Buffalo Bills: Wild Card weekend is when bad teams do great things
The Buffalo Bills enter the postseason after a relatively miserable year, statistically. Bad numbers, however, haven’t stopped many of the league’s other poor playoff teams from advancing.
When Baltimore Ravens tight end Benjamin Watson came up a yard short on fourth-and-14 near the end of Sunday’s game against the Cincinnati Bengals, the Buffalo Bills clinched their first playoff berth in the 21st century. And just like that, quicker than you can say “Tyler Boyd”, the longest active postseason drought in America’s four major sports had ended (baseball’s Seattle Mariners now “top” the list).
Now, the real fun begins for Buffalo. They enter football’s single-elimination tournament with one of the worst playoff teams the sport has ever seen – and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
The Bills were 29th out of 32 NFL clubs in offensive yards and 26th in yards allowed. Those rankings are similar to those of the weakest team to ever reach the playoffs, the 2010 Seattle Seahawks (28th and 27th, respectively). Those Seahawks were outscored by an astounding 97 points during the regular season and won the NFC West with a losing record.
Of Buffalo’s nine wins, seven were against teams that finished 6-10 or worse and they lost four times by 20 or more points. The other 11 teams in the playoff field combined to lose six such games.
On the season, the Bills scored 57 fewer points than they allowed, placing them among the bottom third of the entire league in that metric. Only four teams have ever qualified for the postseason with a worse differential. But if there’s a glimmer of hope for Buffalo, it’s that all four of those clubs actually won their opening round playoff game.
In fact, of the 15 teams that had been outscored by 20 or more points and still qualified for the postseason, 12 of them (80 percent) advanced to the second round. That group includes very few standout quarterbacks and nine underdogs who collectively went 7-2 in their initial playoff games.
| Year | Team | Point Diff. | Starting QB | Wild Card |
| 2010 | Seattle Seahawks | -97 | M. Hasselbeck | Won |
| 2011 | Denver Broncos | -81 | T. Tebow | Won |
| 2004 | St. Louis Rams | -73 | M. Bulger | Won |
| 1989 | Pittsburgh Steelers | -61 | B. Brister | Won |
| 2017 | Buffalo Bills | -57 | T. Taylor | ??? |
| 1998 | Arizona Cardinals | -53 | J. Plummer | Won |
| 1978 | Atlanta Falcons | -50 | S. Bartkowski | Won |
| 2016 | Houston Texans | -49 | B. Osweiler | Won |
| 1989 | Houston Oilers | -47 | W. Moon | Lost |
| 1994 | Chicago Bears | -36 | S. Walsh | Won |
| 2014 | Carolina Panthers | -35 | C. Newton | Won |
| 2012 | Indianapolis Colts | -30 | A. Luck | Lost |
| 1983 | Denver Broncos | -25 | S. DeBerg | Lost |
| 2017 | Tennessee Titans | -22 | M. Mariota | ??? |
| 1986 | New York Jets | -22 | P. Ryan | Won |
| 1995 | Philadelphia Eagles | -20 | R. Peete | Won |
| 1993 | Los Angeles Raiders | -20 | J. Hostetler | Won |
*Non-Strike Shortened Seasons
The Tennessee Titans (-22) will join the Bills as eight-point road underdogs during Wild Card Weekend. It marks just the second time the NFL has ever had two playoff teams with a minus-20 point differential during the regular season. In 1989, the Pittsburgh Steelers (-61) defeated the Houston Oilers (-47), 26-23, before falling to the eventual AFC Champion, Denver Broncos, by a point the following week.
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Both Buffalo and Tennessee enter January following a string of solid results. The Bills have won four-straight contests against quarterbacks not named Tom Brady, while the Titans are 7-4 in their last 11 games — and three of those losses were decided by a combined nine points.
Fortunately for both teams, as history has shown, a poor regular season point differential doesn’t seem to matter; every team begins the postseason at 0.