During the first half of Saturday night’s preseason game between the Cowboys and the Texans, CBS analyst Phil Simms offered up his picks for the 2010 playoff field.
In the AFC, he selected the same six who made it a year ago: the Jets, Bengals, Colts, Chargers, Patriots, and Ravens.
He’ll likely miss on three of those picks, given that the free agency era has seen turnover of roughly 50 percent per year. And so the safe approach is to pick all of the six playoff teams from 2009 to return, which essentially guarantees that the prognosticator will be partially right.
The risk-takers will try to predict the three teams per conference that, as history tells us, won’t make it back, the three that will, and the three playoffs party crashers. Few so-called experts apply that approach due to the risk of picking the wrong three to exit and the wrong three to replace them.
But at least Simms allowed for some turnover in the NFC. He picked four of the teams from last year to return (Cowboys, Vikings, Saints, Packers), with the Cardinals and Eagles being bounced for the 49ers and Giants.
I’m not knocking Simms. I applied a similar approach in my picks for the PFT Season Preview magazine. In the NFC, my six-team field matches Simms’. In the AFC, I dropped the Bengals and the Jets and included the Texans and the Dolphins.
So I went with 33-percent turnover per conference, even though I was fully aware that it’s likely that one more of the teams that made it last year from each conference will be sitting at home this time around.
As to the rest of the PFT scribes, Rosenthal, MDS, and Silva each predicted that three of 12 won’t make it back.
Keep that dynamic in mind as more and more predictions roll in over the next week or so. And if anyone out there predicts that six teams that made it last year won’t make it this year, we’ll applaud him or her for having the guts to do so -- and then of course we’ll point and laugh if the ultimate outcome of the suggested playoff field is zero for 12.