With their latest commanding victory bringing their record to 11-3 on the season, the Baltimore Ravens became the first team in the AFC to clinch a playoff spot. Barring everybody else losing out, they need only to win one more game this season, in fact, to capture the top seed and the first-round bye—but it has to be a specific game—and a bit of help.
The earliest the Ravens could clinch the top seed would be in Week 17, when they face the 10-4 Miami Dolphins, one of only three teams remaining in plausible striking distance, the others being the Kansas City Chiefs and, against all odds, the Cleveland Browns, both 9-5.
If the Ravens win their next two games, they will clinch the top seed heading into the final week of the season, with nothing anybody else could do about it. But as long as they beat the Dolphins in Week 17, they still stand a very good chance of locking up the bye even if they lose their two other remaining games.
If either the Chiefs or the Browns were to win out while the Ravens only beat the Dolphins, either of them would claim the top spot. In the event that both teams manage to win out, Kansas City would have the edge over Cleveland.
Not that Baltimore’s remaining schedule is easy. Their next opponent is the 11-3 San Francisco 49ers, currently the top seed in the NFC. After a brief blip midseason, they appear to be right back on track and are dominating teams.
After that game is, of course, the game against the Dolphins, with the season finale coming against a Pittsburgh Steelers team that should hopefully have QB Kenny Pickett back by then. I understand that Steelers fans would laugh at the notion that that might be a tough game for the Ravens, but funny things always happen in divisional games.
So while the Ravens have already stamped their ticket to the playoffs, and they have a very clear and straightforward path to locking up the top spot, it won’t be easy. They will have to take down two of the best teams in the league over the course of the next two weeks.
But if they manage that, they could find themselves resting starters against the Steelers in the finale, which would certainly be an embarrassment. Of course, if they’d simply caught the passes that were thrown back in Week Four against the Steelers in their first matchup, then things would be even easier.
As for the Dolphins, in addition to the Ravens, they still have to play the Dallas Cowboys and the Buffalo Bills, so they’re likely to lose at least one more game. The Chiefs have the Las Vegas Raiders, the Cincinnati Bengals, and the Los Angeles Chargers—two teams that have fired their head coach and another without its franchise quarterback. But the Raiders and Bengals seem to have rebounded amidst the adversity.
The final team’s schedule to consider is the Browns, who only narrowly beat the Chicago Bears yesterday. They still have to play the Houston Texans and the Bengals in the finale, though in between they have the New York Jets. Of these, I think the Chiefs clearly have the best shot at winning their final three games, but I expect the Ravens to go at least 2-1.
