Heading into this past Sunday, there was concern that Week 18 of the NFL season would be a complete dud. The Lions and Colts had already been eliminated by the Lions losing and Texans winning, meaning all the potential wild card teams were already in the playoffs and the only spots remaining to be determined were the winners of the NFC South and AFC North, and if the Steelers, Panthers, and Dolphins all won, all 14 playoff teams would be determined through Week 17 with only seeding left to be settled.
In the end, that did not end up happening. The Browns pulled the upset over the Steelers, the Seahawks had a fairly dominating win over the Panthers, and the NFL had a veritable surfeit of games that it could put in its standalone windows, with the two remaining playoff spots to be decided by division title games in Panthers-Bucs and Ravens-Steelers. I’m not titling this post “Week 18 Schedule Post-Mortem” because when I did that it was in the aftermath of an almost indefensible schedule (and the time before that involved me needing to recalibrate my expectations), and that’s not what happened here. I predicted the schedule more or less completely accurately, with Panthers-Bucs on Saturday and Ravens-Steelers as the Sunday night game. This despite the fact that right up until the Week 18 schedule was actually announced at the end of the Bears-Niners game, there were a number of people on The Site Formerly Known As Twitter absolutely convinced that the Sunday night game would be Seahawks-Niners.
This was absolutely astounding to me. I had been pretty much convinced that as long as the AFC North division title game was an option, it would get the nod for Sunday night – it had all the advantages in terms of stakes, name value, and storylines. Yet as the Sunday night game went on I actually started second-guessing myself and seeing the case for Seahawks-Niners to get the nod. In the end, the original logic I went by won out and I couldn’t help but celebrate a little even as I was no longer sure it was the right move. Certainly many of the people who expected Seahawks-Niners to get the nod, rather than simply admitting they were wrong, moaned that the league had made a mistake. So in this post I’m going to break down exactly why the league set the schedule as they did by looking at every argument made in favor of Seahawks-Niners and why they fell flat.