The Rams had a 7-8 record entering the game, and the Seahawks’ record was 6-9, far from sterling marks by pro football standards. The teams played at their season standards, which were poor, and Seattle eventually won the game 16-6 to claim the division title with a final regular season record of 7-9 and earn the NFC’s No. 4 seed which enables them to host a playoff game this weekend against the defending Super Bowl champion and No. 5 seeded New Orleans Saints, who finished two games behind NFC South champion Atlanta and ended the season as a wild card with a final record of 11-5.
Now I was a decent math student in school, and I’m fairly certain that 11 is a higher number than seven, therefore it would make sense that the team with the higher win total would host a playoff game, right? Wrong.
In the world of the NFL, greatest emphasis is placed on a team winning its division when it comes to playoff seeding, even if that division winner lost more games than it won.
Using the current league playoff format mediocrity is rewarded, and the Saints, who even defeated the Seahawks head-to-head in the regular season, are the hard-luck losers in the mix.
The idea of rewarding teams with less-than-stellar records goes beyond the pro ranks. Leave it to the NCAA to foul up a potentially great idea, similarly to foregoing the excitement and windfall of a college football playoff for the Bowl Championship Series. College football has taken the idea of rewarding the mediocre to another level by playing a grand total of 35 bowl games this postseason.
Again, if my math serves me correctly, that means 70 teams are invited to bowl games this year. There are only 120 or so NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision (former Division 1A) teams eligible for bowls to begin with, so almost 60 percent of those teams went bowling this postseason.
A total of 14 teams (20 percent of the teams in bowl games) either have played or are scheduled to play in bowl games and finished the regular season with six wins and six losses. It is even conceivable that a team that finishes under .500 could have played in bowl games this season.
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| A pair of .500 schools (BYU and UTEP) played in this year's New Mexico Bowl. | . |
Perhaps the best example of this celebration of average was this year’s New Mexico Bowl which pitted 6-6 Brigham Young University against 6-6 University of Texas-El Paso. Sure, the records make it appear that the game might be competitive (which it wasn’t…BYU won 52-24), but what message is being sent by the NCAA when it gives a team that couldn’t win more games than it lost the privilege of playing a postseason bowl game?
It’s easy to complain about a broken system, but I have some solutions as well. Here’s my two cents worth:
First, to fix the college bowl issue why not use a football playoff system with no greater than 16 teams. Since this doesn’t appear conceivable in the near future, rather than rewarding mediocrity, why not eliminate a few bowl games and raise the standard? To qualify for a bowl game, a team must win a higher minimum number of games. Eight is a good round number of wins, with at least seven coming against fellow FBS opponents and include a cap on the maximum number of games a team plays in a season at 13 games.
In the event that there are not enough teams that qualify for the bowl games, throw in a provision that would allow for less than eight wins to qualify if that team wins a set percentage (60 percent is a good benchmark) of its FBS games with a minimum number of 10 games played. That way, teams finishing a regular season at 6-4 or 7-3 would qualify for postseason, while a 7-5 team would fall short.
In the NFL playoff format, use head-to-head record and whether a team is a division champion as factors in breaking ties. However, if a wild card team has a better record than a division champion (such as the New Orleans/Seattle quandary), the team with the better season record should host the playoff game. It works in Major League Baseball, where seeding is based on overall record and a wild card team with a better overall record has home field advantage over a division champion.
This year’s watered down NFC West should open the league’s eyes to the notion that total wins is more important than the best out of four teams in a division. Let’s reward excellence more. It would lead to better quality of competition and more exciting games, which is a win-win for everyone.
