Broadway Joe
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- Mar 19, 2019
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It’s safe to say that neither the Jets nor the Dolphins will win the AFC East. But on Sunday, when the Jets play the Dolphins, that may go from a 99.9 percent probability to a 100 percent certainty for the losing team.
That’s because if the Patriots win on Sunday, the Jets-Dolphins loser is mathematically eliminated from AFC East contention.
It’s easy to see why the Dolphins would be eliminated: The Patriots are 8-0, so if they win to improve to 9-0 on Sunday, the worst they could finish is 9-7. The Dolphins are 0-7, so if they lose to fall to 0-8 on Sunday, the best they could finish is 8-8.
For the Jets, who are 1-6, a loss to drop to 1-7, combined with a Patriots win, would still give them the extremely remote possibility of tying the Patriots at 9-7 by the end of the year. But in that case, the Jets would lose the tiebreaker: Even if the Jets were to win out and the Patriots were to lose out after this week, a 9-7 Patriots team would have a 4-2 division record. That’s better than the Jets can have, as they’re already 0-3 in the AFC East.
It’s not often that a team is mathematically eliminated from playoff contention in Week Nine, but it has happened before: After nine weeks of the 2007 season the Patriots were 9-0, the Dolphins were 0-8 and the Jets were 1-8, which meant both the Dolphins and Jets were mathematically eliminated. History repeats itself in the AFC East.