The league sent out a press release two hours ago, confirming that Ravens-Bengals will kick off at 1 p.m. Eastern time on Sunday. This further solidifies that if the Monday night game is going to be resumed, it’s not going to happen until after the Week 18 slate.
(Heading into Week 18, it was up in the air whether Ravens-Bengals would occur in the early or late window, with the potential that it would be a winner-take-all affair for the AFC North title.)
For fantasy purposes, I think this gives league commissioners the green light to finalize their decisions on their in-limbo players from Week 17.
I’ve seen a lot of different suggestions in the comments sections of our site. Some are hitting those players with zeros. Some are averaging production for the first 16 weeks. Others are waiting for the game to continue. And some are simply sharing championships.
Putting on my commissioner hat, if I were running a league with a championship game hanging in the balance, that game would continue in Week 18, with the in-limbo players being awarded whatever points they generate this week. I suppose if teams wanted to make lineup changes, I would allow it (maybe, for example, a franchise owner liked Dawson Knox at Cincinnati but wasn’t crazy about starting him against the Patriots – I would allow a lineup change, including by a waiver pickup).
Some leagues, as a reader pointed out, play through Week 18. In such a format, I would keep all possibilities in play. That is, the Week 17 semifinals would remain in progress, with both of those franchises also submitting provisional lineups for the Week 18 championship game (applied only if they qualified for the game).
These are just my own personal opinions, speaking as a guy who’s been a league commissioner for 36 years – this is how I would be working through the issue in my league (with any proposal subject to the agreement of the league owners).
It remains to be seen what the NFL does with the unfinished Bengals-Bills game. If they do play it, it will be played in Week 19. Under that scenario, they would likely push back all of the AFC playoff games by a week. That would give the NFC champion an extra week to prepare for the Super Bowl, but that might be the least disruptive course in a very strange year.
If the league opts to abandon the Bills-Bengals game, it will require some big decisions to be made. Particularly if the Ravens win at Cincinnati. It wouldn’t seem right to give the AFC North title to an 11-5 Cincinnati team that had been swept by 11-6 Baltimore. Nor would it seem right to give the No. 1 overall seed in the playoffs to a 14-3 Kansas City team that was beaten in the regular season by 13-3 Buffalo. At the same time, the No. 1 seed can’t be given to the Bills, when they likely would have dropped down to No. 3 had they lost at Cincinnati.
Complex issues, and no doubt the league is carefully working through them.
—Ian Allan