Bizarre ending to a bizarre season

The bleak race to win the NFC East is a fitting lowlight to end a season that has been strange in so many ways because of the pandemic.

Washington’s Taylor Heinicke was studying for college finals just a few weeks ago

There’s an NFL rule that says the winner of each of the eight division gets to make the playoffs. It doesn’t matter if that team happens to be more of a loser than a winner and is just slightly better than the other bad teams in the same division.

Which brings us to the bleak race to win the NFC East. One of three teams — the Washington Football Team, Dallas Cowboys or New York Giants — will be remembered as perhaps the worst division winner in NFL history. The others will live with the ignominy of failing to win an historically moribund division.

It’s a fitting lowlight to end a regular season that has been strange in so many ways because of the pandemic. There were games on all seven days of the week. The Denver Broncos played a game without a quarterback. The New England Patriots were bad. The Buffalo Bills were actually good.

The absurdity rolls into the season’s final weekend, which features unusual scenarios as teams vie to make a newly expanded playoffs that now include a seventh team in each conference. A team with a 6-10 record could win the NFC East. A team with an 11-5 record could miss the playoffs entirely in the AFC. A team with an 8-8 record could win a wildcard spot in the NFC.

There’s one other key factor in this playoff picture: the virus that has disrupted the entire country and NFL season. The Cleveland Browns, one of the AFC contenders, are actively battling an outbreak that forced the closure of their facility and has sidelined players and staff. New positives test results rolled in last week, casting doubt on the status of their critical game.

A number of key match-ups will be decided by an odd cast of characters. The Washington Football Team’s hopes could rest with a quarterback who was studying for college finals just a few weeks ago. The Los Angeles Rams are banking on a quarterback who had started a career in private equity. The Arizona Cardinals may turn to a quarterback who’s only professional completions came in the Canadian Football League.

The NFC East race should be simple. If the Washington Football Team (6-9) beats the Philadelphia Eagles — the only team in the division that has been eliminated — they’re in the playoffs at 7-9. But nothing is ever simple for a franchise mired in daily controversy and dysfunction, which has extended from courtrooms brawls involving owner Dan Snyder to the field.

Last week, Washington released quarterback Dwayne Haskins, who started on Sunday and was the team’s first-round pick in 2019, after a dizzying combination of poor performance and poor decisions off the field, including having his captaincy stripped when a video surfaced of him partying without a mask.

If Alex Smith can’t play because of a calf injury, Washington will start Taylor Heinicke, who earlier in December was taking online classes — number theory, partial differential equations, applied numerical methods and math and nature — at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, to wrap up his degree. He had taken two of his finals when Washington called, forcing him to send an awkward email to his professors asking if he could wait to take the other two after the season.

“They were pretty nice about it,” Heinicke said.

If Washington loses to the Eagles, then it comes down to the game between the Cowboys (6-9) and Giants (5-10). A Dallas win would put them in, though they’d lose the tie-breaker with Washington if both teams win. A Giants win would put all three teams at 6-10 — and New York would win the three-way tie-breaker.

This type of mess isn’t normal. Since the NFL expanded to 32 teams in 2002, only two teams — the Seattle Seahawks in 2010 and the Carolina Panthers in 2014 — have won their divisions with losing records.

There are eight teams in the AFC with at least 10 wins already. There are only seven playoff spots.

The Kansas City Chiefs (14-1) have locked down the No 1 seed while the Pittsburgh Steelers and Buffalo Bills, both at 12-3, have clinched their respective divisions. Then there are five teams tied at 10-5: the Tennessee Titans, Miami Dolphins, Baltimore Ravens, Cleveland Browns and Indianapolis Colts.

All of those teams are guaranteed a berth with a win except for the Colts, who would then need one of the others to lose, and it’s particularly fascinating because of the match-ups. The Colts (vs. 1-14 Jacksonville), Ravens (at 4-10-1 Cincinnati) and Titans (at 4-11 Houston) should have an easy go of it. But the Dolphins play the Bills while the Browns take on the Steelers.

In the past, the Steelers and Bills would have had major stakes on the line — the No 2 seed in the conference and a bye. The new playoff format, though, only gives out one bye per conference, and it already belongs to Kansas City. So it’s unclear if this game means much at all for them when there’s hardly a difference between the two and three seeds, especially when home-field advantage has been sapped by reduced or non-existent crowds.

In light of that, Pittsburgh is starting back-up quarterback Mason Rudolph over Ben Roethlisberger against Cleveland, which is also fighting the virus. The Browns already missed a chance to clinch a playoff berth when they lost to the lowly New York Jets last weekend with their top receivers off the field because of league-mandated contact tracing. Then, last week, four members of the organisation tested positive on Wednesday and Thursday — potentially jeopardising the game.

Any of those AFC teams would have an easy go of it if they played in the NFC, where there are three teams — the Los Angeles Rams (9-6), Arizona Cardinals (8-7) and Chicago Bears (8-7) — duking it out for the last two wildcard spots.

The Bears are in with a win. The Rams and Cardinals play one another, and the winner is in. The Bears, though, play the 12-3 Packers, who still have a first-round bye to play for. Chicago could still sneak in at 8-8 if the Cardinals lose.

It’s an especially dicey situation because of the quarterbacks. The Bears are riding the hot hand of Mitchell Trubisky, the quarterback they benched earlier in the year but has reclaimed his role. The Cardinals are waiting to see if a banged-up Kyler Murray can play or if they have to go with back-up Chris Streveler, who last year was helping lead the Winnipeg Blue Bombers to the CFL’s Grey Cup title.

Then there’s John Wolford, who will replace injured Jared Goff and put a career as a private equity analyst on hold to play some football. He’s stepping in with a chance to make a fascinating futures bet: taking the Rams back to the playoffs.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL