This season’s playoffs was quite unexpected in the eyes of many, which may be one of the reason’s why NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and the league are looking into tweaking the current playoff format. In Goodell’s State of the League address before Superbowl XLII, Goodell was concerned with the way teams have finished their regular season by resting their starters before the playoffs.
“The incentive should be for every team to win as many games as possible. We owe that to our fans and it’s important for clubs to be incented that way. We are going to look into the potential of seeding our teams differently after they qualify for the playoffs, so that you could potentially make more of the regular season games have significance for the postseason.“
Once a team clinches their playoff berth, the theme is that they will rest their starters for what will be “meaningless” regular season games. The Giants and Patriots did not follow this approach and played their hearts out against each other in the last game of the season and it is not coincidence that both teams then reached the Superbowl. The Buccaneers rested their starters for almost a whole month before the playoffs only to look rusty and lose in the first round to who else by the Giants.
Teams should try to win out the rest of their games after clinching a berth to gain momentum heading into the playoffs. Granted if a player is hurt, by all means rest them but other than that, teams should try to win every game as Goodell mentioned. Ratings for the NFL and ESPN and other stations that carry NFL games tend to drop towards the end of the season as fans do not tune into the epic quarterback matchups that include Jim Sorgi and David Gray. The excitement in games is lost in the last three or so weeks of the season. Watching New England and New York play the game the way it was meant to be played, for the shear competition of it in week 17 was amazing as Goodell called it “one of the proudest moments I had in the 2007 season”.
What Goodell is suggesting in terms of changing the playoff format is perhaps reseeding the teams. Of course teams that win out their division will earn a playoff berth and then two teams will make the wild card slots. However, this is where the reseeding would occur as normally the top four division winners automatically would have held seeds 1 through 4. Goodell is implying that his changes in the format would give the teams will the better record, regardless of division or wild card berth, the higher playoff seed. So for example, the Tampa Bay and New York game in the first round of the playoffs where the Giants won, would potentially have been played at New York under this new reseeding. So division winners, despite clinching a playoff berth in the season, will have to continue to win the rest of their games to ensure that a wild card team with a better record does not seed higher than them. A perfect example would have been in the AFC South, where the Jaguars finished the season with an 11-5 record, earning themselves a wild card slot since the Colts had won out the division. Now the Jaguars played the Steelers at Pittsburgh, who had won their division but had a 10-6 record. Under the reseeding, the game would have been played at Jacksonville.
However this isn’t certain, who knows if Goodell and the league will change the playoff format anytime in the near future.
