It would be less disruptive with the option they considered, staggering the wildcard round across two weeks. The Bills and Bengals would play the first Wildcard week when the NFC is playing, with the rest of the AFC getting a bye. Then the NFC gets a bye the following week when the AFC wild card matchups happen. That would mean three playoff games don’t have to move, those first three NFC ones. Nobody at the league seems to have an appetite for moving playoff games, though.
I think they should just add one playoff spot to the AFC only, and leave the NFC playoffs intact. I like that idea as a fix, but I don’t see why the top seed in the NFC should lose a first round bye.
In defense of the Giants, the year after their first Superbowl win was a strike-shortened crapshoot. They didn’t happen to have the best scab players. Plus they did win a second one a few years later.
I was talking about in the playoffs proper. If they add an eighth team to each conference, nobody gets a bye on Wildcard weekend. The #1 seeds would have to play.
The Giants first super bowl win was on 1/25/1987. The subsequent season, the 1987 season, did indeed have a strike, which cancelled week 3 of the season and then the teams used the infamous ‘replacement players’ for the next three weeks, until the union dispute was settled. The Giants had lost the first two games with their ‘regular’ players, and then lost all three games with the replacements. So they started 0-5 and finished 6-9.
The neutral site plan for the AFC championship was approved by the owners today. The game will be played at a neutral site to be determined if any of these scenarios happen this weekend:
Buffalo and Kansas City both win or tie, and the game is between Buffalo and Kansas City
Buffalo and Kansas City both lose and Baltimore wins or ties, and the game is between Buffalo and Kansas City
Buffalo and Kansas City both lose and Cincinnati wins, and the game is between Kansas City and either Buffalo or Cincinnati
And if the Bengals and Baltimore Ravens end up as opponents in a wild card game, a coin flip will determine who gets home field.
The disruption of this whole adding-an-extra-playoff-team or playing the AFC title game at a neutral venue seems huge compared to, as the other Doper suggested above, simply pushing the normal schedule of everything back 1-2 weeks.
Shifting 14 games to different days is easier than (potentially) changing the location of 1 game?? How do you figure? Changing the location doesn’t have any impact on TV, which is the most important consideration. The location of games isn’t known until the week before anyway.
Not to mention that they often change the location of a game in response to a sudden problem, such as the snow that dumped on Buffalo this season. They just played in Detroit instead. That seems to be the NFL’s go-to resolution for such things. Since that tends to be their standard response, it’s common sense that it’s probably also the easiest and has the least negative impact.
A hurricane hits Florida, do you:
A) Play the game a week later, after the hurricane passes and there has been enough cleanup that the stadium is usable and people can travel to it, or…
B) Just pick someplace that is available at that time which isn’t experiencing a hurricane.
The NFL has historically picked option B.
While this isn’t the same problem, they’ve chosen what is effectively the same solution. A change of venue. That implies that it’s something they would prefer to do when given different options.
As I noted a couple of days ago, pushing the playoff schedule one week would be feasible, by using the off-week that’s already built into the schedule, in between the conference championships and the Super Bowl.
Pushing the entire playoff schedule by two weeks would create a logistical nightmare, as the Super Bowl is built around reserved hotel rooms for ~100,000 people, plus conference rooms, party venues, etc. at the host city, all of which have been planned and booked many months in advance.
But right now, before kickoff of the final week, nobody knows who’s hosting a game the following weekend. So what difference does it make whether those first-round games are played January 15 or January 22?
As a KC fan, I think they’re getting a heckuva deal, because I expected the Bills to win their last two games (or the Chiefs to lose tomorrow), and Buffalo would potentially host the AFC championship game. The team that’s getting screwed is the Bengals, who had a shot to earn the #1 seed, but now have no opportunity to do so.
It’s pretty shitty that the rule already in place for the winning percentage to grant the Bengals the home field advantage for the first playoff game (since they’ve already been declared the division winner) has been overruled with this new precedent. The Bengals should have had the luxury of the choice of resting their starters or not without that game being home field or not. Because had the Bills game occured, win or lose that game, they would have.
If the Bengals lost to the Bills and the Ravens to close out the season, they still would have won the division?
EDIT: Looking up the schedule, looks like the Ravens beat the Bengals earlier this year, so I think you have this wrong. If the Bengals lost to the Bills last week, they’d be 11-5 vs the Ravens 10-6. Then if they lost to the Ravens, both would be 11-6 with the Ravens sweeping the Bengals. The Ravens would win the division and get the home game.
The Bengals had to beat the Bills to make this Ravens game meaningless, but they’d probably still play their starters because they’d be alive for the #1 seed and first round bye.
So there’s a neutral site possibility for the AFC championship, and a coin flip possibility for Bengals-Ravens, but what about a potential Bills-Bengals game in round 2? It looks like that will just be in Buffalo, although Cincinnati would’ve had the opportunity to pass Buffalo if the game had continued.
Maybe I am too cynical but the TV want an game a win and in game for both teams on SNF. They also want Rogers in the play-offs as both will increase ratings. I suspect the officials will do all they can to get a Rams win against the Seahawks, and a Packers win against the Lions.