The Carolina Panthers are 7-2 in close games, while the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are 5-6. Both teams are in the bottom 20 in point differential. Tampa Bay is 31st in average margin of victory, while the Panthers are 29th. The NFC South, everybody.<\/p>\n
We have ourselves as close to a play-in situation as it gets between the Panthers and Buccaneers\u2026kind of. As we discussed in the NFC Playoff picture ahead of Week 18\u2019s games, the Panthers could lose this game and still make the playoffs. They\u2019ll need some help from the Atlanta Falcons.<\/p>\n
Tampa Bay needs a win and the Falcons to lose.<\/p>\n
Why does the Panthers vs. Buccaneers game matter for the 49ers?<\/p>\n
No matter what ends up happening in San Francisco\u2019s game Saturday, the winner of this game could play the 49ers soon.<\/p>\n
If the 49ers win Saturday night to take the one seed, they could see the NFC South winner in the divisional round if all the home teams win on Wild Card weekend.<\/p>\n
If the 49ers lose Saturday night and the Rams lose on Sunday, San Francisco would be the five seed and travel to the winner of the NFC South in the Wild Card round.<\/p>\n
Based on how they\u2019ve played this year, the Bucs don\u2019t deserve to be in the postseason. Baker Mayfield lives on the injury report and plays like a quarterback who has been perpetually banged up. He\u2019s a different quarterback than the one the San Francisco 49ers faced back in Week 6. In that game, Mayfield had an average yards per attempt of 11.1. He\u2019s only had two games with over seven yards per attempt.<\/p>\n
Bryce Young has outplayed Mayfield this year, which is how both teams have arrived at Week 18. Carolina is ahead of schedule. It showed last week, and it should again here against Todd Bowles, who has seemingly spent the past month calling out his team.<\/p>\n
The talent level for the Bucs should prevail on Saturday afternoon. We\u2019ll find out on Sunday whether that\u2019s enough for Tampa Bay to make the playoffs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Carolina Panthers are 7-2 in close games, while the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are 5-6. Both teams are…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":119138,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[17258,101,58154,48327,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":["post-119137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-game-day-threads","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-49ers-discussion","tag-san-francisco-49ers-playoffs","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119137\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/119138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}