NFL Conference Semi Finals Preview and Predictions

After an excit­ing open­ing week­end to the NFL play­off sea­son it is on to the con­fer­ence semi-finals now. All the home teams won last week and as a reward all of them get to go on the road now. I was 3–1 in my picks last week, only miss­ing the Fal­cons game, which I must admit I was wor­ried about, but since they were my pre-season Super Bowl pick I couldn’t bail on them as long as they were still around. But enough about last week’s games, let’s get to this week’s picks.

Sat­ur­day

#3 New Orleans Saints (-3 ½) @ #2 San Fran­cisco 49ers (4:30 p.m. / FOX)

Clas­sic bat­tle of the high pow­ered Saints offense ver­sus the 49ers and their stingy defense filled with all-pros. The 49ers like to pound the ball with Frank Gore and pass spar­ingly with quar­ter­back Alex Smith. They have the best spe­cial teams in the league and are per­fectly fine play­ing the field posi­tion game and trust­ing their defense. How­ever, they have yet to play a team this sea­son that is as explo­sive as the Saints are in every aspect of the game. The 49ers will have to rely on punter their all-pro Andy Lee to keep the ball out of the hands of the speedy and elu­sive Dar­ren Spro­les who set a new NFL record for all-purpose yards this sea­son. The Saints are also one of the rare teams that can run the ball as well as they can pass it. They use up to four run­ning backs that are all dif­fer­ent in their styles of run­ning and can all catch the ball well out of the back­field. They can also spread you out with a bevy of tal­ented and speedy receivers. Defen­sively they are a lit­tle lack­ing, espe­cially in com­par­i­son to San Fran­cisco, but they always seem to find a way to get the job done. I just look at Drew Brees ver­sus Alex Smith and I just have to go with the Saints here to win and cover.

New Orleans 27   San Fran­cisco 17

#4 Den­ver Bron­cos @ #1 New Eng­land Patri­ots (-13 ½) (8:00 p.m. / CBS)

I don’t think there is much doubt that this game will crush the record for rat­ings in the his­tory of the NFL for a sec­ond round play­off game. You have the Golden Boy Tom Brady ver­sus the cho­sen one Tim Tebow. I think this will be a very enter­tain­ing game, when they played last month the Bron­cos actu­ally held a 16–7 lead in the sec­ond quar­ter before they imploded in the 2^nd quar­ter with three turnovers in their own ter­ri­tory and ulti­mately falling 41–23 to the Patri­ots. The Bron­cos gained a ton of yards in that game and if they can avoid the turnovers that plagued them last time they should be able to hang with the Patri­ots. But in the end I think the Patri­ots offense will prove too much, I just don’t think they have the per­son­nel on defense to stop the tight end com­bi­na­tion of Gronkowski and Her­nan­dez. They stopped Gronkowski last time, but Her­nan­dez had a career day. I like the Patri­ots in this one, but I’m tak­ing the Bron­cos and the points.

New Eng­land 31   Den­ver 23

Sun­day

#3 Hous­ton Tex­ans @ #2 Bal­ti­more Ravens (1:00 p.m. / CBS)

This should be a good bat­tle between teams that play great defense and have great run­ning games. The biggest ques­tion here is which Ravens team will show up? Will it be the one that when they fea­ture Ray Rice doesn’t lose, or the one where they try to throw the ball a ton and ignore Rice and lost four times doing so this year? The Tex­ans on the other hand are going to run it early and often with Arian Fos­ter and Ben Tate, no ques­tions about that. Whether or not they can be suc­cess­ful doing so against the stingy Ravens defense is another story. To me the Tex­ans need to run a ton of play action plays to keep the Ravens hon­est and off bal­ance and hope that they can catch them off guard for a big play deep to Andre John­son. If they can get a few big plays early in the pass­ing game it should open things up more for Fos­ter and Tate. For some rea­son I just don’t trust the Ravens offense right now, they are too bi polar and I don’t have a lot of faith in their quar­ter­back Joe Flacco either.  I think the Tex­ans pull off the upset on the road.

Tex­ans 20   Ravens 16

#4 New York Giants @ #1 Green Bay Pack­ers (-8) (4:30 p.m. / FOX)

My upset of the play­offs right here, I think the Giants are going to go into Green Bay and knock off the Pack­ers. I love the way the Giants defen­sive line is play­ing now that they are all as healthy as you can be at this point in the sea­son, and com­bine that with the banged up offen­sive line of the Pack­ers and things look pretty good for New York. I also think the Giants finally have their ground game going and that makes their pass­ing game even more dan­ger­ous against one of the worst defenses in the league when it came to giv­ing up yards. I think it will be a fairly close game, but I think the Pack­ers will be play­ing catch up the entire game.

Giants 35   Pack­ers 31

So there you have it, my picks for this weekend’s games. A few upset picks and only one home team win­ning after the home teams went unde­feated last week. I am 8–1 in my picks over the past two week­ends so hope­fully I stay hot this week. Enjoy the games.