The NFL loves average.
Just won the Super Bowl? Sorry, you’re going to the very back of the draft line – in every round. Amassing too much talent on that roster? Sorry, but the salary cap will ensure you can’t keep all of it – this ain’t the 1980s. Racking up too many victories? Sorry, but your schedule will very likely be appreciably harder next season – especially as it relates to your divisional foes.
Regression to the mean fosters football chaos – sorry, I meant competitive balance. It’s part of the league’s not-so-secret sauce, offering hope to all 32 fan bases – often beyond the winter solstice for many – and why the playoff field typically changes so significantly year over year.
Yet this is also the very reason to reward teams that manage to remain a standard deviation or two beyond average – and I’m talking about the good ones, not the New York Jets. If you can achieve excellence in the NFL, you should be applauded for it.
This is why I was heartened to see Wednesday that the Detroit Lions, a franchise long relegated (until very recently) to middling if not the Jets’ side of the bell curve, proposed a change to the league’s present postseason format that I’ve thought was long overdue – namely compensating the best teams with better seeds and home playoff games rather than (mindlessly?) rewarding those that merely win divisions.
The Lions are asking the NFL “to amend the current playoff seeding format to allow Wild Card teams to be seeded higher than Division Champions if the Wild Card team has a better regular season record.”
Detroit’s plan further lays out that higher-seeded teams host postseason games, regardless of whether they’re division champions or wild-card entries. The proposal will be voted upon by owners at the March 30 league meeting in Palm Beach, Florida.
Let’s go back to the ‘80s (and ‘90s) again. It was a time when things like network news, landlines and Congress mattered. It’s also when the NFL was constructed of six divisions – RIP, AFC Central and NFC Central – most of them comprised of at least five clubs. That meant fully half of a team’s 16-game regular-season schedule – RIP, 16-game schedule – was spent matching up with divisional foes and rendered a first-place finish a little more consequential and its guaranteed home playoff game perhaps a touch more meaningful.
Nowadays?
The NFL went to eight four-team divisions when it expanded to 32 franchises in 2002 – hello, Houston Texans; RIP, Houston Oilers – which meant clubs only spent 37.5% of the schedule competing against their traditional rivals. That figure dropped to 35.2% when the 17th game was added in 2021 (and we know an 18th isn’t too far off).
The modern math indicates that when a division is consistently ruled by a nine-win team – looking at you, Tampa Bay Buccaneers – it’s actually just a bad division, not a case where a bunch of good squads are beating the [tar] out of one another the way the Dallas Cowboys, New York Giants, Philadelphia Eagles and Washington ________ did … back when such a thing was allowed in the body bag heyday of the 1980s and ‘90s NFC East, which also included the always irrelevant (RIP) St. Louis/Phoenix Cardinals.
Mediocrity in the 21st-century NFL is too easily elevated.
Let’s drill down a bit more on the NFC South. The Bucs have won it each of the past four seasons, meaning they’ve been assured at least one home playoff game all of those years. Should that have been the case, though? Not once in that period has the NFC South produced a wild-card team – its most recent one actually the 2020 Tom Brady-led Bucs who won Super Bowl 55. Over the past three seasons, Tampa Bay’s regular-season record is 27-24 (9-8 its average record). Yet the Bucs have wound up with the third or fourth playoff seed each time, even though their overall conference record has never been better than sixth – and was tied for ninth in 2022.
And this isn’t some recent anomaly.
Remember when the NFC West used to be shaded like the NFC South is now? Cris Collinsworth infamously called the 2008 Arizona Cardinals the “worst playoff team” ever before that postseason, when circumstances ultimately permitted those Cards to host two playoff games on their way to Super Bowl 43, which they lost to the Pittsburgh Steelers. Two years later, the Seattle Seahawks, led by backup QB Charlie Whitehurst on ‘Sunday Night Football,’ won the final game of the 2010 regular season – beating the St. Louis Rams (RIP) to finish with a 7-9 record … which was good enough to win the division. A week later, the ‘Hawks somehow managed to knock off the high-octane New Orleans Saints in the wild-card round, in large part because QB Matt Hasselbeck was healthy enough to play but also because they got to host the game at raucous Qwest Field (RIP) on the day Marshawn Lynch registered his famous “Beast Quake” run.
Those are fun trips down memory lane – the division-winning 2014 Carolina Panthers (7-8-1) and 2020 Washington Football Team (7-9) provided no such nostalgia – but it’s worth wondering if the moments should have ever occurred. With the NFL playoff field now ballooning to 14 games, average postseason qualifiers have become commonplace. And that’s fine. After all, this is the time of year when everyone likes to see the Ohio Valley Conference team go on a bracket-busting run. But let’s make ’em earn it without greasing the skids.
And there’s a flip side to all of this.
Is the arc of the football universe bending toward justice when the Minnesota Vikings finish 14-3 – as they did last year, the most regular-season wins ever by a wild-card team – but are seeded fifth with basically no hope of playing a postseason game in front of their home fans even though they’d tied for the NFC’s second-best record? Unrelated – but related – a similarly wonky seeding system led to unexpected (unfair?) outcomes in the new College Football Playoff earlier this year, when Boise State and Arizona State were slotted third and fourth, respectively, by virtue of winning weak conferences. (Neither team was in the top seven of the final regular season Top 25 poll.)
In each of the last three NFL postseasons, at least one wild-card team in both the AFC and NFC has had a superior record to the division-winning No. 4 seed and, in many cases, multiple clubs have been better. I’m not suggesting winning a division shouldn’t lead to automatic playoff qualification – that ought to remain the case – but those so-called champions should have to earn the higher seed and home dates that come with them. The whole point of seeding is to create the best possible matchups as a bracket reduces, otherwise what’s the point? Furthermore, chasing seeds also makes for more compelling games in Week 18 rather than a bunch of teams resting on their laurels while taking de facto byes rather than earning the real thing.
Which brought me to another realization and belated point.
When I saw this proposal had come from the Lions, my first – naïve – reaction was that they’d felt some sort of compassion for their NFC North brethren Vikings, whom Detroit swept last season to win the division and No. 1 playoff seed. There was also that caught-on-camera moment at Ford Field in Week 18, when the Lions beat the Vikes in the regular-season finale and Detroit coach Dan Campbell told Minnesota counterpart Kevin O’Connell, “I’ll see you in two weeks,” an innocuous but nevertheless highly parsed comment made following the heat of battle – and also one that would have been true had the seeding held to form. (It didn’t. The Vikings lost to the NFC West champion Los Angeles Rams in their playoff opener but would not have faced the Lions a third time in the divisional round anyway given the third-seeded Bucs were upset – at home – by the sixth-seeded the Washington Commanders, who subsequently ambushed Detroit, too. Notably, the Buccaneers and Rams would have been the NFC’s lowest seeds in 2024 based on the Lions’ recommendation.)
Even though the matchups didn’t materialize as they were designed to, it does become apparent that the Lions’ proposal would also generally benefit their self-interests – and No. 1 seeds should be deservedly granted plenty of indulgence, beyond earning a first-round bye and home-field advantage. The NFL’s playoffs dictate that the highest seed always hosts the lowest remaining seed as the rounds progress. But the current set-up would have theoretically meant that Detroit would have played the wild-card Vikings a third time, despite Minnesota’s gaudy record, even though the higher-seeded Rams and Bucs both finished 10-7 and would have been – logically, if not practically in this case – more attractive matchups for a top-seeded host team.
The NFL is nothing if not an organism that constantly evolves in a bid to create a more attractive product. And that includes occasional tweaking of a playoff system that’s generally been the best in professional sports for the last half-century or so given its one-and-done nature. But it’s not always perfect. (Remember, the undefeated ’72 Dolphins somehow had to go on the road to win the AFC championship game back when it was hosted on a rotational basis rather than a merit-based one.)
But when there’s a good reason to embrace excellence and champion meritocracy in a sport largely designed to suppress it, let’s celebrate that. RIP average division winners who don’t deserve more built-in advantages when they matter most.
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