division finished with a losing record except the team that just got blown out at home.
Both AFC North exits share a root cause and it is not coaching: this was a division where 10-7 won it, 8-9 finished second, and the other two teams finished 6-11 and 5-12. When a whole division underperforms, the people with the longest tenure absorb it.
"Holy [expletive]": how Bisciotti found out
The detail that will outlive both news cycles: Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti was holding his own press conference when he learned, live, that Tomlin was stepping down in Pittsburgh. His reaction, on the record, was "Holy [expletive]."
It is funny. It is also the most honest summary anyone in the sport produced this week. Two owners, two of the longest coaching tenures in modern football, both ending inside of eight days, one of them finding out about the other from a room full of reporters. The AFC North has had exactly two head coaches in Baltimore and Pittsburgh since 2008. Next season it will have two new ones.
Nine head coaching jobs have now changed hands this cycle, going back to Tennessee moving on from Brian Callahan in October and the Giants moving on from Brian Daboll in November. Where any of these coaches end up is a story for the next few weeks, and anyone telling you they know today is guessing.
The pick'em angle: what wild card weekend taught us
If you run or play in a bracket pool, this weekend was either a disaster or a windfall, depending on whether you priced teams by seed or by record. A few things worth carrying into the divisional round:
- Stop paying full price for home field in this format. Four of six road teams won. Two 12-5 road teams beat division champions with worse records, and a third 12-5 road team lost by three to an 8-9 host.
- Blowouts are the real bracket killers. The 30-6 and 16-3 results are the ones that wreck margin-of-victory tiebreakers. If your pool uses them, weight your confidence toward the games you think will be close, not the ones you think you know.
- The survivor lesson from the fall applies here too. The teams that busted pools all season were popular favorites, not obscure ones. That pattern held right through January, and it is the same thing that gutted the field back when Carolina went into Green Bay as a 13-point underdog and won.
- Coaching news is not a handicapping input this week. Neither Baltimore nor Pittsburgh is still playing. Do not let the loudest story of the week bleed into how you rate teams that had nothing to do with it.
The divisional round sets up as Denver hosting Buffalo and New England hosting Houston in the AFC, with Seattle hosting San Francisco and Chicago hosting the Rams in the NFC. Three of those four home teams sat out last weekend. The fourth just needed a four-point win over a 9-7-1 team to get here. Pull up the season stats before you fill anything in, because the records that got these teams seeded have been a poor guide to what happens on the field for four straight months.
Two coaching legacies closed inside eight days, both No. 3 seeds are out, and the two teams with the league's best records have not played a snap yet. Whatever the next round looks like, it will not be decided by who deserved the higher seed. Nothing this season has been.