Why bother with playoffs at all? Through eight games, the postseason has only reaffirmed what the regular season had already told us: the New Orleans Saints and Los Angeles Rams are the best teams in the NFC; the Kansas City Chiefs and New England Patriots are their equivalents in the AFC.

If recent trends hold, we will see the number one seed from each side of the draw square off in the Super Bowl. No road team has won a Conference Championship Game since 2012.

For an alternative indicator of who will win this Sunday, however, you might want to wait to see who GEOFFREY MANBOOB and WEST COAST OFFENCE pick. They each called all four games correctly in the divisional round, putting themselves in contention to win our Pick The Playoffs contest.

Full standings can be found at the bottom of this article. But first, here are my predictions for the title games.

Los Angeles Rams @ New Orleans Saints (Sunday 8.05pm GMT)

We have already observed this January that rematches between teams who met in the regular season rarely play out the same way the second time around. The Ravens beat the Chargers on the road in Week 16, but lost to them at home on Wild Card weekend. New Orleans thrashed the Eagles 48-7 in mid-November, but needed a Marshon Lattimore interception to avert another Nick Foles playoff miracle last Sunday.

So whilst we should not ignore the fact that the Saints have already beaten the Rams at the Superdome – 45-35 in Week 9 – we also need to be cautious with the lessons we draw. Both teams have changed a great deal since.

In the last month alone, the Rams have been transformed by the addition of CJ Anderson. The former Broncos back can joke all he likes about ‘man pregnancy weight’ and being a ‘Fat Kid running’, but the reality is that he is averaging 6.4 yards per carry. Against Dallas, last week, he got more carries than Todd Gurley.

Great team win another championship Sunday I get to play extremely blessed. I’m just a Fat kid running 💯

— Cj Anderson (@cjandersonb22) January 13, 2019

A lot goes into that. Gurley was only just returning from a knee injury, and still played more snaps, so nobody is suggesting that Anderson is about to leapfrog him on the depth chart. But it is the combination of both players that will challenge New Orleans: giving LA the kind of variety in its backfield that the Saints themselves aspire to have with Mark Ingram and Alvin Kamara.

Sean Payton’s team did a pretty good job of containing Gurley in November, keeping him to 68 yards on 13 carries. The Saints’ rush defence has been solid all year. But it has been most vulnerable to runs up the middle – precisely where Anderson does his best work. Oh, and New Orleans just lost one of the league’s better defensive tackles, Sheldon Rankins, to a torn Achilles.

Even playing in a hostile environment, I think the Rams have a chance to win this game in the trenches. New Orleans’s starting left guard, Andrus Peat, played with a broken hand against the Eagles and wound up committing four penalties. He and his interior line-mates struggled mightily to contain Fletcher Cox, and their task will not be any easier here as they line against Aaron Donald and Ndamukong Suh.

The Saints hold the upper hand in other areas. Michael Thomas has provided Drew Brees with an astonishingly reliable receiver, his 85% catch rate on balls thrown his way representing the highest figure for a non-running back since the league started tracking targets in 1992. The below note, from a piece on The Ringer, is frankly a little bit mind-boggling.

“Among players who have more than 100 targets in a season, the gap between Thomas and second-place Wes Welker (who caught 77.2 percent of his targets with the 2007 New England Patriots) is 7.8 percentage points, which is the same as the gap between Welker and Julian Edelman in 2013, who is ranked 81st.”

In a shootout, there is no question that I would trust Brees ahead of Jared Goff, who has struggled down the stretch, and who is up against a defence that leads the league in sacks (32) and turnovers (16) since Week 9. Yet the Saints quarterback has seen his performance dip in the latter part of the season, too. And the Rams do at least have a better chance of slowing down Thomas (who caught 12 passes for 211 yards in the first meeting) now that Aqib Talib is back in the line-up.

LA’s hopes of an upset, though, will rest on their ability to run the ball effectively early, controlling the clock and, even more crucially, setting up the play-action. A repeat of last week’s 273 net rushing yards against Dallas would make them heavy favourites, but my hunch is that they can spring the upset here even with less.

Rams win

PAOLO’S PUNT: Rams to win, Todd Gurley 2+ TDs, Jared Goff 300+ passing yards….14/1

New England Patriots @ Kansas City Chiefs (Sunday, 11.40pm GMT)

Picking against New England in January is foolishness, right? Well, it certainly is when they are playing in Foxborough (not that this stopped me last week…), where they are 20-3 in postseason games during the Bill Belichick/Tom Brady era.

The outlook has been rather different, however, when they are made to play away from home. Brady and Belichick have won a modest three out of seven road playoff games together, and none since 2007. Similar trends have played out this season. New England are 9-0 at home and 3-5 on their travels.

We are not talking about simple coincidence here. The Patriots’ performance level has varied according to location, to a degree that is perplexing. According to Football Outsiders’ DVOA metric, the Patriots’ defence was the second-most efficient in the league at home in 2018, and the second-least efficient on the road.

Chiefs will host Chargers or Patriots next week.

If it's Patriots, that defense is 2nd in DVOA at home, 31st on the road.

— Scott Kacsmar (@FO_ScottKacsmar) January 13, 2019

That is not an encouraging statistic for a team that is about to face the most prolific offence in the league on its own patch. Even when these teams met at Gillette Stadium during the regular season, New England did not prevail by shutting down Patrick Mahomes and company, but simply by outgunning them, 43-40.

Kansas City have improved on defence since – and might be about to welcome back Eric Berry. Even if not, Justin Houston’s return has already had a transformative impact since these teams last met. Both he and Dee Ford ranked in the top 10 in the league for percentage of plays in which they generated pressure on opposing quarterbacks.

There is no better coach than Belichick for tailoring his gameplan to target the weaknesses of a specific opponent. In what are expected to be freezing conditions, one imagines that New England will look to run the ball early and often, slowing down the likes of Houston, Ford and Chris Jones. But that was supposed to be the plan for Indianapolis last week, too, until the Colts fell into a 17-point hole early in the second quarter.

And few coaches have given Belichick as many tough games down the years as Andy Reid. Of the seven occasions this century when the Patriots have given up 40 or more points, he was standing on the opposite sideline for three of them.

If the likes of Tyreek Hill, Damien Williams and Travis Kelce can get untracked early, then the Chiefs will have an opportunity to force New England out of the slow, ball-control approach they employed against the Chargers. The Patriots were actually pretty predictable in their play calling last weekend – feeding handoffs to Sony Michel and passing whenever James White came into the line-up – but LA’s own inflexibility on defence played right into Belichick’s hands.

You would like to hope that Reid’s staff learned some lessons from the game film. On the other hand, even if Kansas City were to fall behind against New England – as they did in the regular season match-up – Mahomes will always give them a puncher’s chance of coming back. (Of course, the same could be said for the Patriots with Brady …)

Belichick will not make things easy for Mahomes like the Colts did. A great deal of good information on the young passer will already have been gleaned from the first meeting: when he struggled more against man coverages in the first-half than he did against zone after the interval.

Perhaps we will see more fake blitzes. The Patriots had some success getting pressure on Mahomes by threatening to send Dont’a Hightower and Kyle Van Noy, obliging offensive linemen to adjust to their presence, before having both linebackers drop into coverage while team-mates ran free around the edges. Even when harried, though, Mahomes has so many viable targets that one will often come free.

And so we are back to that fundamental question of whether New England are capable of producing their best football – especially on defence – away from home. I am putting my trust in the cold numbers that tell us they have struggled to do so. I do so with some hesitation, knowing that Brady and company have a habit for getting hot as the mercury dips low.

Chiefs win

PAOLO’S PUNT: Chiefs to win, 56+ total points, Patrick Mahomes 300+ passing yards, Sony Michel 100+ rushing yards….12/1

Or perhaps you fancy one of these:

Chiefs and Rams both to win….3/1
Chiefs and Rams both 35+ points….9/1
Chiefs -3, 58+ total points, Patrick Mahomes and Tom Brady 300+ passing yards each….6/1
Chiefs and Rams both to win, Patrick Mahomes and Jared Goff 250+ passing yards each, Todd Gurley and Damien Williams 80+ rushing yards each….28/1

Think you can pick a winner? How about both of them? Why not leave your predictions in the comments section below…

OVERALL PLAYOFF STANDINGS

6 – AALIPOUR1, THOM OWEN
5 – GEOFFREY MANBOOB, JROSCOW, KEVIN JACKSON, MATTHEW SHERRY, WEST COAST OFFENSE
4 – SCAMPTON
3 – CRAIG LLEWELLYN, GARY FORBES, OWEN MARSDEN, PAOLO BANDINI, SOXINOX
0 – BEN JOHNSON