This past weekend, the National Football League's two top-seeded teams, the New England Patriots (14-2) and the Atlanta Falcons (13-3), were each stunned at home in their playoff openers by white hot bottom-seeded teams. These surprising results are the latest evidence that finishing with an elite record in the NFL's regular season no longer confers a significant advantage in the postseason. In the interest of competitive fairness and increased profits, the NFL should add four more playoff teams to its postseason format.
Under the current system, six teams from each of the League's two conferences make the playoffs: the winners of each conference's four regionally-themed divisions and two wild card teams with the next best records. The reward for finishing in the top two of each conference is a bye in the first round of the playoffs, while the punishment for wild card entrants is to play all of their playoff games on the road. From 1990 to 2001, during the early years of this system, teams that had earned a first round bye won 81 percent of the time in their first home game, proving that the bye was an ample and valuable reward for their stellar season play.
Since 2002, however, when the NFL adopted its current scheduling format, which aims to create parity by giving successful teams extremely difficult schedules and weaker teams easier ones, those same bye teams have won a mere 56 percent of their first home games, with a particularly mediocre 12-12 record since 2005. Over that same period, wild card teams have flourished, with two teams winning the Super Bowl despite never once playing at home. This trend is likely due to the aforementioned scheduling system artificially depressing the records of the League's best teams while inflating those of second-tier teams, causing a few of the strongest teams to end up as wild cards. This system is not ideal for the NFL, however, because many teams, knowing that it's no longer terribly daunting to win on the road in the postseason, opt to rest key players late in the year rather than attempt to secure the best record possible, sapping late season games of stars and drama.
Adding four more wild card teams, two from each conference, to this mix would restore a host of competitive fairness and financial advantages. Under this system, the NFL could add an extra week to its playoff format, with the eight wild card teams playing each other on the first weekend, and the victors advancing to play the 3rd and 4th seeded division winners on the second weekend, who would have byes in the first round. The winners of this second round of games would then advance to play each conference's top-seeded teams, who by then would have had two weeks off to rest.
By giving all of this extra rest to the division champions, while forcing the wild card teams to play more games, the NFL would restore a significant competitive advantage to the teams who had earned it by playing well during the regular year, and sufficiently impede less-qualified wild card entrants. This competitive fairness is needed to assure that during the regular season, teams have a genuine incentive to win as many games as possible. This new system would strengthen the allure of the bye and thus achieves that goal.
Additionally, this system provides the NFL with a way to add more games to the schedule while minimizing player injury exposure. The NFL is actively seeking to add two more games to its regular season schedule, an idea that has earned scorn from players and commentators for the increased injury risk extra games would present. If the NFL added wild card teams instead, only four more teams would see extra exposure, and even then, only one more game than the current system.
The NFL would reap the increased television revenue of an additional week of games and the increased late-season gate receipts from the several additional markets in playoff contention late in the year. More fan bases with a shot at seeing postseason play in December means more interest in the NFL, which means more money for NFL owners.
Adding more wild card teams would create more quality football late in the regular season and an extra week of exciting match-ups, all of which would be a win for the NFL. The ultimate winners, however, would be the fans, who would be treated to another week of the best product in professional sports.
