Late on Sunday night, when the hum of the world has stilled and the good sane people of the country have sloped off to bed, there’ll be a whole heap of us for whom the fun is only starting. There was a time when this meant nightclubs, or at the very least late pints and no work on Monday morning. Now it means a dimmed livingroom with the volume turned down so that the rest of the house stays asleep.
Yes, it is time for the NFL playoffs. Where wins become losses and losses become wins (if you know, you know). Always the pep in the post-Christmas fug, you couldn’t invent a better fit for these few weeks of the sporting calendar. It’s dark outside, nobody has anywhere to be, all the other sports are still weeks and months away from jeopardy. Meanwhile, here are these games, the 32-team field whittled down to the last eight, everything mattering all the time.
When you’ve watched enough sport, you know instinctively how much of it you need to consume in the moment and how much you owe to your one and precious life. Do you really need to watch the first set from the fourth round of the Australian Open? You do not. Will you get away with having the second round of the Dubai Desert Classic on in the background while you clean the kitchen? You will.
For much of the regular season, American Football has a bit of that going. You watch it while not watching it, right until you have no choice but to watch it. It’s a sport you can keep an eye on while attending to other matters. You’d want to be a real sicko to be sitting down at six o’clock on a November Sunday, glued to the first half of an NFL game without having something else going on at the same time.
But the playoffs are the pure drop. Fantasy Football is over. There’s no Red Zone any more. A sport that for four months is perfectly dip-in-and-outable now demands your attention. And nowhere is that truer than in the final game of this weekend, when the Baltimore Ravens take on the Buffalo Bills on Sunday night at 11.30pm Irish time.
Mostly, that’s down to two players. Lamar Jackson for the Ravens and Josh Allen for the Bills. At any given time, the sporting world never has more than a handful of characters who demand you stop and look at the screen when they’re on. The NFL has three of them right now and two are facing off against each other this weekend.
[ Lamar Jackson v Josh Allen: how two geniuses somehow got even betterOpens in new window ]
If Patrick Mahomes is still the king of all modern quarterbacks, Jackson and Allen are thrilling pretenders to the crown. This season in particular, they have been by a distance the two best players in the league, battling it out for that peculiarly American bauble, the most valuable player trophy. They had burned off all other contenders long before the end of the regular season.
Any kind of novice viewer could see why. If you’d never watched a minute of American football, you’d still have picked them out as the two most valuable players in the league this season. Time and again, they took games over and decided them all by themselves, pulling off moves that shouldn’t have been possible.
Jackson’s most famous play came against the Cincinnati Bengals back in early October. It started with him fumbling the ball. Instead of diving on it before he got minced, Jackson picked it up, retreated a few yards, stiff-armed an advancing Bengals defensive end (not once but twice), ran to the sideline and pointed to where he was going to send the ball to get his receiver in position, before throwing across his body to connect with Isaiah Likely at the back of the end zone.
The whole thing lasted 11 seconds — an eternity in NFL terms — and was one of those pieces of sport that leaves you laughing at the sheer wildness of it. The play should have ended three times in failure and still, he somehow conjured up a touchdown. The Ravens were 10 points down with five minutes to go and ended up winning by three. Ludicrous.
“Only Lamar” screamed the NFL’s official X account when running the highlight. Except, a few weeks later, Allen had his own skywalk to pull off. With just over two minutes left against the Kansas City Chiefs — and Mahomes on the opposing sideline waiting to ice this game as he has so many others — Allen took off running and scythed through six defenders on his way to the end zone.
Four different Chiefs got a hand on him but he bludgeoned them out of his way. Allen isn’t particularly fast, at least not compared to other quarterbacks like Jackson or Washington’s Jayden Daniels or Arizona’s Kyler Murray. This was more like a backrow trucking over the try line than a nippy winger skating in to score.
But the context was everything. The Bills are decent but they can’t win without Allen putting them on his shoulders and here he was, doing it against the defending Super Bowl champions with the game on the line. Nothing is more storied in American sports than the quarterback stepping up when that tornado of violence is swirling around him and making the play that clinches the win.
If Allen can do it against the Chiefs when it matters, maybe he can keep doing it through the playoffs. And if so, maybe he can end the Bills’ haunted record — they famously made four Super Bowls in a row in the early ‘90s without winning one and have never been back in the 32 years since.
The Ravens have won two Super Bowls but haven’t made the final game of the year since their last one in 2012. Jackson has been the league most valuable player twice in his career but his playoff record is patchy — the win over Pittsburgh last weekend was just his third in seven games. Allen’s is better — six wins from 11 — but like Jackson, he has yet to play in a Super Bowl.
And maybe neither of them will get there this time around. Mahomes and the Chiefs have been patchy enough through the season but still ended up with a 15-1 record and have the Houston Texans on their slate this weekend. Whoever comes out on top between Allen and Jackson will still have that hurdle to jump next weekend.
None of that matters on Sunday night. All it will be is the here and now, the season’s two best players trying to get their team into the last four. Late at night and the good sane people are asleep, a few stolen hours of quiet exhilaration for the rest of us.
Can’t wait.
