Wild Card Weekend has been around for decades now, denoting the weekend when the NFL’s Wild Card playoff teams kicked off the postseason.
“Super” was added to the weekend’s name in 2021, however, after the playoff field was expanded and games on the first weekend increased.
Exploring the Origins of Super Wild Card Weekend
The NFL has long had at least one Wild Card team qualify for the playoffs, dating back to the 1970 AFL-NFL merger, after which three division winners and the non-division-winning team with the best record qualified for the postseason from each conference.
The format then expanded to two Wild Card teams per conference in 1978, when it first began using the Wild Card distinction, and bumped up to three teams in 1990, leading to 12 of the league’s 28 teams qualifying for the postseason.
Then came expansion to 32 teams in 2002, and the league realigned to eight four-team divisions. At that point, it settled on having the four division champions and two Wild Card teams qualify for the playoffs from each conference, amounting to the same 12 total playoff teams as before expansion.
One more growth of the postseason field, the most recent one, came in 2021. The league elected to add a Wild Card team qualifying from each conference and thus trimmed down to just one team from each conference receiving a first-round bye.
With that expansion, six games are now played on Wild Card Weekend, and thus, it earned the “Super” distinction given its size as the biggest weekend of Wild Card games ever.
In the more than 50 years since the Wild Card began use in 1970, just 10 Wild Card teams have advanced to the Super Bowl. Six have won it all during that span — the 1980 Oakland Raiders, 1997 Denver Broncos, 2000 Baltimore Ravens, 2005 Pittsburgh Steelers, 2007 New York Giants, and 2010 Green Bay Packers.
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A seventh hopes to add its name to the list this season.
The Steelers, Cleveland Browns, and Miami Dolphins will get their chance on the AFC side of things, while the Philadelphia Eagles, Los Angeles Rams, and Packers are the NFC’s hopes of doing so.
None will be favored to win it all, for obvious reasons, but at least a few have the potential to make some noise in the postseason if they can get hot at the right time.
Perhaps no element of the NFL’s structure epitomizes its desire for randomness and chaos quite like the Wild Card playoff system.
Time will tell what magic it has in store this time around.
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