It is oftentimes said that the conference finals (AFC and NFC) which determine(d) the conferences’ respective sides in the Super Bowl of a given year were the real Super Bowls, especially when compared to the actual Super Bowl game. Is this true?
Sure, sometimes you’ll have the top two teams in the same conference so they can’t compete in the Super Bowl. That means that the conference championship will be the game where the two best teams compete.
I think this was often true in the years when you had the Super Bowl blowouts. Most off the Super Bowls of the past few years have been fairly competitive games
It’s still true, dale42. Look at the 2006 playoffs. The AFC championship between Indy and NE was the “real” Super Bowl. Either of those teams would have smoked Chicago.
It depends on what you mean by a ‘real Super Bowl’. The Super Bowl isn’t a contest between the two best teams in the NFL, it’s contest between the two best teams in their own conference.
The NFC championship games between the Cowboys and 49ers from 1993-95 were regarded this way. The winner of all 3 went on to win the SB.
Now that I think of it, the NFC championship was kind of the de facto SB for a long time because the conference won the title 13 years in a row.
Depends. This last season, the Ratbirds (arguing point here) weren’t even the best team in the playoffs at the end of the season. But when they beat Denver, I pretty much knew that they sealed the SuperBowl result. Very subjective, I know, but each year (each game, really) has so many variables, who can really say.
What I have found, tho, is that the people who say that usually were fans of the losing team in the Conf Finals. (YMMV)
A lot of the issues I had with division, conference, and playoff structure, as well as the legitimacy of the Super Bowl as a championship, were resolved for me when I finally came to the following realization:
The point of the Super Bowl is not to determine the best team in the NFL; the point of the Super Bowl is to determine which NFL team will win the Super Bowl.
That’s it…that’s the goal. Being the best team gives you a leg up on accomplishing that goal, and being a bad team means you’ve got a long row to hoe, but everyone’s got a shot, and once the numbers are on the scoreboard on that final Sunday, that’s all she wrote. It sounds trite and obvious, and I suppose it IS the latter, but realizing what that statement actually meant — that “finding the best team” isn’t the most desirable goal, and the whole point of an individual game is to see which competitors will succed at that moment — went a long way toward putting me at peace with the current setup.
Yeah, if the goal is to find the actual best team, then you want to have a series of several games, with the winner being the first to win over half. Which still doesn’t assure you of getting the guaranteed best team; it just makes it more likely.
This was said during the Steelers and Oilers of the late 70’s.
The Steelers had the best team of all time, and the Oilers had the best running back of all time (while he was healthy, anyway). Earl Campbell.
I loved Earl Campbell, and felt bad for him that he never won a ring. But for the AFC Central teams, they had to win the division or a wildcard. Since Pittsburgh owned the division, the Oilers finished second and had to play the extra weekend of wild card games.
In both 1978-79, and 1979-80, the Steelers and Oilers played for the AFC Championship in Pittsburgh, with Pittsburgh winning both times. This was when the AFC was considered to be stronger than the NFC at the time (like the NFC was later in the 80’s and 90’s with their string of SB victories)
So, even though the Steelers played Dallas in Jan 1979 and the LA Rams in 1980, and both of those games were very good, I remember folks at the time thinking the AFC Championship was indeed the Super Bowl for that year.
Pretty silly, when you stop and think about it. Especially in football (or any single elimination tourney). In a one game championship, ANYTHING can happen.
Good example. And a still a sticking point for people (in my circle of middle aged fans) who say refs shouldn’t decide games. I wonder if that call would’ve been overruled and called a TD by today’s rules?
Personally, if it were up to me, I’d get rid of the divisions and conferences. You’d just have a rotating schedule of teams playing other teams. At the end of the regular season, the teams would be ranked based on their records and the top eight teams would go to the playoffs.
Week 1:
Game 1 - #1 vs #8
Game 2 - #2 vs #7
Game 3 - #3 vs #6
Game 4 - #4 vs #5
Week 2:
Game 5 - Game 1 winner vs Game 4 winner
Game 6 - Game 2 winner vs Game 3 winner
Week 3:
Super Bowl - Game 5 winner vs Game 6 winner
The ideal result would be you’d have the #1 and #2 teams meeting in the Super Bowl.
All good responses-- thanks! The reason I asked is because sometimes it is also said, if I’m not mistaken, that it is like this because the Super Bowl is, nowadays, too full of media hype and corporatism. I was wondering if that also was true.
Well, it is too full of media hype and corporatism, but that’s not the reason the Super Bowl isn’t a contest between the two best teams in the NFL.
Then why even have Games 1-6? Just let #1 play #2 and be done with it.
Because those top two ranked teams should have to prove that they deserve their rankings.
But my system makes it possible for the two best teams to meet in the Super Bowl. The current system doesn’t guarantee that. You could have two teams with 16-0 records that are better than every other team in the league. Both teams are so far above the rest of the league that they score triple digits in every game and no team has ever scored a point against them - both in the regular season and in the playoffs.
But if they happen to be in the same conference it’s impossible for them to compete against each other in the Super Bowl.
That’s a problem with the regular season schedule structure. Conferences and divisions can be very sensible, but not when you have both a very short season and interconference games.
Yeah, but if they got their rankings playing mostly teams in their divisions (to say nothing of the conference), why do you think the rankings would be accurate measures of skill? Surely strength of schedule would be a huge factor, which then means you might as well be like college football and just vote.
Yeah, your problem there Little Nemo is the schedule. With 32 teams playing just 16 games, you’re judging teams that have played wildly different seasons. The point of divisions is to remove that uncertainty. Teams within the same division play very similar schedules currently, so winning your own division at least proves that you were better than those 3 other teams.
Soccer leagues like the EPL don’t need playoffs because everyone gets to play everyone else home and away - a perfectly even schedule. That isn’t ever going to happen in the NFL, but if you want to realign MLB to make that work I think you might get some people on board.
The problem is that the two best teams in one conference might be better than any team in the other conference. But there’s no way the playoff system can put those two teams in the championship game.
Even if you loaded one conference full of high school teams and the other with professional teams and no high school conference team ever beat a pro conference team in any game in the season, you’d still have a high school team playing a pro team in the championship game.