NFL Playoff System Is Fine As Is

An 8-8 team has made the playoffs while a 11-5 team has to pack up their lockers and go home.

Quick, let’s convene a meeting and discuss how we fix this great travesty of sports.

Funny isn’t it? Every time something looks amiss, we’re all quick to blame the system and demand that everything be torn down and rebuilt, hoping along the way that we’ll stumble upon the perfect method that will end debate. It’s funny though, how quickly we all forget that that same mentality if what created the BCS system in college football. How well has that performed in ending debate over there?

Sure, as a Patriots fan, I could easily sit back and rail on about how the Patriots, despite finishing with 3 more wins than the Chargers are sitting home while the Chargers continue to take a shot at the Super Bowl, I won’t. Fact of the matter is, I believe the playoff structure in the NFL is working fine and the current plight of the Patriots is just an aberration in a system that has worked well for a number of seasons.

The latest realignment of the NFL made it possible for four division winners in each conference to advance automatically to the post season. Then, it leaves the best records among the also-rans to fight it out for the two Wild Card spots. New England failed to make the playoffs because it failed to capture either of its two chances at a berth, not because it was cheated out of them.

Sure, you can make a case that New England played better football or in a tougher division than San Diego, but is that really a fair assessment? San Diego jumped on their chances to win their division on the backs of a 5-1 record against their division opponents and a swoon at the hands of the Denver Broncos. New England on the other hand was 4-2 against their division opponents, meaning had they won either of their two losses, against Miami and New York, then they would have claimed their own division title and this debate would have been unnecessary.

Further complicating the matter was the play of the Wild Card winners. Baltimore, at 11-5, finished second in their division to Pittsburgh at 12-4. Indianapolis, at 12-4, were one game behind division winner Tennessee who finished 13-3. Baltimore, on the back of its 8-4 conference record, held the tiebreaker over for the final Wild Card spot. So again, New England was punished under the rules set up already in the system, making them more a victim of circumstance than anything else.

Looking at other leagues, some people would assess their systems as working better, but in all honesty, they all have similar structures. The NBA, although having a division set-up, rewards only three spots to the division winners, with the five remaining slots going to best records among the rest. MLB, has three divisions per league, with each winner getting a playoff berth and the best record among the non-division winners gaining a Wild Card slot. If there is any inherent flaw in these systems, NFL included, is that division winners get preferential seeding, even if they themselves do not hold better records than the Wild Card teams, giving them home field advantage.

So needless to say, the NFL system seemingly works fine the way it is. Each team’s fate is in its own hands, each with sixteen games to make a legitimate case for why they should secure a slot. Sometimes fate, or division alignment, shines down on you. Sometimes it doesn’t. But that’s just a roll of the dice.