Week 18 preview: Vikings at Lions for all the (regular season) marbles
The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL
The Athletic
4.6 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 3 January 2025
⏱️ 57 minutes
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Summary
The regular season began four months ago with what very well could be an AFC Championship Game preview, Ravens at Chiefs. It ends with what very well could be an NFC Championship Game preview, Vikings at Lions. The location of that possible third meeting between division foes will be determined on Sunday night when they battle for regular season NFC supremacy. Robert Mays and Derrik Klassen dive deep on that game to kick off the Week 18 preview episode of The Athletic Football Show. The guys also discuss the remaining playoff spots up for grabs—AFC 7-seed and NFC South winner—choose their own adventure for the NFC Wild Card round, and consider the contrasting makeup of the playoff fields within the two conferences.
Rundown
- Vikings-Lions preview
- Remembering the first Bucs-Saints game of the season
- Building our ideal NFC Wild Card Round matchups
- Bengals-Steelers preview
- The AFC 7-seed
- AFC's got the star QBs, NFC's got the expertly built teams
Host: Robert Mays
Co-Host: Derrik Klassen
Executive Producer: Michael Beller
Producer: Michael Beller
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Athletic Football Show. I'm Robert Mays. Week 18 is here. A slightly |
| 0:09.7 | underwhelming week 18. Typically, there are probably three, four games that have a huge impact |
| 0:14.3 | on what the playoff field is going to look like. For the most part, things are relatively set. |
| 0:19.4 | And even where they're not, you have the bucks being like two touchdown favorites over the Saints. |
| 0:23.8 | Vikings Lions is the game of the week and one of the games of the year. |
| 0:27.8 | So me and Derek Klesson spent a majority of our week 18 preview digging into what that might look like as those two teams fight for the number one seed in the NFC. |
| 0:37.2 | We also chat a little bit about the rest of the field in the NFC and what an ideal |
| 0:41.5 | playoff bracket in that conference might look like, which feels important just because of |
| 0:47.6 | how wide open the NFC is right now and how many teams we can envision potentially playing |
| 0:52.9 | on championship Sunday. |
| 0:54.7 | Also dug into the AFC field, what still needs to get settled over there, and just a couple |
| 0:59.9 | other thoughts as we head into the final week of the regular season. |
| 1:02.8 | So let's dig into all of that with Derek right now. |
| 1:24.7 | All right, Derek, let's dig into the Week 18 preview, which is going to look a little bit different than a lot of the other previews we've done this year, because there's essentially one game that really matters, and then a lot of other hypothetical situations that we're going to talk about. |
| 1:33.2 | So let's kick this off with the one game that really matters, The game of the week presented by BetMGM, Vikings at Lions. Lions are minus three-point favorites in this game. This is an absolute banger to get at the end of the year. We were just |
| 1:38.2 | talking before we started recording about how there aren't that many games that are meaningful |
| 1:41.6 | in Week 18. That's offset by a game that kind of means |
| 1:45.4 | everything. It means as much as a week 18 game in the NFL can possibly mean. This is for the |
| 1:53.2 | one seed and home field advantage in the playoffs. This is the first time in NFL history, I believe, |
| 1:59.1 | that two teams with 13 plus wins have been facing |
| 2:01.7 | each other in a regular season game. Some of that is because we have an extra week, so it's |
| 2:06.3 | easier to get to 13 wins. But even with that, it's still remarkable that this is a season |
... |
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