The Playoff Seeding Debate
The Lions proposed a rule change. Playoff teams should be seeded by record, not by division winners. After the way the NFC North shook out at the end of last season, the subject was in high discussion. The surprising part to me was that the Lions of all teams were the ones to propose it. They won! They got the first seed! They were not hurt or damaged by the system at all. The Vikings were the team that was impacted by the seeding rules, dropping to the 5th seed despite having the second-best record in the conference. If you wandered into the debates online about seeding in those final weeks, you were sure to see Vikings fans angry in there, almost as if they knew they’d end up with the short stick (of course they knew, they are Vikings fans, they’ve developed a sixth sense for incoming pain). It made me wonder if Dan Campbell was doing a favor for his bro Kevin.
The proposal was tabled. For the time being, the seeding is staying as it is. Personally? I’m fine with it. I like the current system. As far as I’m concerned, and I’ll get into why, win your fucking division or quit whining.
The main issue at play is that sometimes the best wildcard team has a better record than the worst division winner, so people are confused why the “worse team” gets the home game. Just because they won the division? What if the division sucks? Seems unfair! On the surface, I think this is a reasonable argument. More wins = better team, right? Give better team the playoff advantage, right? I think these people are undervaluing the importance of divisions in football.
Football has an inherent, unsolvable problem: small sample size. A single NFL win means so much more to a season than any other major sport. It is part of what makes it so exciting. Every game is functionally a vital event. In baseball, you drop a stinker, you’ve got 161 other games. Basketball has 82. Hockey has 82. Even soccer has 32, and you can just tie all the time, who gives a fuck. It’s part of the reason I’ve always been mostly a casual fan of other sports. If I miss a game, oh well. Football feels different. But this results in a sort of paradox. A single NFL win means the most to a team, but it also tells us very little about that team. Fluke games, weird events, dare I say it: chaos, all have significantly more impact on a team’s chances in this small sample size. A wild chaotic baseball outcome will barely matter in the scheme of a season. In the NFL stupid fluke shit can straight up knock you out of the playoffs. That’s why teams who start 0-2 are basically in crisis, and teams who start 0-3 are essentially written off. It’s not a huge problem, good teams will still win, bad teams will lose, some balance will be achieved, but those random elements have greater impact and dilute the ability to properly judge the teams.
The Vikings and Eagles both ended the 2024 season at 14-3. Under the proposal, the Vikings would have been the 2 seed, and the Eagles 3. Were the Vikings, a team that unceremoniously lost in the first round, better than the Eagles, who won the fucking super bowl? I can’t say. In 17 games, the Vikings and Eagles only shared 4 opponents (Packers, Rams, Falcons, and Jaguars) and never faced each other directly. They reached the same record by facing almost completely different schedules, so how do you really compare them? That’s the issue with the small sample size season. We aren’t getting enough head-to-head data to truly judge which of these teams are for sure “better”. Good teams might just be teams that feasted on weak opponents and inflated their win total, like the 2022 Giants. I do not think final record is a true end-all-be-all indicator of quality, and I’m fine with the seeding process also subscribing to this theory.
I think the divisional system is a balance put in place by the NFL to try and counteract the chaos and uncertainty of the small sample size problem. The divisional system is a system devised on order. NFL schedules rotate every year and cannot account for fluctuations and imbalances in that rotation. Some teams get stuck with brutal schedules (on paper) simply due to bad luck. The division system holds it together by being the main point of consistency. No matter what other teams a franchise will face, they are guaranteed to face their division opponents twice, both home and away. Those teams in your division are also (mostly) sharing your same schedule, bringing further balance to proving who is the best among you. Your other opposition might be unpredictable, but you know exactly what 6 of those games are every time, and those 3 opponents are facing a similar lineup outside the division. The division has significant value. That’s why winning your division should matter as much as it does. It is the only pillar of consistency in a small sample size schedule. Give those 6 games added weight, make being the best of those 4 teams mean something, even if your division sucks.
That’s why I’m fine with the divisions getting seeds 1-4. If you can’t be the best team in a small group, why do you deserve a higher seed who could manage that goal? Especially when schedules are all so different that we can’t get a true sense on who would deserve it anyway? Win your fucking division. If you can’t? You end up like the Vikings. Here’s the thing. If you are the best non-division winner, your reward for this is getting to face the 4th seed, who is the worst division winner. If you are a better team than them, go prove it.
Our current system does occasionally spawn complications, like last year’s Vikings thing, or a bad, possibly under .500 team earning a playoff spot. That shit is funny as hell though, and it isn’t happening every year. I don’t want to live in a world that didn’t have the Beastquake in it because fans of a team that can’t win their division cried about it too hard. Win your division. If you can’t do that, well, go on the road and pull off some shit. Wildcards have won the Super Bowl before. The Vikings certainly didn’t prove they deserved the 2nd seed in the playoffs this year. They didn’t even have to face the Rams in LA thanks to the wildfire relocation and they still got spanked. The NFL’s small sample size will always loom over every facet of these seasons, and that chaos it causes is part of why it is so fun. Once you reach the playoffs, you just have to be the better team on Sunday. A home game is just the reward for accomplishing what should be every team’s goal in the regular season: winning those valuable division games on top of whatever else you win.
The only change I’ve seen floated that makes any sense to me is what I believe the Lions proposed, winning your division gets you a playoff spot but now seeding is determined by record. I still prefer the current system, but at least that keeps the divisions valuable. I’ve seen people argue the divisions are too small, which, okay, that might be a different discussion. I’ve also seen people call for no divisions at all, and those people can all dive straight into a woodchipper. You want the NBA system? The NFL doesn’t have enough games to justify that nonsense, where divisions have ceased to matter at all. Divisions are a necessary source of consistency to balance out the system. We need a thumb on the scale for the order side to balance that chaos. The Lions proposal didn’t appear close to passing, so I’m not inclined to think anything is changing soon.
Agree on all accounts for all reasons listed. I feel like this debate should have been ended forever when the 7-9 Seahawks beat the Saints personally.
IDC about high wun wildcard teams having to go on the road, but I do heavily dislike terrible division winners being gifted a home playoff game. That should feel like a reward which is earned. It’s too big of an advantage for a winner take all game. It’s hard to determine lines of what “bad division winners” are, so I’d be fine with it being reserved for the exceedingly rare cases like sub .500 teams where they get kicked down to the bottom seed. A team that couldn’t win more often than it lost does not deserve additional help, they should already consider themselves lucky that 3 other teams were terrible enough to give them a playoff spot by default. Make them truly earn any wins they can get.
I like that winning your division always really matters, which plays into your division rivalries always feeling like they’re the most important thing to win in the regular season. The end results can be a little eccentric at times, but I think that’s okay if it means divisional play is critical to your season. We don’t want to become like the NBA where they’ve all but eliminated divisions and divisional rivalries, and completely devalued the regular season – both of those really suck and play a big part of why so many people only watch the NBA’s playoffs (well, those and the fact that there are just way too many games).
Larger divisions would make it extremely easy on schedulers, 8 team divisions would be the logical split, 14 games against your division and a rotating schedule against the 3 remaining (decided either by ranking or a set 8 year schedule) divisions, but that creates a schedule where some teams might never play each other and a weird seeding debate (do we keep 4 auto bids and 3 wild cards? Go crazy with 6 auto bids since every division basically becomes it’s own silo? Or just division winners and 3-7 are all wild cards?) I don’t see that being better than the current system, divisions kind of operate in their own silo as far as common opponents go, but you at least get a few measuring stick games to compare teams across the conference.
One other option, we go really crazy, 4 tiered divisions, 8 teams each, European soccer style, split the playoff bids seeds 1-5 go to division one, 6-9 to division two, 10-12 to division 3, and 13-14 to division 4, top 2 from division 2-4 get promoted each year, bottom 2 from division 1-3 are relegated. Bottom division teams should be able to improve more quickly, after all they start the season with the guarantee of a top 10 draft pick, top division teams need to be more savvy as even a complete collapse leaves them 2-3 years away from a high draft position.
You could keep a very similar schedule by just play against divisional opponents 1x a year and alternating the home-away aspect. Then you have 7 games against division and 10 non-division.
But if this change gets made, you don’t get the 2014 Carolina Panthers (Record: 7-8-1) shellacking the Arizona Cardinals (Record: 11-5) at home in the first round of the playoffs. That win was perfect, a bad team who shouldn’t have made the playoffs whips a good team who should have been a top 2 seed, a QB gets sent out to pastor, the legend of Ron Rivera gets born. Keep our bad brackets!
Wrong year for the Panthers. That was the one where they played the Ryan Lindley led Cardinals. The 15-1 Panthers next year were the ones that shellacked Palmer.
This might be an outlandish idea but their could be a point system kind of like the world cups system. Each win +2, each conference win is 3 points a loss is no point, a conference loss is -1 points and if you win the divisional you get maybe +4 points and seed accordingly with tied points being given to the conference winner then opponents combined record etc etc. This plan could give conference games the weight still but then also reward teams that were good in their division but their might have had a stacked division.
Go Loins!
Loins
The current system is not why the Vikings lost. We lost because we sucked in the 2 most important games of the year. The system is fine.
I wouldn’t mind switching up home/away being determined solely by record, but I am not pounding the table for it.
Somewhat unrelated, but if I was made emperor of the NBA, I’d cut the regular season down to 64 games, emphasize division games, and guarantee division winners a playoff spot. Seems like a better idea to increase interest in the regular season instead of a single elimination tournament in December that has no stakes, but what do I know
I mostly agree with Dave’s points, the ONLY exception I might even consider would be something like taking the strength of schedule, and using THAT to determine who gets the home field advantage, but only if the wildcard team has significantly more wins than the div winner. So if a team like the Vikings goes 14-3, and they have to go visit a team like the 2010 7-9 Seahawks, I’m not against using the strength of schedule to determine who should go on the road.
It’s not a hill I’d die on, but I’d be open to exploring something like it as a method to give a kick in the pants to some really bad divisions. Let them know winning the division alone isn’t a 100% lock for a home game, they still need to be relatively competitive in the greater conference.
So, like, maybe… “If the wildcard team has a minimum of 4(?) more Ws than the division winner they’re set to face, and if the strength of schedule is X% or more in favor of the wildcard team, then the division winner will go on the road and be the visiting team.”
I’m not all-in gotta-have this idea, but I’d be open to something like it, if we wanted to really encourage teams to not JUST win their division, but give them an incentive that they still need to keep up with the wildcards, provided the strength of schedule determines these weren’t wins against bottom feeder teams.
These kind of problems were a lot lesser before realignment gave us a 8 tiny divisions instead of 6 beefier ones. You still might get wildcard teams with better records than division winners, but having fewer divisions plus more competitive divisions with the larger team count, you didn’t end up with so many of these division champs with records barely above .500. Reject tiny divisions, bring back the 6 team AFC Central.