THE NFL the writers certainly saved the best for last. The Lions host the Vikings on “Sunday Night Football” to end the regular season, the first regular season game in NFL history between teams with more than 13 wins.
You couldn’t prepare for a regular season game with much higher stakes than this one. The winner of the game will be the single seed in the NFC, win the NFC North and have home-field advantage throughout the NFC playoffs. Neither team would have to play away for the entire playoffs.
The loser will earn the fifth seed in the NFC and hit the road in the wild-card round (either the Rams, Buccaneers or Falcons), becoming the first 14-win team to play in that round. There is a good chance that the path of the five seeds to the Super Bowl would include a road game against the NFC North champion in the divisional round and against the No. 2 seed Eagles in the NFC championship game.
That’s a huge difference, considering a top seed has appeared in 49 Super Bowls since the playoffs were expanded to 10 teams in 1978, and five seeds have made a total of three.
OK but what if there is a tie?
There hasn’t been a tie since Week 13 of 2022 between the Giants and Commanders, but if you remember the Chargers-Raiders regular season finale in 2021, anything can happen. The Raiders won this game on a 47-yard field goal as time expired in overtime; otherwise, it would have ended in a tie and the Steelers would have missed the playoffs.
A tie in Sunday’s Vikings-Lions game wouldn’t be quite that doomsday scenario. The Lions would get the top seed as they own the tiebreaker over the Vikings thanks to a 31-29 win at Minnesota in Week 7.
In the event of a tie, it also means that Detroit’s result Monday in San Francisco was not completely meaningless. If the Lions had lost this game and tied in Week 18 against the Vikings, they would be the fifth seed.
I think Dan Campbell would rather instantly ignite than play for a tie in overtime, but if somehow the game ended in a tie, the Lions would be the beneficiaries.
