The National Football League has spent the first 15 weeks and three games of their regular season eliminating five teams from playoff competition. Today, tomorrow, and over the next two weeks, the league will remove 13 more squads from consideration to pare down the Super Bowl prospects to 14 teams.
Eliminated are the Jacksonville Jaguars, Detroit Lions, Houston Texans, New York Jets and Chicago Bears. Two teams are assured of division titles, the Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys. Those two NFC teams are in a fierce battle to earn the coveted first week playoff bye along with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Los Angeles Rams. Last night, the chances of a bye for the team that was last to fall from the unbeaten ranks this season, the Arizona Cardinals, took a hit with their third consecutive loss.
I recall as a kid going to San Francisco Giants baseball games vendors at the stadium selling programs by saying, “Scorecard, scorecard, can’t tell the players without the scorecard.”
Today, in the NFL, the cry would be “Covid, Covid, can’t know the teams without the Covid list.”
Rules that sideline players because of either positive tests or exposure to the virus have wreaked havoc throughout the league this season. While injuries during weekday game preparation was an occasional occurrence in the NFL, that is, a player suffering a major injury not in a game but during practice, this year any squad is subject to getting a weekday or pregame report that a key player is not eligible because of the virus.
Two teams this week, the Baltimore Ravens and New Orleans Saints, are forced to open a new can of quarterbacks because their first three choices have all been lost to injuries or Covid protocol. The Cincinnati Bengals host the Ravens today with the two teams tied atop the AFC North Division race … and the Ravens, who were just gaining confidence in backup Tyler Huntley, who replaced an injured Lamar Jackson, now need to count on veteran Josh Johnson to end a three game skid that has seen Baltimore relinquish their bulge in the division standings with three losses by a total of four points.