Predicate Pigskin 6: The Playoffs

Happy New Year! Time to sort out our last piece of family business from the sixth season of Predicate Pigskin before we start a long winter-spring-and-summer's nap.

After all the excitement of their playoff runs, our Cinderella teams both disappointed in the quarterfinal round. Earning the right to play the #1-seeded Beefalo Balls is certainly better than staying home in Week 14, but it proved too big a challenge for The Hooligans, who have now made the playoffs in five of their six seasons as a team and have yet to score a post-season victory. On the other end of the spectrum, the Ghost Of Roger Staubach finally returned to the post-season for the first time since 2006, but were shut down by the best performance from I'm Thinkin RBs since Week 3.

The mushy middle-seed matchups were similarly unfriendly to wild card teams, as the gods of Pigskin declared 2011 to be a Division Winners Only club. Staggering into the playoffs without RB Matt Forte put the nail in the coffin for The Headbangers, allowing bitterpants and his Niagara Fails to claim their first-ever playoff win with the second-lowest point total of the week. The third-lowest point total was amassed by the Ann Arbor Hippies, who wound up almost 30 points short of The Boys Named Suh in Colin's first-ever post-season victory, which also marked their first playoff appearance since the 2008 season.

The semi-final round thus came down to a pair of rather conventional #1 vs. #4 and #2 vs. #3 contests, which were quickly resolved in favor of the top two seeds. Every competing team scored fewer points than they did the week before, which proved disastrous for the Fails (who had no room for decline) and the Boys (who shed almost 30 points from week to week), forcing both teams to remain content with making their marks on the post-season as also-rans.

The stage was now set for a rematch of the 2009 title game! Would Miah finally be able to get over the hump this year? Turns out, not so much. Both teams' point totals fell off a cliff again, with the injury-plagued RBs failing to crack 60 points in a championship contest for the third year in a row. But Beefalo fared little better, logging goose-eggs at both the QB and PK position, and only a Tim-Tebow-crushing performance by the Buffalo D/ST (36.2 points!) saving their bacon. This was the lowest-scoring championship contest since the infamous Headbangers-GreatLionSnake tilt of 2008, eventually settled 68-31 in favor of the metalheads. Still, a win is a win, and this one was for all the marbles.

Congratulations to Cy Guy and the Beefalo Balls, the 2011 Predicate Pigskin champions!