Atlanta Are Ninth on Minus Two. The Rams Are Tenth on Plus Eleven.

Three NFC clubs sit at 3-4 this morning. Atlanta are the ninth seed with a point differential of minus two. The Los Angeles Rams are tenth at plus eleven. Dallas are eleventh at plus nine.

If you sort that band by the margin they have each produced over seven games, you get the order exactly backwards. So the margin is not what is sorting them.

The number that sorts them is conference record, and Atlanta's is the best of the three: 3-2 inside the NFC, against 2-2 for the Rams and 2-3 for Dallas. Six hundred, five hundred, four hundred. That is the seed order, in order.

This is worth being precise about, because the published procedure is precise about it. In the league's wild-card tiebreaker for three or more clubs, won-lost-tied percentage in conference games is the third step — after the division filter and a head-to-head sweep. Net points in all games is the tenth step of twelve. For two clubs, conference record is the second step and net points in all games is the ninth of eleven. Point differential is in the procedure. It is simply almost never reached, and a seven-point gap in it does not outrank a one-game gap in the conference column.

Which brings up the part of this that is structural rather than circumstantial.

Atlanta do not play the Los Angeles Rams this season. They do not play Dallas either. I checked all seventeen fixtures; neither club appears. Head-to-head, which is the first step for two clubs and the second for three, can never be applied to the two teams directly behind Atlanta in the standings. Whatever order those three end up in will be settled in a ledger neither party can influence directly — they can only each go and win conference games.

And Atlanta are about to stop having them.

Tampa Bay on Sunday is an NFC game. Then Cincinnati in Madrid, which is not. Then Kansas City, which is not. Then the bye, in Week 11, the week of November 22. The next time Atlanta can add to the 3-2 that is currently holding their seed is November 29, at Minnesota. One conference game in the next five weeks.

That is a strange position for a team whose entire case rests on that column. The three NFC wins — at Green Bay, at New Orleans, and San Francisco on Sunday — are what Atlanta have. Both of their non-conference games, Pittsburgh and Baltimore, were losses. The record that looks mediocre from a distance is doing something quite specific up close: it is front-loaded with exactly the games that count twice.

One caution on how far to take this. Atlanta hold the best conference winning percentage of the five clubs occupying seeds seven through eleven — better than Green Bay's 3-3 and much better than Seattle's 1-2. That is true and it is not yet worth anything. Seeding sorts on overall record first, and both of those clubs are 4-3. A tiebreaker is not a thing you hold. It is a thing that gets reached, and it only gets reached once the records are level. Atlanta's 3-2 is a credit note that pays out if they get to 4-3, and does nothing at all if they do not.

Inside the division the same arithmetic produces almost nothing to separate anyone. Carolina are 3-3, Atlanta 3-4. They are level at 1-1 in divisional games and level at 3-2 in the conference. No row in the NFC South standings carries a note of any kind, which is the feed's way of saying there is no order to report yet. One game in the overall column is the whole distance between them, and Carolina have eleven games left to Atlanta's ten, because Carolina have no bye remaining.

The remaining schedules are a wash. By the records of their opponents as of this morning, Atlanta's run-in grades .539 and Carolina's .547. Eight thousandths. Neither club has been handed anything.

So: minus two across seven games, 24.4 points scored a game against 24.7 allowed. By the only ledger that measures how a team has actually played, Atlanta are indistinguishable from the teams they have played. On Sunday I argued that a win built on a turnover margin this team has no way to count on does not tell you it has been fixed, and seven games of scoring and conceding is a larger sample saying the same thing in a colder voice.

What has changed is that the thing holding Atlanta's position is no longer a performance claim at all. It is a filing. Three conference wins, banked in September and October, and one more chance to add to the pile before the calendar takes the opportunity away for a month.