This is the athletic football show.

Welcome to the athletic football show.

I'm Robert Mays.

Joining me tonight is my good friend Nate Tice Nate. How are you Mays. Joining me tonight. It's my good friend,

Nate Tyson, how are you? Week 17 in the books, playoff time. It's like, it's finally, it's like, oh, yeah, stuff coming to the light. And it's like, I'm starting to get a great feel for these teams. And it's like, okay, regular season's over. Here comes the playoffs. Now it's just throw that all out the window because it's so week to week now. And it's awesome. It's the best time.

It's so much fun. I love even expanding this to seven teams in each side, it's, I still got excited about the extra game. It's like, I'm a sucker for it. It's just, I know. At first I'm like, oh, we don't want that. It dilutes it. And as soon as it came, it's just like, oh, I love it. Extra game. Here we go. The fact that there are six games next weekend is crazy. I mean, it's unlike any other playoff weekend we've ever had. Typically, I'd always said the divisional round was my favorite weekend of the year because the quality of the games is so high. But now Wildcard weekend has six games. So it's going to, it has a little bit of a

different edge than it used to have. So we're going to get into the playoff field, some of the things that happened today, including some, the NFC East having to have a winner. The Brown's making the playoffs for the first time in a very long time. A surprising outing from John Wolford and the Rams, few other things, some teams that did not show up when they needed to.

Before we do that, though, let's talk about what just happened in the Sunday night game. I don't have a ton to say. I'm pretty sure the Eagles were actively trying to lose the game. Yeah. I don't. Hey, I think they ended up with pick number six, I think. So, hey, good job by them. Win, win. If that's an organizational dictum

that they're telling Doug Peterson do what you can to lose this game. If you got to throw Nate

Sutfeld in there, if it's going to a little dicey, then go ahead and do it. I'm pretty sure

you have to keep Doug Peterson, which does seem like from everything that came out this week, it feels like they are going to bring it back, which likely means that Carson wins to be in Philadelphia. We'll see what happens with that quarterback situation. We've had a lot of time to talk about the Eagles, though, when we're going to have even more time in the offseason to talk about the Eagles. Let's talk about Washington. They finish 7 and 9. They win the NFC East. You know, in a lot of ways, it's not as an impressive season compared to other division winners, even that we've seen this year, that we've seen in the past. And with a third team to make the playoffs with a losing record since 2010, Ron Rivera coached one of the other ones, funnily enough, in Carolina. But for a Washington team that desperately needed a reset and a reboot, this is everything

they could have asked for.

You know, they were seven and nine.

They fought hard every single week.

They were one of the best defenses in the NFL from start to finish.

Early in the season, I feel like some of the success they had on that side of the ball. There was a question and it was a worthy question of if it was real and how long they could sustain it. And they did all year. They finished the, it came into this game third in the NFL and EPA per play on defense. I assume that won't change very much. Second and defensive DVOA lost Land and, who should have been their best defensive player coming

into the season when you look at the way they've paid guys. So I feel like a resounding success

from a team that really needed to turn around. They brought Ron Rivera in for this express

purpose. Yeah, it's what you bring Ron Rivera is to bring respectability and just organizational skills,

like a true leader of a team, like a true leader of men and just what it entails with an NFL

franchise because everyone, even myself, even being in it, you're always like, oh, the leader,

it's just you watch film all day. That's like, no, it's not. You are truly a leader and organizer

...