Which team is sleeper in the 2009 playoff tiebreakers & game-by-game scenarios?
Assuming no regular-season games end in ties, there are 18 possible combinations for the No. 5 and No. 6 seeds in the AFC. Those are included below. Note also that Cincinnati can pass New England for the No. 3 seed in the AFC, but it must make up 5 games to win the strength of victory tiebreaker. There are 11 possible combinations of all six NFC seeds. To read the below tables, each row represents the winning team(s) for their Week 17 matchups. A blank space indicates the team contending for the wild card lost. Both teams separated by a slash indicates that the winner of that game does not matter in conjunction with the other winners in that row. So the second row below means that if New York wins vs. Cincinnati and Baltimore loses at Oakland and Denver wins vs. Kansas City and Houston wins vs. New England, New York will be the No. 5 seed and Denver the No. 6 seed. Below each row is the explanation of how ties were broken for that scenario. AFC Week 17 winners Playoff teams NYJ BAL DEN
