During the Wild Card round in the NFL playoffs, is home-field by seed or record? I’d always assumed seed. Has a six seed ever hosted? How many times has the 5seed hosted?
Meh. Why even have divisions then?
I honestly think Divisions are largely antiquated anyway with modern media coverage with many fans shifting away from home team concepts toward players or better teams in generals. As such, rivalries can and do form outside of divisions and some intra-division games are boring to anyone who isn’t interested in that division.
Either way, reseeding based on record is something that needs to happen because there’s no reason for receiving extra reward for winning your division. As much as it helps a team that lost a couple games more than they might have for coming out of a tough division, it also hurts teams that, by virtue of their record, deserve to be in the playoffs but aren’t because an 8-8 team won a division, and a 12-4 team got a wild card spot behind a 13-3 team in their division. All it really does is reward or punish a team based upon the luck of how good the other teams in their division are.
To the OP, since it hasn’t been answered yet, the current format is such that the four division winners are guaranteed a top four seed and they are awarded the seed in those top four based on record. The last two seeds are wild cards and are also awarded in order by record. Even if a wild card team has a better record than a division winner, they are seeded lower. Playoff games are always scheduled such that the highest seeded team hosts the lowest seeded team. As such, a 6th seed cannot ever host a playoff game and a 5th seed can only host a playoff game if it’s against the 6th seed which, interestingly enough, would only be possible in the conference championship and, to my knowledge, it hasn’t happened since the playoffs were expanded to a 6 seed format.
For example, this season it’s not unlikely that the winner of the NFC West ends up being 8-8 or even 7-9 and that the Eagles or Giants end up being the 5th seed at 11-5 or 12-4. If that were to occur, despite the clear difference in record, the NFC West champ would still host the 5th seed.
But in the NFL, teams in the same division play each other twice a year. So you have a responsibility, as a team, to make your division opponents good or bad. In other words, if you’d done your job during the season, you wouldn’t have lost the division to an 11-3 team.
It’s related to the situation that occurs when an 11-5 team misses the playoffs completely in favor of 9-7 or 8-8 division winners, as happened to New England a few years ago ('08 I think). Still, I’m not in favor of changing it. I like the divisional structure and placing some significance on winning the division.
I’d like the know the winning % of teams that host first-round playoff games to teams with better records. I’ll bet it’s fairly low.
Another reason that the league likes the current format is that it maintains interest in more teams later in the season. Under a format where you just take the top 6 teams into the playoffs, all these NFC West teams would already be pretty much eliminated. Instead, they’re still playing meaningful games late in the season.
Okay, but let’s imagine that in a four team division you have two teams that deserve to go to the players and two that don’t. When two good teams in the division play, you probably expect that they’ll split, each winning at home. Now we can go a step farther and say that both end up with the same record and so one wins the division based on some tie breaker. So, by virtue of that tie break, now one gets at least one homefield game and potentially a first round bye, and the other gets a 5 seed at best and has to play on the road all the way to the super bowl. Would you really say that losing a tie breaker is worth that much of penalty?
It’s also not reasonable to say they could have done more. What if both of these teams went 5-1 in the division, only losing to eachother? That puts the next tie breaker at conference record, right? Let’s say that the reason the team that lost the tie breaker lost to another playoff team within the conference that the other team didn’t, but the one that won the tie break lost to a crappy team in the other conference that the losing team didn’t. I’m fine with saying “thems the tie breaker rules” and if the penalty were just one got a 2 seed and the other got a 3 see, that’s reasonable, but when the discrepancy is larger, it doesn’t seem fair.
Its just adding insult to injury when they’re then forced to travel to another team that they clearly out performed and, only by virtue of being in a weak division are they even in the playoffs at all.
Yes, they’re playing meaningful games, but only because they’re forced to be meaningful. Consider a more attrocious example, like the NBA where it’s not uncommon for teams with losing records to make the playoffs. Yes, those losing teams are playing meanginful games at the end of the season when they’re fighting for that 8th seed, but I sure as hell am not interested in it, because I know that they’re nowhere near the class of the top handful of teams and have virtually zero chance of making a run.
Now compare that to the situation in the NFL this season. Sure, the NFC West is playing some meaningful games, but as a result, a team that deserves to be in the playoffs more will get shafted and we’ll likely see whoever plays the winner there travel there and just shove the ball down their throats.
Right now, the Bucks and Packers are both 8-5, and it’s a travesty that it’s quite likely that both of those teams could miss the playoffs with potentially as high as 11-5 records and a 7-9 team could be in instead. Sure, that means that the 6-7 Seahawks and 6-7 Rams, and possibly even the 5-8 49ers can still play meaningful games, but in exchange we’ll probably get a Saints vs Seahawks first round rout instead of seeing two winning teams.
Really, I kind of hope at a 7-9 team does make the players and a 10-6 or even 11-5 team gets shafted because of it because it will force them to take some steps to correct it.
You don’t have to just take the top six teams in the conference. You could still take the four division winners, plus two wild cards, and seed those six by record. That doesn’t prevent an 11-5 team from missing the playoffs in favor of an 8-8 division winner, but it forces that 8-8 division winner to play its first game on the road to a superior wild-card team.
I don’t disagree with any of what you said, except for this. I really don’t think that a 7-9 team getting in will force the league to change anything. This inequity with less-deserving teams getting in has existed for a while, and I don’t know that a 7-9 playoff team will cause any different reaction than an 8-8 team like the Chargers a couple years ago.
Although now that I think about it, maybe if this year’s NFC West champ gets demolished there might be changes after all. The thing about this is that recently the “undeserving” teams have done pretty well in these games. 8-8 SD beat 12-4 Indy, 9-7 Arz beat 11-5 Atl, 9-7 Arz beat 10-6 GB, etc. It’s harder to argue that these teams are undeserving when they beat the “more deserving” teams. But maybe if 13-3 NO smokes a 7-9 Rams team the reaction will be different.
That’s a good idea. I subscribe to the fact that when a team wins its division, it’s supposed to mean that they are the best of that given group. The reality is that in a crappy division, you could get an 8-8 (or worse) team going to the playoffs.
As for other teams who are not first in their division, have a good record, and don’t qualify for playoffs, too bad for them. It’s unfortunate, but they should have done everything to ensure that they won their division or didn’t need to depend on some other team from some other division to lose in order that they get in.
Of course, having a sucky team go deep into the playoffs would totally suck.