Tony Dungy bashes NFL playoff scheduling for unfair 49ers, Bills tasks

Billy Heyen

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Tony Dungy bashes NFL playoff scheduling for unfair 49ers, Bills tasks image

The NFL playoff schedule, you'd hope, would at least be fair.

But in the second round of the postseason, the San Francisco 49ers and Buffalo Bills are on short rest, relatively unnecessarily. And whoever wins Monday night between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Houston Texans will be, too.

Super Bowl-winning head coach Tony Dungy, who now works for NBC, bashed the NFL for its scheduling procedures in a long post on X on Monday.

"NFL playoff scheduling is not fair," Dungy began. "It might produce good ratings but it’s not fair. This late in the season recovery time is crucial and it is not given equally. Rams & Bears played Saturday games. They will face each other on Sunday with an extra day of rest. 49ers played on Sunday and will face Seattle on Saturday-short week of recovery. Why?"

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He then proceeded into the AFC.

"In the AFC the Bills will have to travel to Denver on a short week," Dungy writes. "Why? Because there’s a Monday night AFC Wild Card game. The Texans play Pittsburgh. The winner will automatically have a short week and travel to New England. Why?"

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The other note, of course, is that the Bills (at Denver) and 49ers (at Seattle) are both facing the team that had a first-round bye. They're going to be at a disadvantage on that front against the AFC and NFC No. 1 seeds, anyway.

The least the NFL could do would be to give them a Sunday-to-Sunday turnaround.

Instead, they get an unlucky draw.

They'll just have to deal with a little bit more adversity to survive and advance.

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Editorial Team