When you’re picking the divisional round, make sure to remember one thing: The home teams win more than 75% of the time. Home teams in the divisional round are not only at home, but they’re better rested than the visitor, and they’re almost always a significantly better team than the visitor. Coming off sixty minutes of playoff-intense brutality 6-8 days ago to take on a superior team in their backyard really kind of puts you behind the eight ball. It takes a lot of… well, a lot of something to overcome that. A lot of genius on your side, a lot of incompetence on theirs, or an act of God (anybody remember the Tuck Rule game?)

So if you’re picking games straight-up for your office pool or something, just pick all the home teams in the divisional round and you will almost always be just fine. Only twice in the past fifteen years have the home teams failed to win at least 3 of the 4 games. Usually they go 3-1, but if you try to figure out who that one loser is going to be, usually you’ll be wrong and get saddled with a 2-2.

Generally, to go against a home team in the divisional round, it would have to be Marty Schottenheimer going against Bill Belichick or something.

Now this here’s an interesting matchup. People keep making fun of Jeff Garcia because hey, it’s easy. He’s Jeff Garcia. But like I’ve been saying all along, the dude’s a pretty handy backup QB.

Anyhow, I’m not going to waste your time talking much about Jeff Garcia (I’ll do that sometime in the off-season.) The Saints are vulnerable. 11-5 in the NFC, as you’ve probably figured out by now, is what an above-average-not-that-great team does. The Jaguars or Broncos would have gone 12-4 playing the Saints schedule; teams like the Flaming Thumbtacks or Steelers could probably have matched their 11-5.

So, the Saints aren’t really that good. Why, then, am I picking them to win the NFC, you ask?

LOOK AT THE SCHEDULE!!

Next week, we’ll talk more about why the winner of Saints-Eagles is going to the Super Bowl. Let’s please try to stay on topic here, OK?

The Saints aren’t really that good. They can’t play defense. Teams that can’t play defense don’t generally do well in the playoffs (more on this in the Ravens-Colts analysis.) Their defense has shown the consistent pattern of being pretty good against runs up the middle, decent at stopping the long pass, and awful against everything else. They’ve been the worst team in the NFL all year at stopping outside runs; they have trouble against screens and short slants; their secondary is too shallow to match up well against an offense that has multiple weapons; their pass rush isn’t very good.

In short, the Saints defense would have trouble with an offense like, say, the Eagles.

It’s not all rainbows and sunshine for the Eagles, though, because their defense is not all that likely to slow down Drew Brees’ Flying Circus, either. The Eagles have been for years relying on a strong secondary and exotic blitzes (the kind with little umbrellas in them) as the building blocks of a bend-don’t-break, big play-oriented defense. It doesn’t work so well against a QB like Brees, who’s as good as it gets when it comes to burning opposing blitzes.

There’s just a lot of information out there on these two teams and how they match up. You can make a very strong case for either team in this game. Most folks are taking the Saints, apparently because they still don’t trust Jeff Garcia, which makes one even more inclined to go the other way. One one hand, the Saints are at home and home teams don’t lose divisional games; on the other, the Eagles are the better team. The Eagles’ 10-6 record is a huge fluke, the result of odds-defying bad luck early in the year. They’re a 12-4 quality team, have been all year, and the gap between Donovan McNabb and Jeff Garcia isn’t as long as you’ve been led to believe. There’s the whole emotion-charged Saints-in-the-Superdome thing; but then, the Saints were only 4-4 at home this year, 7-1 on the road. And anyhow, it’s the playoffs, man! If anybody on either team isn’t already playing at max intensity, he needs to find another line of work, something very un-intense, like mortician.

I’ve almost talked myself into the Eagles, and in fact I’m going to take them against the spread. Straight up, though, I’m sticking with the 77% of divisional-round teams that win. Saints 29, Eagles 27.