Larejo is a mid-stakes tournament mastermind who specializes in outmaneuvering 150-max players with a small number of entries
The old adage says, “Nothing is as good or bad as it seems.” I’ve taken this to heart over the years, and when you think about it, it’s so true. Whether you’re in the midst of something great, or working through something not so great, it will rarely feel or actually be as good, or as bad as it seems at the moment. That’s the thing with the NFL playoffs. Mostly everyone sees them the same way. We say the one seed is good. We think the seven seeds are bad. The seeding and recent play strongly influences our opinions because surely when the stakes are raised even higher, the better teams will prevail. Right? Not so fast. The balance here is we know for certain there will be some unexpected outcomes coming our way. We just don’t know where.
In the playoffs, we can put a little or a lot of our prediction formulas into the first matchups (or second in some cases) earlier this season. Teams evolve over the course of any season, coaches do as well. For this week, the Packers / Eagles Week 1 kickoff matchup holds little value. As does the TNF matchup in Week 6 of the Rams and Vikings. I’d argue that of all the current matchups, only the Steelers / Ravens game holds the honor of being able to see how these teams matched each other up earlier this season in order to assess this week’s game. That said, we need to find unpredictability in predictability. With six games on the weekend, we’re spanning all in this piece, including an emphasis on short slates where appropriate.
