You couldn’t prepare for a regular season game with much more at stake than this one. The winner of the game will be the only seed in the NFC, will win the NFC North and will have home field advantage during the NFC playoffs. Neither team would have to play outdoors for the entire postseason.
The loser will obtain the fifth seed in the NFC and go as a visitor in the wild card round (either against the Rams, Buccaneers or Falcons), becoming the first team with 14 wins to play in that round. There’s a good chance the five-seed’s path to the Super Bowl includes a road game against the NFC North champion in the divisional round and the No. 2 seed Eagles in the NFC Championship Game.
That’s a big difference, considering one seed has reached 49 Super Bowls since the playoffs expanded to 10 teams in 1978, and five seeds have reached a total of three.
Okay, but what if there’s a tie?
There hasn’t been a tie since Week 13 of 2022 between the Giants and Commanders, but if you think back to the Chargers-Raiders regular season finale in 2021, anything can happen. The Raiders won that game with a 47-yard field goal as overtime expired; otherwise, it would have ended in a tie and the Steelers would have missed the playoffs.
A tie in Sunday’s Vikings-Lions game wouldn’t be a doomsday scenario. The Lions would get the sole spot because they own the head-to-head tiebreaker over the Vikings, courtesy of a 31-29 win at Minnesota in Week 7.
In the event of a tie, it also means that Detroit’s result on Monday in San Francisco was not entirely insignificant. If the Lions had lost that game and tied in Week 18 against the Vikings, they would be the fifth seed.
I think Dan Campbell would rather go up in flames than play for a tie in overtime, but if somehow the game ended in a tie, the Lions would be the beneficiaries.
