Reminder: Texans can lose against the Browns and beat the Titans and Colts and have a 97% chance of making the playoffs via NYT

I felt this needed clarifying since I see confusion on the NFL subreddit…

The most common question we are seeing is "Why are we always the 8 seed at the bottom of the 8-6 teams?" The answer is that so far our loss to the colts are eliminating us first before the head to heads with other teams come into effect.

​

With this particular rule that divisional tiebreakers reign supreme in crowded wildcard scenarios, us beating the titans and colts will give us the tiebreaker over the colts via rule 2 in the divisional tiebreaker (Colts will be 3-3 in division and Texans will be 4-2).

​

This means that if we lose to the browns and beat the Titans and Colts we will still have a 97% chance of making the playoffs because now we will have the tiebreak over the Colts, Broncos, Steelers, Bengals directly.

​

The best case (no pun intended) scenario is resting CJ another week and having him come back healthier for the 2 more important games on our schedule, potentially finishing 10-7 with pretty much every tiebreaker advantage.