The Lions have codified the thing about which many have complained over the years: Division champions hosting wild-card teams with better records.
Detroit’s proposal takes the seven playoff teams (four division winners and three wild cards) and seeds them based on record. Winning the division would no longer guarantee a home game and, at worst, the No. 4 spot on the playoff tree.
Although it happens more often than not that the best wild-card team has a better record than the worst division champion, stripping the division champion of its guaranteed home game in the wild-card round would diminish the impact of winning a division. To ensure fairness to all teams, it also would require a reconfiguration of the schedule.
If playoff seeding is going to be determined on a conference-wide basis, there should be more conference games. To be as fair and equitable as possible, each team should play the other 15 teams in the conference, with two (soon to be three . . . then maybe four . . . then maybe five) interconference games.
If the division championship doesn’t guarantee one of the top four spots on the conference playoff tree, why play six games against division rivals? Swap out those three games for more games against other teams in the conference.
Frankly, the fact that three playoff teams are determined without regard to division already makes it important to have more conference games. The current approach has each team playing six games in the division, six games against other teams in the conference, and five interconference games. The schedule rotation, aimed at ensuring each team will host every other team in the league at least one every eight years, is based more on engineering variety and less on determining the best possible teams in each conference, every year.
As mentioned recently regarding the NFC West’s schedule formula for 2025, they’ll each play four games against the teams of the NFC South and four games against the teams of the AFC South. Although one of the four NFC West teams will win the division no matter what, the other three could be better positioned to win wild-card spots based on the potential imbalance in the scheduling formula.
Here’s the point. The current scheduling formula already bakes a certain amount of unfairness into the playoff cake. Turning the playoff tree into a seven-team free-for-all without regard to division championship will make the existing approach even less fair.
If the goal is to award conference playoff seeding based on record, the seven teams that earn those spots should be playing as many of the other teams from the conference as possible. And if that happens, why even have divisions at all?
Which might be the best argument in favor of keeping the current system. Does it lead to situations in which “good” wild-card teams must face “bad” division winners? Yes. But it preserves the significance of becoming the best team in a given division — no matter how bad the division might be in any given year.
