NFL playoff picture after Week 2: only 9 teams can clinch by winning out, and what the math leaves 0-2 teams

Nine NFL clubs can now clinch a playoff place without help, and all nine need the same thing: 15 wins from the 15 games they have left. Eight of them are the clubs at 2-0. The ninth is Jacksonville, at 1-1. For the other 23, no run of their own results guarantees anything, and for 15 of them that includes a 16-1 season. All 15 are 1-1 clubs that could win every game they have left and still, under the worst case this table works from, finish outside the seven.

Every figure here is from the table at the end of Week 2. All 32 clubs have played twice and all 32 have 15 games left, so every club is measured against a schedule of the same length. The league has split eight at 2-0, sixteen at 1-1 and eight at 0-2, and the middle group split evenly too: eight clubs won their first game and lost their second, eight lost the first and won the second. No Week 3 game is in these numbers. The worst case behind a clinch number has every rival win every game it has left, without checking whether those rivals are scheduled to meet each other, and a level finish is always scored against the club being asked about.

The clearest way to see what the rest of Week 2 changed is a club that had already finished it. Buffalo's line is exactly what it was in our earlier pieces: 2-0, 15 games left, 77 points scored and 62 allowed. Back then a 17-0 finish could not guarantee the Bills a place. Now it can, and their clinch number is 15. Four other AFC clubs made the difference. Jacksonville, Baltimore, the Jets and Pittsburgh won their first game and lost their second, which leaves four clubs in each conference able to reach 17-0, the eight at 2-0. A 17-0 club can therefore be matched by at most three others in its conference, and pushing it out of the field would take four: one to take its division on the tie and three to fill every wild card. At 16-1 the count runs the other way. Seven AFC clubs and nine NFC clubs are 1-1 and share that ceiling, with four 17-0 ceilings above them, and for every one of them except Jacksonville a crowd that size can take its division and all three wild cards ahead of it when every tie goes against it. Every clinch number on the board, all nine of them, equals the club's entire remaining schedule.

The division column follows the same line with one more condition. Five clubs can win their division on their own results: Cincinnati, Buffalo, Jacksonville, Minnesota and Philadelphia, each at 15. The other four clubs at 2-0 cannot, because the two West divisions hold two apiece, Kansas City and Las Vegas in the AFC, San Francisco and Seattle in the NFC. Each of those four can be matched at 17-0 by its own division partner, and the tie goes against whichever club is being asked, so all four carry a clinch number for a place and none for the division. Buffalo's division number is the one our Buffalo piece said would appear once the Jets lost, and it arrived in the shape described there: 15, the whole remaining schedule.

Jacksonville holds the numbers of the 2-0 division leaders without their record. The Jaguars are 1-1, and Houston, Tennessee and Indianapolis are all 0-2, so the best any of those three can finish is 15-2 against a Jacksonville ceiling of 16-1. That one game of daylight gives Jacksonville a clinch number of 15, a division number of 15 and no tragic number at all, the same three entries as Cincinnati, Buffalo, Minnesota and Philadelphia. The four unbeaten West clubs match it everywhere except the division number, which none of them has. The NFC South went the other way. All four of its clubs lost their first game; Carolina and New Orleans then won, and Tampa Bay and Atlanta lost again. The cushion the division shared while everyone in it was 0-1 is gone. Carolina and New Orleans can each be tied at 1-16 by the other, so both carry 15 like every other 1-1 club, and Tampa Bay and Atlanta carry 14 like every other 0-2 club. Both South divisions are now led by a 1-1 club, and the other six are led by clubs at 2-0.

That leaves the question the 0-2 clubs are asking, and the arithmetic answers it without any history attached. Tennessee, Houston, Indianapolis, the Chargers, Miami, Tampa Bay, Washington and Atlanta all carry a tragic number of 14 against 15 games left. Fourteen more defeats end it even if every rival loses every game it has left, and any rival win from here can bring the number down. Spelled out, a 0-2 club is finished at 1-16 and still has a route at 2-15. That is the same 1-16 finish that ends the fifteen 1-1 clubs carrying 15, so on the elimination side the whole cost of the second defeat is one win: a 0-2 club needs two more to keep a route open, a 1-1 club needs one. Both lines are ties. At 1-16 a club finishes level with others, this table scores that against it, and the league's own tiebreakers might not. On the other side, a 0-2 club tops out at 15-2, below the 16-1 ceiling of every 1-1 club and the 17-0 of every 2-0 club, so every route it has runs through other clubs losing. That is equally true of fifteen of the sixteen 1-1 clubs. Five of the eight 0-2 clubs play in the two South divisions, where the leader is 1-1 and one win ahead; the Chargers, Miami and Washington trail a 2-0 club by two. Point margin enters none of it. Atlanta has scored 16 points and allowed 54, the fewest points scored and the worst margin in the league at minus 38, and it carries the same 14 as Tampa Bay at minus 10.

What the arithmetic cannot do yet is put anyone in order, and the order on the page comes from two different places. Our conference table sorts by record and then point margin, so its top four in each conference are the 2-0 clubs in margin order: Las Vegas plus 26, Kansas City plus 24, Cincinnati plus 20, Buffalo plus 15; San Francisco plus 42, the best margin in football, Seattle plus 27, Minnesota plus 23, Philadelphia plus 6. The league's seeding gives the first four places to division leaders, so one club from each West pair drops to a wild card. Las Vegas and San Francisco are the fifth seeds, behind 1-1 Jacksonville and 1-1 Carolina in fourth. Carolina was fourth at 0-1 in our Week 2 seeds piece and is fourth again at 1-1. Below the fifth seed, the last two places in each conference go to clubs with identical records. Six AFC clubs are 1-1 without a division lead; New England and Baltimore hold the two places and the Jets are first out. Eight NFC clubs are in the same position; Detroit and Chicago hold the places and the Rams are first out. That choice is made entirely by the league's tiebreakers. Our playoff picture follows the league's seeding order at that point and does not compute the tiebreakers itself.

Update, September 30: Week 3 is over, and the four things named in this paragraph went as follows. Nothing reached zero. In the West, Seattle lost 31-33 at Washington while San Francisco beat Arizona 36-30, and the 49ers picked up a division number of 14, their whole remaining schedule; Kansas City and Las Vegas both won, so neither has one. Jacksonville beat New England 35-6 and kept its shape: 14, 14 and no tragic number. Cincinnati lost 27-30 at Pittsburgh and Philadelphia lost 7-27 at Chicago on the weekend their 1-1 division rivals, Pittsburgh and the Giants, both won, and both lost their clinch and division numbers; Buffalo and Minnesota won and kept theirs. Carolina and New Orleans both lost, so neither took Jacksonville's shape. One thing went further than this piece said: Buffalo's clinch number is now 13 with 14 games left, the first this season below a club's remaining schedule. Our tables also no longer order equal records by point margin; they use win percentage and then ESPN's seeding everywhere. The numbers after Week 3 are in the next piece. What to watch in Week 3 is shape, not size. Nothing on the board can reach zero this week in either direction, because a club at 3-0 would still have 14 games it could lose and a club at 0-3 would still have 14 it could win. Several things can change shape, and four are worth naming. The first is the West pairs. On the first weekend that one of Kansas City and Las Vegas, or one of San Francisco and Seattle, loses while its partner does not, the partner picks up a division number, and like every clinch and division number on the board today it will be that club's entire remaining schedule. The second is Jacksonville's one game of daylight. A Jaguars loss on a weekend when Houston, Tennessee or Indianapolis wins would bring Jacksonville's ceiling down to 15-2, level with that rival's, and all three of the Jaguars' entries would change at once: the clinch number and the division number would go, and a tragic number would take their place. The third runs the other way for the four 2-0 division leaders. If Cincinnati, Buffalo, Minnesota or Philadelphia loses on a weekend a 1-1 division rival wins, the two finish the week level on a 16-1 ceiling, and the leader's clinch number and division number both go. The fourth is in the NFC South. If one of Carolina and New Orleans wins and the other loses, the winner takes Jacksonville's current shape: a clinch number and a division number equal to its remaining schedule, and no tragic number. Week 3 fixtures are on the schedule page, and the what-if page lets you pick results for this week's and next week's intra-conference games and watch the record order move.

How to read these numbers. A clinch number, also called a magic number, is the fewest further wins that guarantee a place even if every rival wins every game it has left. A tragic number is the further losses after which a place is impossible even if the club wins everything else and every rival loses. Zero means it is done, and a blank means the arithmetic cannot settle it yet. A level finish is scored against the club being asked about in both directions, so a clinch here can come later than the league's own announcement and an elimination can be declared on a tie alone. The official tiebreakers and the question of who plays whom are not part of the calculation. Every club's numbers are on the magic numbers page, the seeding and tiebreaker order on the playoff page, the conference tables on the standings page, and the working on the methodology page. The club this week's arithmetic turns on has its own page.