Playoffs were originally due to fan interest, and they allowed that interest to be monetized. They started in baseball in 1884 because fans would argue whether the National League or American Association was better and they continued until the AA folded. But fan interest was so great that the NL set up the Temple Cup between the first and second place teams. It failed because the players didn’t care.
The World Series was also originally driven by fan interest; John McGraw refused to play the AL champs the next year. But fans and the press castigated the Giants for it, so it became part of the league rules (people now don’t understand the hatred between the NL and AL, which meant the leagues resisted working together until football began to challenge them).
The Stanley Cup was actually originally set up like boxing: the team holding the cup could be challenged to defend it and it only began to be a playoff when multiple teams became eligible one year. Eventually only two leagues were eligible, and when the Western Hockey League folded, the NHL took it over as its championship trophy.
Other sports noticed the hype and income from the championships and arranged things so there was some sort of playoff.
The NCAA is a special case. It had had championships for years and their basketball tournament was filled out with a mix of conference champions and other teams invited due to their strong records (there were fewer conferences, too). Most conferences named the team with the best record as their champion, but the SEC created a championship and said the winner of that would be their champion. It had a beneficial effect on the SEC: the regular season champion usually had a strong record, but it could lose the tournament to a team the NCAA wouldn’t have considered. That team got the bid, and the NCAA would have to add the regular season champ to the tournament because they were clearly one of the top teams in the country. So the SEC got two teams in the tournament (the more teams there, the more money your program can get). Other leagues spotted this and joined in. This meant more in the days of 16 and 32 teams, of course. The reason there’s 68 today is that new conferences were created. New Division I conferences get a playoff berth. To avoid losing non-champion berths to the new conferences, the NCAA added the extra teams.
Last year the Cardinals and Royals faced each other six times in interleague play, and the Cardinals won four of those games. I think all it really proves is that the regular season doesn’t count once you get to the playoffs.
Okay, so the purpose of the playoffs is to make money. What does that mean for the team that gets crowned, and their relative quality compared to their rivals? One reason I asked this is because when I think about it, I’m not sure what relevance the Super Bowl or the Final Four or the World Series actually HAS to talking about the quality of the teams of that season. I do see some, though, when I think about how titles come into play when talking about, say, the greatest quarterback of all time, but I’m not sure I could express it.
ETA: the last sentence of the post above sums up my dilemma: if the regular season and playoffs are so divorced from each other, then what’s the “point”?
Think of the regular season as a long qualifying tournament for the playoffs. Of course, some leagues don’t have playoffs (the Premier League jumps out as an example), but you run the risk of having fan interest wane when the champion is so strong that they clinch the title weeks before the end of the season, making the games interesting only to fans of the champion. This has long been the case in racing, which is why F1 is frequently derided as boring when the frontrunners win the title with 5 races to go. This is why NASCAR went to the Chase format, which sucks, but it’s an attempt to keep people interested until the very last race.
First reply had it: they’re fun. Oh, why are they fun? The competition and the stakes are high. The leverage of every in-game event is magnified. The stage is set for stories of immediate drama.
I guess it depends on the sport, but in the ones I am used to it gives teams that haven’t done as well a chance to progress (in the English football play-offs the teams in positions 3-6 compete to see who will go to the higher division along with the teams in positions 1 and 2). They are played at the end of the season when no one else is playing, so they seem more popular as there is more attention due a lack of other fixtures.
Depends on what you mean by “best.” In the NFL, for example, the season is so short that the top teams may not play each other during the regular season. Out of 31 other teams in the league, each year a team will only play 13 other teams - not even half of the league. I’d assert it’s difficult to say that such a limited schedule gives a clear insight into which team is the ‘best’ when they haven’t even played half the league one-on-one.
Now, this argument certainly loses something for sports with much longer schedules. In the NBA this season, for example, I wouldn’t mind if they canceled the normal playoffs and just made Warriors-Spurs the NBA Finals. But still, there’s a strong attraction to saying that the championship should be decided by playing and beating the best competition one-on-one. Yeah, a team can “get hot” (such as when the 9-7 Giants beat the 16-0 Patriots) but that adds to the interest of the story, I think. Upsets mean a lot more in a one-and-done tournament.