KC Chiefs still have 7 possible Wild Card opponents. Here’s the probability of each
Update: Either the Steelers or Raiders will be coming to Arrowhead Stadium next weekend. The Chiefs are locked into the No. 2 seed in the AFC. Read an updated scenario here on which team they’ll face in the AFC Wild Card Round.
The Chiefs did their part, even if barely. They wrapped up their regular season with a 28-24 win Saturday in Denver to finish 12-5 and guarantee themselves a top-two seed in the AFC playoffs.
And so now they wait.
On whom?
Good question. It’s quite a complex situation that awaits Sunday’s slate of games, which forms a winding path of many forks in the road. Or more like a seven-prong fork.
Even after the Chiefs beat the Broncos on Saturday afternoon, there are 96 remaining combinations of scenarios that could play out Sunday.
Ninety-six.
The Chiefs still have seven potential opponents for AFC Wild Card Weekend — the Colts, Chargers, Patriots, Bills, Ravens, Raiders or Steelers.
Or the Chiefs could still play nobody at all.
If the Titans lose to the Texans at noon Sunday, ignore everything else — the Chiefs would be the No. 1 seed in the AFC and receive the only first-round bye. For what it’s worth, FiveThirtyEight forecasts that as having a 27% chance of happening. And that covers exactly half of those 96 scenarios.
The rest? Well, thanks to a couple of reddit users (flomo813-6 and mtkaiser), we can use math to find out the remaining teams’ probability of visiting Arrowhead Stadium next weekend.
If you combine the remaining 48 scenarios with FiveThirtyEight’s game forecasts (which predicts the probability of each game outcome), you can find the chances of each potential Wild Card Round opponent for the Chiefs. Here’s what you get:
• Chargers: 30.1%
• First-round bye: 27%
• Colts: 15.9%
• Patriots: 14.9%
• Steelers: 4.8%
• Bills: 3%
• Raiders: 2.4%
• Ravens 1.2%
Here is the full chart of how each game’s outcome affects each scenario, if you’d like to follow along in real time Sunday. Warning: It’s lengthy.
The games that matter? Four of them kick off at noon — Titans at Texans, Bengals at Browns, Colts at Jaguars and Steelers at Ravens; two kick off at 3:25 p.m. — Jets at Bills and Patriots at Dolphins; and one is the Sunday Night Football game at 7:20 p.m. — the Chargers at Raiders.
In roughly half the scenarios, we won’t know the Chiefs opponent until the final game of the NFL’s regular season concludes.
Enjoy.
This story was originally published January 9, 2022 at 5:00 AM.