Everyone’s an Underdog in the N.F.L. Playoffs

Minutes after the Buffalo Bills held on to beat the Baltimore Ravens 27–25 in the A.F.C. divisional game, a sideline reporter asked the Bills’ quarterback Josh Allen what he’d been thinking when the Ravens had failed on a late bid to tie the score. Allen beamed. “All year, this team has heard we got no talent, we’re too small, we can’t stop the run, we’re not good enough to compete,” he said. “We just put our heads down and worked hard.” Before long, in a press conference, the team’s coach, Sean McDermott, said the same thing: “Our guys heard it all. They heard it all week long. We’re not big enough. We’re not strong enough, not talented enough. Whatever it is, they heard it.” One Baltimore radio host was singled out for calling Buffalo a “city of losers” a few years ago.

It was not the first time the Bills had revelled in overcoming their critics this season. The previous week, after the team dominated the Denver Broncos 31–7 in the wild-card round, the Bills’ offensive tackle Dion Dawkins told the N.F.L. Network that videos of Broncos fans chanting “We want Buffalo” earlier in the playoffs had given the team extra motivation. Never mind that the Bills had been favored to win that game by more than a touchdown, or that, before the start of the season, oddsmakers had ranked the Bills among the top eight teams, out of thirty-two, most likely to win the Super Bowl. It’s true that the Bills had been expected to retool after losing some stars in the off-season, and that they had only two players named to the Pro Bowl this year (another eight are alternates). But, then again, no talent? Allen is a finalist to win M.V.P.

Not to be outdone, Andy Reid, the coach of the Kansas City Chiefs—whom the Bills play today in the A.F.C. championship game for a spot in the Super Bowl—said last week that the Bills will “probably be favored” in the game. Presumably, he had in mind the Bills’ 30–21 win over the Chiefs during the regular season, and not the fact that the Chiefs’ quarterback Patrick Mahomes is 3–0 against Allen in the playoffs, or that the Chiefs finished the A.F.C.’s regular season as the No. 1 seed, or that the Chiefs have eliminated the Bills from the playoffs in three of the past four years, or that the Chiefs are playing in their seventh-straight A.F.C. championship game, or that they’ve have won the past two Super Bowls. The N.F.C. championship game is between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Washington Commanders. The Eagles do have a coach and a quarterback whom nobody seems to believe in, but, that aside, the team is currently the betting favorites to win the Super Bowl. The Commanders, meanwhile, are everyone’s favorite underdogs. “We know the whole world doubted us in these playoffs, and that they still doubt us now,” the Commanders’ Jeremy Reaves wrote, in the Players’ Tribune, on Thursday. “We’re fine with that.” (In a report on Friday, two out of three ESPN experts picked Washington to win.)

It’s a hallowed tradition, claiming disrespect. “Not one of y’all said the Chiefs were gonna take it home this year,” the Chiefs’ tight end Travis Kelce said, after his team won the Super Bowl in 2023. It was the team’s third Super Bowl appearance in four years. “Not a single one! Feel that shit. Feel it! And, on top of that, the next time the Chiefs say something, put some respect on our name.” (Many media members had predicted the team would win.) Perhaps the best ever to do it was, well, the best ever to do it: Tom Brady. “Everyone thinks we suck and, you know, can’t win any games,” he said, in 2019, after reaching his eighth consecutive A.F.C. championship, shortly before the Patriots won yet another Super Bowl. It happens in other sports, too, of course. Think of Novak Djokovic, in tennis, lifting his level above the crowds’ boos, or Coco Gauff winning the U.S. Open and thanking her haters, or the mid-two-thousands Detroit Pistons. But no one seems to embrace the nobody-believes-in-us rallying cry quite like football teams and their fans. The popular sports guy Bill Simmons (who happens to be my former boss) has often referred to a “Nobody Believes In Us” theory of playoff football, perhaps propelling the phrase’s overuse.

None of the claims are actually crazy. Part of the appeal of sports is that the outcome of any given game is truly in doubt. The Bills haven’t made the Super Bowl since 1994, and lost their two top wide receivers from last year. The Chiefs, far from looking invincible, have squeaked out win after win this season, and no team has ever won three straight Super Bowls. The Eagles head coach, Nick Sirianni, was the subject of such loud derision from his own fans that, at one point during the season, he turned around and started yelling back, and their quarterback will probably be wearing a knee brace. “We had to drag ourselves through the mud through . . . a lot of the doubts, and now here we are,” Sirianni told PhillyVoice last week. As for the Commanders, well, they’re overcoming decades of being at the mercy of Dan Snyder, the worst owner in sports. Prior to this season, their last playoff win was in 2005.

Psychologists have identified plausible explanations for why it might help to embrace the underdog status (or pretend you’re one). Underdogs have lower expectations of winning, which might help insulate players against the pain of defeat. For some teams, a dark-horse mind-set might be better for strategic reasons: underdogs tend to focus on the positive outcome (winning), while top dogs tend to avoid negative outcomes (not losing), which could explain why underdogs sometimes play looser and with an eye to higher risks and rewards. Even though athletes often talk about ignoring the “noise,” many of them relish proving people wrong. It also seems to matter where the noise is coming from: lower expectations can hamper performance if their source is credible, but they boost performance if their source is untrustworthy. Coaches might use the bogeyman of “the media” to help reinforce group bonds—it’s us against the world. A sense of disrespect can fuel feelings of injustice and competitiveness, as anyone who’s been cut off in traffic, or has watched Duke play basketball, knows too well.

It takes a certain level of baseline confidence not to hear in criticism some small echo of self-doubt. When people tell me I can’t do something, I usually believe them! But I am not an élite athlete. “I don’t know if I ever went out and did anything believing I couldn’t do it,” the former quarterback Kurt Warner, who won a Super Bowl and two M.V.P.s, told me. “Most athletes are so ultra-confident that they already believe they can do it.” Warner really was an underdog: he was cut by the Green Bay Packers, and then stocked shelves at a Hy-Vee grocery store, before taking a circuitous route back to the N.F.L. Warner pointed to the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. He was driven by an internal desire to improve, he said, whether people believed in him or not. “I understood why people didn’t think I was going to make it in the N.F.L.,” he added. He didn’t blame them.

But, “even at the highest levels of the N.F.L., not everybody is built the same,” Warner said. A leader’s job is to figure out what motivates all the different players around him. And, at the top of the game, motivation can be harder to come by: What do you play for when you’ve already achieved so much? Some play for bigger contracts; some play for a place in history, and others for fun; some don’t want to be embarrassed. Others lovingly tend to the chips on their shoulders. If it gives them even the slightest edge, why not?

During the 2008-09 regular season, the Arizona Cardinals finished 9–7, a shaky end after starting 7–3. Nevertheless, they made it to the playoffs for the first time in a decade, and proceeded to beat the Atlanta Falcons and the Caroline Panthers. After that, Warner challenged the team to “shock the world.” “I only said it to see if it would motivate some of my teammates,” he said. “I didn’t care if anyone was shocked or not.” But he could feel the locker room’s energy change when he gave that speech. “In the moment, you could feel the emotions,” he said. The Cardinals continued their improbable run to the Super Bowl, and “Shock the world” became their rallying cry. In the end, it wasn’t enough. They lost that game, narrowly, to the Pittsburgh Steelers. Underdogs are usually underdogs for a reason. ♦