THE NFL has announced that the high-stakes matchup between the Buffalo Bills and Cincinnati Bengals won't be resumed after Damar Hamlin suffered a cardiac arrest during the game on Monday.
That puts the NFL in a precarious position as the league needs to come up with a playoff structure that accounts for the canceled game.
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After Thursday brought the uplifting news of Hamlin's remarkable progress in his recovery, the NFL has announced the ill-fated Monday Night Football matchup won't continue.
The Bills-Bengals game had huge implications for playoff seeding as both teams had a chance to top the AFC standings at the end of the regular season.
Buffalo ranked second in the AFC with a 12-3 record, ahead of Cincinnati with 11-4.
The Kansas City Chiefs occupied the top spot in the conference after their Week 17 win over the Denver Broncos.
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But both the Bills and Bengals hold the head-to-head tiebreaker over the Chiefs.
That means either team would have beaten Kansas City to become the top seed if they had the same regular-season record as Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs.
The No. 1 seed is invaluable to playoff success as it rewards the team with a first-round playoff bye and guarantees home-field advantage all the way to the Super Bowl.
With the Bills-Bengals clash canceled, Buffalo and Cincinnati will have played one game less than the rest of the conference, hugely complicating the seeding situation.
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What happens now that the Buffalo Bills-Cincinnati Bengals game is canceled?
On Thursday evening, the NFL said it canceled the Bills-Bengals game.
Among the key factors in arriving at the decision was the league's intention to avoid delaying the scheduled start of the playoffs.
However, the NFL acknowledged that the cancelation of the Monday matchup might create competitive inequities in certain playoff scenarios.
So it asked the clubs to consider playing the AFC Championship game at a neutral ground if the matchup involves teams that played an unequal number of games and both could have been the No. 1 seed in normal circumstances.
In other words, two of the Bills, Bengals, and Chiefs will have to end the regular season with the same number of losses andreach the conference championship game for the clash to take place at a neutral site.
The cancelation of the Bills-Bengals game might also impact the Wild Card card round in the AFC.
If the Baltimore Ravens defeat the Bengals in Week 18, they will have defeated Cincinnati, a divisional opponent, twice.
Still, Baltimore will not be able to host a playoff game because Cincinnati will have a higher winning percentage for a 16-game schedule than Baltimore will for a 17-game schedule.
Therefore, if the Ravens win on Sunday and both teams end up facing each other in a Wild Card game, the site of the clash will be decided by a coin toss.
“As we considered the football schedule, our principles have been to limit disruption across the league and minimize competitive inequities,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said in a statement.
“I recognize that there is no perfect solution. The proposal we are asking the ownership to consider, however, addresses the most significant potential equitable issues created by the difficult, but necessary, decision not to play the game under these extraordinary circumstances.”
