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| Cheer up, Raiders fan. A win over the lowly Raiders mean more to a team than a win over a contender. |
With the
calendar turning to mid-November and most of the playoff field largely-decided, we turn
for a moment this week to the NFL’s grand prize, the Lombardi trophy. A decade ago, one could correctly point to a
playoff bye as a key step to a Super Bowl title. A team who only needed to win two games to
make the Super Bowl (at least one of which would be at home) would only be
helped, the thinking went, by the extra week of rest. But the importance of getting a bye has
proven less and less important since 2005, as 5 of the last 7 Super Bowl champs
(and 4 of the last 5) were playing during Wild Card Weekend.
The most
important factor, experts say? How a
team plays down the stretch. Since we’re
not “down the stretch,” yet, we obviously can’t assess that for 2012, so we’ll
table it for six weeks. Instead, we’ll
look at another piece of conventional wisdom: that Super Bowl-contending teams typically
blow out crappy teams, something that has absolutely held true in the past 10
years. Some facts after the jump:
