NFL Divisional Playoff Picks: Who will advance to the Conference Championship Games?

The NFL’s Divisional Playoffs this year illustrate clearly the importance of having an elite quarterback — or at least elite quarterback play. Of the eight teams remaining at this stage of the postseason, five have starting quarterbacks ranking among the top ten in DVOA and four in the top five of that metric.

Even more illustrative is the EPA+CPOE composite from RBSDM.com. Among the leading QBs in that statistic (filtering out when a team’s win probability is less than 4% or more than 96%), each of the top six QBs in the NFL are on teams that are still alive. All of this goes to say that the 2021 season demonstrates that NFL football is still a quarterback-driven sport, perhaps more so than ever before.

It’s a good thing for the Green Bay Packers, then, that they have the league’s top-ranked QB in both of those metrics. Aaron Rodgers is on his way to a fourth MVP award, but he is of course looking for his second Super Bowl ring instead. In his way this week is Jimmy Garoppolo (ranked 5th in DVOA and 4th in EPA+CPOE composite), who has given the San Francisco 49ers great results this year.

Will the Packers get it done at home in the Divisional round for the third straight year to advance to another NFC Championship Game? If so, who would they face, the defending champions or another NFC West team who has lost at Lambeau Field twice since the start of the 2021 calendar year? And out in the AFC, will Josh Allen or Patrick Mahomes move on to deny the other a repeat appearance in the AFC title game?

Here are our picks for this weekend’s games, and be sure to give us your opinion on Packers-49ers below. You can check out all of the lines for this weekend’s games courtesy of our friends at DraftKings Sportsbook.