I bet you didn’t see this coming.
With just four games remaining in the regular season, the St. Louis Rams are actually in the hunt for their first playoff appearance in eight years. They would need to win out—not necessarily a prospect for which you’d want to thrown down in Las Vegas—but the really interesting part is that they don’t need as much help as you might expect, given that they currently rank 11th among the NFC’s 16 teams (with six making the playoffs).
Are you a CITY SC fan?
Subscribe to the CITY Scene newsletter to get a fan’s guide to the pro soccer scene in St. Louis.
Assuming, for sake of discussion (or for the sake of dreaming), that the 5-6-1 Rams win their winnable games against Buffalo, Tampa Bay, and Seattle on the road and against Minnesota at home, they’d wind up with a 9-6-1 record. In the process, they’d be giving a seventh loss to the Bucs and Vikings, moving them out of the way, and they’d have handed a sixth loss to the Seahawks.
That would mean—without help from any other team—that the Rams would be no worse than ninth in the playoff standings and no worse than a half game behind Seattle, Washington, and Dallas (the latter two sitting at 6-6 now). The only help they’d need would be for each of those mediocre teams to lose another game.
Dallas and Washington play each other, meaning one of them gets a seventh loss right there. Dallas has tough games remaining in Cincinnati and at home with Pittsburgh and New Orleans. They’re less likely than the Rams to win out.
Washington still has to face Baltimore at home and Philadelphia and Cleveland on the road, an easier schedule, but the Ravens are tougher than any of the Rams’ opponents. That leaves Seattle, which would have to beat San Francisco and Arizona at home, and Buffalo on the road, to stay ahead of the Rams in this scenario.
There are other, farther-flung ways for the Rams to sneak in—the 49ers losing three of their last four, or Green Bay or New York wilting—but those are truly in the wild-dream department. But winning out and counting on Seattle, Dallas, and Washington to pick up one loss apiece is not.
Wouldn’t it be something if the season came down to the last game, on December 30 at Seattle, much like it did in 2010, with two not-so-great teams battling for the conference’s final playoff spot? Even if the Rams were to lose again, they’d have the consolation of having made one of the most improbable playoff runs ever, and they could proudly claim to have been victimized by the replacement refs, without whom Seattle would have had one more loss.
Winners of their last two, the Rams are hardly expected to end the season on a six-game winning streak, but if it happens, you can expect the first playoff football since 2004. For a team that was certainly left for dead at 3-6-1 two weeks ago, after a ghastly home loss against the lowly New York Jets, that’s not all bad.
Pleasant dreams.
