The initial reaction about the competitive implications of the NFL expanding its playoff field from 12 to 14 teams is something along the lines of: Watch out, now a bunch of bad teams will be making the postseason.
That’s not the reality, though. The truth is that, for the most part, more good-but-not-great teams will be reaching the NFL playoffs. The biggest on-field implication actually has nothing to do with the seventh team in each conference that will be qualifying for the postseason. It has to do with the top team in each conference: The path to the Super Bowl for the No. 1 seed seemingly just got easier.
The NFL formalized its 14-team playoff plan Tuesday when owners voted via conference call to ratify it. The attractiveness of the new playoff format is easily discerned. It’s a revenue-producer. The owners can sell two extra playoff games per year to the TV networks.
For the upcoming 2020 season, assuming there is a 2020 season, the additional games will be carried by NBC and CBS. The game carried by CBS also will have a separate, kid-friendly broadcast on Nickelodeon.
Owners had contemplated enacting the expanded playoffs previously. But there were concerns among the owners then about diluting the playoff field and diminishing the importance of the regular season. This move, after all, means that 44 percent of the teams in the league qualify annually for the playoffs, up from 38 percent under the 12-team format. There was wariness among owners about allowing bad teams into the postseason.
Those concerns probably aren’t warranted, as it turns out. If the NFL’s expanded playoff format had been in place since 1990, 60 additional teams would have qualified for the postseason since then. Only one would have made it with a losing record; 44 teams would have qualified with winning records and 15 with .500 records.
The real issue with bad teams making the playoffs results from division winners in very poor divisions, not the wild-card teams. That has been the case with the two losing teams to reach the postseason in a 16-game NFL season. The Seattle Seahawks won the NFC West in the 2010 season at 7-9, and the Carolina Panthers won the NFC South in 2014 at 7-8-1.
The bigger concern now is the increased postseason advantage that the top seed in each conference will possess. Under the new format, only one team in each conference gets an opening-round playoff bye, rather than two. That means only one team per conference will have a chance for players to rest and get healthier, with a free pass into the divisional playoff round.
“It’s definitely going to be different,” veteran linebacker Thomas Davis, just signed by the Washington Redskins, said in a conference call with reporters Tuesday. “It’s going to be weird. Essentially, the second team [in each conference] is being penalized for being a good football team. . . . It just makes it more competitive. It adds more teams in and it allows teams that are hot late in the season like the Titans to be able to make a run - a team that might not normally be in the playoffs [is] getting that opportunity. I like it.”
Last season’s Tennessee Titans were a postseason darling, reaching the AFC championship game as a wild-card team. But the Titans lost that AFC championship game at Kansas City as the Chiefs, the No. 2 seed, continued a recent trend. Each Super Bowl participant over the past seven seasons had a first-round playoff bye. The 2012 Baltimore Ravens were the last team without a bye to reach a Super Bowl.
So the NFL playoffs indeed have been fundamentally changed, but perhaps not in the way that most might think.
The Washington Post’s Sam Fortier contributed to this report.
