With the NFL postseason set to get underway, the league has made a tweak to its branding of the postseason’s opening round.
For the 2020 season, the NFL expanded its postseason, adding a wild card team in each conference. That brought two extra games to Wild Card Weekend and with that, a change came, with “Wild Card Weekend” becoming “Super Wild Card Weekend.” That became even more relevant the following year, when a Monday night game was added to the schedule, putting two games on Saturday, three on Sunday and the sixth on Monday (though blizzards in the Buffalo area forced a schedule modification last season, with two games being played each day).
But while the format and schedule has not changed, the league has reverted back to calling the opening slate of games simply “Wild Card Weekend.” Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk shared details of an email he received from the NFL explaining the decision to drop “Super.”
“‘Super’ debuted during the 2020 season playoffs when the NFL introduced the new Wild Card format and the addition of a team from each conference making the playoffs, the first change since 1990,” Florio shared. “‘Super’ was used the last four seasons to help differentiate from the previous 30 years of the Saturday/Sunday schedule and further drive awareness of the three days of Wild Card games. It served its purpose as fans have responded well. While it has been retired, there’s no doubt the Wild Card games will continue to be super.”
How “super” were the games in the four years of “Super Wild Card Weekend?”
Only 10 of the 24 games played in that four-year stretch were decided by a single possession. The 2023-24 postseason was arguably the nadir, with only one of the six games played on “Super Wild Card Weekend” being decided by one possession — or even single digits. Here’s hoping we see a change in that this season — even if the games are no longer officially “super.”
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