No. 8 – Carson Palmer (0-2)
Arizona’s Carson Palmer has turned his 12th NFL season into a rebirth, passing for 35 touchdowns and over 4,600 yards en route to a No. 2 seed and the best year of his career. The likely NFL MVP runner-up had a phenomenal regular season, but his playoff resume is wildly incomplete compared to the other seven quarterbacks he’s up against this year.
Palmer has appeared in just two postseason games, the first of which was more than a decade ago and the second of which was a full five years ago. He’s a combined 0-2 in the playoffs as a starter. Both of those starts came as a member of the Bengals and the latter was at least part of the reason he was eventually traded to Oakland.
Bengals fans will certainly remember his first ever playoff start in 2005, which ended about as poorly as anyone could have hoped. On his first pass attempt (a 66-yard completion), Palmer was hit as he thew and suffered a tear of both his ACL and MCL. Jon Kitna went on to lose to the Steelers.
Battling that injury over the next several years, Palmer finally returned to the playoffs in 2009, but struggled in a Wild Card loss to the Jets. With a 50.0 completion percentage, one touchdown, one interception and one fumble, the Bengals lost at home and sent them on a downward spiral that would see them finish 4-12 the next season.
Palmer has some serious playoff demons to exorcise, and he’ll have to do so first against a quarterback who’s had his own playoff struggles, but also some big success, in Aaron Rodgers.
