After nineteen weeks of NFL football, only four teams remain on the road to Super Bowl 50, and for the most part there aren’t too many surprises. After a Wildcard Weekend that saw the visiting team win every game, the roles were reversed during the Divisional Round as the home team was victorious in all four contests. As such, the first and second seeds in both the AFC and NFC moved on to the Conference Championships.
NFL Conference Championship Preview
In the AFC, the top-seeded Denver Broncos will play host to the second-seeded New England Patriots, while in the NFC, the top-seeded Carolina Panthers welcome the second-seeded Arizona Cardinals to town. While these are all highly respected clubs, each game tells a very different story. In the AFC, it’s a tale of two perennial contenders vying for Super Bowl berth that seemingly everyone expects one of them to occupy in any given year. They are venerable franchises led by Hall of Fame quarterbacks that have a track record of success for over a decade-and-a-half.
On the NFC side of the equation, you have the new kids on the block taking center stage. While the Patriots and Broncos have combined for six Super Bowl titles, neither of their NFC counterparts has won a Lombardi trophy. That will make for an interesting narrative next week when the Super Bowl 50 match-up has been determined, but right now let’s take a deeper look at the Conference Championship games.
Arizona Cardinals vs. Carolina Panthers
These two teams paced the NFC all season, and so it is fitting that they will face off in the biggest game the conference has to offer. Buoyed by elite quarterback play and excellent defense, these two teams are both ready for prime time.
There isn’t much more that can be said about Cam Newton’s spectacular season. After showing flashes of true dominance over the first four years of his career, Newton took the next step and became one of the game’s elite signal callers, turning in a likely MVP-winning season and carrying the Panthers offense on his back at times. A pre-season ACL tear to top wideout Kelvin Benjamin looked like a blow to the Panthers chances of contending this year, but Newton stepped up his game this season in a huge way. With big defensive contributions from Luke Kuechley, Josh Norman, Thomas Davis, and Kawann Short, the Panthers achieved the kind of balance that most franchises would drool over, compiling a 15-1 regular season record en route to the NFC’s top seed.
Their opponents in the NFC Championship took a similar path to get to the big game. Carson Palmer put up an MVP caliber season of his own as the Cardinals offense was among the game’s most productive and exciting in recent history, while the defense came up big as well. After a series of injuries to Palmer last year, this franchise teased us with what they could accomplish if the former USC Trojan could just stay healthy. We found out the answer to that question this season and that answer was “plenty”. The Cards finished 13-3, the second best record in the league after the Panthers, and generally looked like a team that had the talent and confidence to win any given contest. And win they did.
While both of these teams have made appearances in the Super Bowl before, a title has eluded these franchises over the course of NFL history. These two talented, hungry teams will face-off for the right to face one of the AFC’s old guard in the biggest game of the year. This should be a great one.
New England Patriots vs. Denver Broncos
We couldn’t let an NFL season go by without a Tom Brady-Peyton Manning match up, could we? In all seriousness, expect this narrative to be over-played all week, and expect Brady and Manning to try to avoid answering questions about it. And who could blame them? These two will be inextricably linked in NFL history books, but this game is about the Super Bowl, not a debate about the greatest quarterback of the modern era.
The Patriots are back in the AFC Championship game for an obscene fifth year in a row, and Denver is back in the game for the second time in three years. The Pats started the season on an absolute tear, looking very much like a team that could finish 16-0, before an rash of injuries slowed them down considerably. Though they still finished 12-4, they dropped four of their last six games and clearly needed to get healthy fast. With Julian Edelman back in the line-up and Tom Brady showing no ill-effects of his Week Seventeen ankle injury, the Pats appear to be back in business. Brady’s MVP-caliber season (notice a trend with these quarterbacks?), Belichick’s usual brilliance, and an underrated supporting cast all contributed to the team’s success and put them in this position. Will Belichick and Brady make their seventh trip together to the Super Bowl? We’ll find out soon enough.
Standing in their way is the Denver Broncos, the first team to hand the 2015 Patriots a defeat during the season in a thrilling 30-24 game that was decided in overtime. Of course, that wasn’t a Brady-Manning, match up as Brock Osweiler started that game, but it is an important footnote to consider entering this game. The Broncos won that game by playing solid defense and running the football well, two things that have become the staples of the team’s game plan. The Bronco’s elite stop unit has been a huge catalyst for success, and they will need to be on their game in a big way against a talented Patriots offense that just scored 27 points against a scorching-hot Kansas City Chiefs’ defense.
These two franchises have both been here before. With a berth in Super Bowl 50 on the line, expect the very best from each of these teams in what should be a reasonably low-scoring affair, and one of the most-watched games in recent NFL history.
In less than a week, the AFC and NFC championships will have been awarded and Super Bowl 50 will be the next stop on the journey. In the meantime, enjoy these two exciting and important AFC and NFC match-ups for what they are. Two long-standing powerhouses and two up-and-coming squads, making their cases to be the best team in the National Football League. Legacies are about to be forged and solidified.
