Fearless Forecaster: Conference Championships

Jonah Bass, Staff Writer

The NFL Divisional Round round was considered one of the best weekends of football ever. THREE out of the four games were decided by game winning field goals as time expired. And one game had 25 points scored in the last TWO minutes, a game tying field goal, and a winning touchdown in overtime. Both of the number one seeds were eliminated, and multiple things that had never happened before happened; including a team winning with no offensive touchdowns, and a team winning even though they got sacked nine times and fumbled four times. 

But what about the next round of the playoffs? The round that decides if you are going to the Super Bowl or not. These are my predictions for the Championship round of the NFL 2021-22 season.

First, the Kansas City Chiefs vs the Cincinnati Bengals. The Chiefs have the best offense in the league right now. They scored 42 points against the number one ranked defense of the Buffalo Bills. The Bengals have an ok defense, but it is not going to be able to stop Patrick Mahomes, Tyreek Hill, and Travis Kelce. The Bengals offense is really good, though. They didn’t have the best offensive game last week, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t really good. They still have an elite offense with Joe Burrow and Ja’marr Chase. The Chiefs do have a pretty good defense, but it could not stop the Bills at all. The Bengals are also going to score a lot. However, I think this is going to be a very high scoring game that is going to end up with the Chiefs going to the Super Bowl.

Next, the San Francisco 49ers vs the Los Angeles Rams. The 49ers are this year’s Cinderella team. The team that few expected to even win the Wild Card, but they somehow got into the NFC Championship. This game has two different possible outcomes. The first one is that the 49ers are actually a good team now, they keep up their momentum in either a very low scoring game (like against the Packers last week), or a very high scoring game (like week 18 in the regular season. Both of those games were against a good team during their win streak). The other outcome is that the 49ers have just been very lucky these past few weeks. They were never meant to make it this far. They are a good team, but not as good as these teams left in the playoffs. An important thing to know is that the 49ers beat the Rams both times they played them in the regular season. This is a very hard game to predict, but in the end, I’m going to choose the Rams because they just beat Tom Brady last week; Tom Brady, the king of the playoffs.

I hope this weekend is as good of a week of football as last week. I can’t wait.