A few days before the start of Christmas and Hanukkah signalled the merciful end to 2016, it was announced that a spring developmental football league was slated to debut in April. Unaffiliated with the NFL, the four-team league will feature free agent players instructed by experienced coaches, and is designed to give fringe players a chance to open some eyes and latch on to NFL teams.

But the NFL is not one to let any competitor leagues pop up unopposed, so this Saturday and Sunday we will see the debut of the NFL’s own developmental league, one they’re calling “the AFC wildcard round”. Over one magical weekend, football fans will be treated to two AFC playoff games featuring three of the following five men at quarterback: Connor Cook, Matt McGloin, Tom Savage, Brock Osweiler and Matt Moore. These are players you expect to see in the second half of preseason contests, not under center on the road to the Super Bowl. We’re getting exhibition names in playoff games. Don’t pretend you’re not excited.

If you want guaranteed quarterback excellence, the NFC bracket boasts Super Bowl winners Russell Wilson, Eli Manning and Aaron Rodgers, rifle-armed Matthew Stafford, MVP candidate Matt Ryan, and Savior Of America’s Team Dak Prescott. Enjoy that. But after Tom Brady and Ben Roethlisberger and the steady little hands of Alex Smith, the AFC’s QB roster offers something very different. Due to injuries to Derek Carr and Ryan Tannehill, and the poor play of Osweiler, we will see some of the most inexperience players at football’s most important position to ever start on the playoff stage. That’s must-see TV. Yes, we all wanted to see how far Carr took the Raiders in his first playoff action, but he’s probably got another 10 playoff appearances left in his career. Right now we have the pleasure of three playoff teams with huge quarterback uncertainty. Isn’t that a lot more fun to watch than another year of the uniquely humdrum playing style of Joe Flacco?

Tom Savage is a former fourth-round pick who has thrown all of 92 passes in the NFL. Cook is a rookie fourth-rounder who has thrown 21, every one coming last week in relief of Matt McGloin, an undrafted college walk-on from Scranton, Pennsylvania. Moore has solid NFL experience, but had thrown just 30 passes in four years before taking over for Tannehill. And Osweiler – if he plays due to Savage’s concussion – has thrown 815 career passes, but nary a good one in more than a year [Editor’s note: the Texans announced on Tuesday that Osweiler will start against the Raiders].

It’s a collection of quarterbacks that only Jon Gruden could love at first glance. The NFL gave Texans-Raiders the Saturday 4.35pm ET kickoff for a reason: it’s the time slot the NFL always reserves for the wildcard game that looks on paper to be the whatever-is-the-opposite-of-marquee match-up. But all of these unknown variables at quarterback give us unknown outcomes, too. We know what to expect from an Andy Dalton; whereas these guys could give us ... anything. The single known outcome is that at least one of these presumed nobodies will win a real NFL playoff game. It will happen. Someone from the Savage/McGloin/Cook clump will be victorious on Saturday and Moore might even be capable of helping the Dolphins get past the Steelers on Sunday for the second time this season. That kind of success, not the potential for horrifically comical pick-sixes, is where the fun really begins.

Don’t forget that the Texans handed Osweiler $37m back in March because he played a handful of decent regular season games in Denver before getting pulled for Peyton Manning. Texans fans surely cannot. Just imagine what some quarterback-desperate team might shell out for a quarterback who will win an honest to goodness playoff game or two. An offseason bidding war between the Jets, Browns and Bears for the services of free-agent-to-be Matt McGloin would be a spectacle we’d not soon forget. I can see the headlines now: “Jets confident $100m man Matt McGloin has only scratched his playoff potential.”

But the greatest unknown of all is this: What if one of these guys is, you know ... actually good? Perhaps you’ve heard the tale before of a man called Tom Brady, a lightly-regarded sixth-round draft pick who quarterbacked his team to a Super Bowl after being forced into the lineup when veteran Drew Bledsoe got injured? No one is predicting the next Tom Brady is in this group – that kind of speculation is for draft analysts when they’re scrambling to fill airtime during the middle rounds of the NFL Draft broadcast – but Prescott has proven this year that the unknown can turn out to be quite good. And this is true: the Cowboys had Cook rated higher on their draft board, but were forced to settle on their new franchise quarterback when Oakland traded up ahead of them to take Cook.

Evaluating quarterbacks is an inexact science, especially in a war room led by Jerry Jones, but they weren’t alone in rating Cook ahead of the possibly Rookie of the Year winner. Cook could actually be good. He could beat the Texans and then, with the talent Oakland has assembled on both sides of the ball ... who knows. It’s a longshot. There will have to be some upsets along the way. But we all could use a good underdog story to kick off 2017. Everyone is tired of bullies winning.