The dust has settled on the Divisional Round of the NFL play-offs and now just four teams remain on the road to Super Bowl 51 in Houston.
Here are some of my thoughts after a weekend where the pretenders were cast aside and the contenders took another step towards NFL immortality.
Having a quarterback matters
Look at the four teams remaining in the play-offs and each of them has genuine quality at the game’s most important position, quarterback. Tom Brady is chasing a record seventh Super Bowl appearance with New England, Ben Roethlisberger has two Super Bowl rings with Pittsburgh, Aaron Rodgers is white-hot right now and also a former Super Bowl winner and Atlanta’s Matt Ryan is a front-runner for the league’s Most Valuable Player prize.
Contrast that with Brock Osweiler, who made so many damaging throws and decisions for the Houston Texans, and Alex Smith, who couldn’t make enough game-changing plays for his Kansas City Chiefs and you can see why having a truly great signal-caller is a real difference maker.
There is plenty of hope for all four remaining teams and we are assured of one thing on Super Bowl Sunday in a few weeks’ time – we will have a stellar match-up of quarterbacks on display.
The talented Mr Rodgers
If Aaron Rodgers keeps playing at this level for the Green Bay Packers, we’re going to need to invent new words to describe his skills. How about ‘strilliant’ which is a combination of stupidly brilliant? Or ‘incredibzing,’ which is a wonderful combo of incredible and amazing?
I think that is going to be the way to go because I am running out of words to describe such brilliance. We use the term great all too often when reporting on sports but it is not an empty and hollow form of praise when it comes to Rodgers – he deserves every bit of it.
He was sublime at the end of Green Bay’s 34-31 win at Dallas, first withstanding a vicious blindside hit from Jeff Heath and holding onto the ball in the process. And then delivering a throw for the ages to pick up 35 yards on a connection where he told tight end Jared Cook to simply ‘get open'.
I love watching the Falcons, but a little bit of Aaron in the Super Bowl would not be a terrible way to spend an evening watching the NFL.
Ryan on a roll
Rodgers is certainly the hottest quarterback in the NFL at the moment but don’t sleep on Ryan, who is jam-packed full of confidence in Atlanta.
During the Falcons’ 36-20 win over Seattle in which they could afford to send Julio Jones to the bench in order to rest his ailing toe, Ryan hit eight different receivers and threw for 338 yards and three touchdowns.
His laser-accurate darts are a thing of beauty and no quarterback is throwing the deep ball as consistently and as effectively as Ryan, who is making the use of every single player on the offensive side of the locker room.
Patriots defence steps up
Tom Brady was far from able to live up to his ‘Tom Terrific’ nickname in Saturday’s eventual wear-down of the Houston Texans, but he was able to deliver the death blows to Bill O’Brien’s men because his under-rated defence turned the screws on Osweiler.
New England are always going to get their share of points with Brady at the helm but I think this defence is confident enough – and certainly well-coached enough – to feel they can limit Big Ben this coming weekend and then one of the ‘pick your poison’ pairing of Rodgers or Ryan.
And consider this when taking Brady’s brilliance into account. He has now played 15 full seasons in the NFL and is preparing to play in his 11th AFC Championship Game. Again, that is not just brilliant in this era – it is historically great and is why the Patriots are the gold standard when it comes to the NFL.
The Bell chimes again
Le’Veon Bell takes his time as he inches his way to the line of scrimmage before darting through a hole for another big gain and while it is unconventional, it works and has the Steelers one game from the Super Bowl.
One week after setting a club play-off record with 167 rushing yards against Miami, Bell rushed for 170 yards in Pittsburgh’s 18-16 win against the Chiefs at Arrowhead Stadium. The nit-pickers might worry that the Steelers failed to score an offensive touchdown, but they were facing a quality team in the Chiefs in a venue where many have failed in the past.
Bell is an enigma of a runner and defies all coaching methodology which suggests you have to ‘hit the hole hard’ or ‘run it up in there'. He deserves a great deal of credit but the same praise must be given to Pittsburgh’s offensive line. If they can run like that again in Foxboro, that approach will frustrate Brady and limit his scoring opportunities.
Move on from Brock?
The common narrative this season has been that Osweiler has struggled at quarterback for the Texans but they will stick with him for 2017 because he was guaranteed $37 million of his $72 million contract over the first two years.
And the actual technical salary cap hit that the Texans will receive in 2017 is $25 million. But there is a growing school of thought that the Texans will indeed cut ties with an inexperienced quarterback who has baffled and bemused with some shockingly-bad decisions this season.
You might say ‘how can they move on at that price?’ I would argue, how can they not? Imagine the potential for this talented team if a reliable quarterback was flinging the passes to DeAndre Hopkins, Will Fuller and an emerging band of tight ends, or handing the ball off to 1,000-yard rusher Lamar Miller.
We all know what the defence can do in Houston but they will only go to the next level with better quarterback play… which could mean them staying in the state of Texas and calling the Dallas Cowboys to ask about the availability of a certain Tony Romo.