There are plenty of reasons for the Patriots to be glued to Saturday's Wild Card matchups. Their next opponent is, of course, dependent on the outcomes.
Should the Bengals beat the Steelers tonight, they'll head to Gillette Stadium for the Divisional Round on Jan. 16. If the Steelers win, then the Patriots will face the winner of the Saturday afternoon game between the Chiefs and Texans.
Though the fate of the next week of preparation will be determined by who wins and who loses, don't expect Patriots coach Bill Belichick to be hanging on every single play and trying like mad to break down the action as it happens live.
For him, there's not a whole lot that can be gleaned from watching the television broadcast. There may be some, but not nearly as much as he'll take from the All-22 coaches tape he'll see later.
"I mean, look, if you watch the game you can follow it just to watch it, and obviously you’re going to be playing one of the two teams or could be depending on -- in this case we have three to choose from," Belichick said on Wednesday. "But if there’s situational plays that come up in the game, which there always are, it’s sort of interesting to follow those. Like, what would we do, or what are they doing in that situation or whatever look you get at it. But I mean if there are 100 things, like, to me, that would be no higher than one. It wouldn’t be 10. It wouldn’t be 20. Somewhere between zero and one probably for me.
"If you didn’t see the game, which there are hundreds of games that we haven’t seen. We’re playing our game, they’re playing their game, we play them next week, we don’t see that. There are a lot more games that I haven’t seen than I have the week before we play the game. So again that’s what I’m saying, like 99 percent of the time, 90 percent of the time, we’re not going to see it. And that’s OK. We’re still going to show up and play anyways. And then the few times we get to see it, we see it, OK, and it adds maybe that one quarter or one percent. I don’t know. It’s not very much."