At least you can say the College Football Playoff Selection Committee isn’t involved here. That said, it’s high time for the NFL to tweak its – mostly sensible – codified rules determining who advances to the playoffs.
As currently constructed, said rules will ensure a team with a losing record hosts a playoff game this season. So, too, might a divisional ‘champion’ merely one game above .500. Meanwhile, clubs with a dozen wins might be sent packing on the wild-card road, their relative sin thriving in a subset of similarly elite competitors.
It shouldn’t be this way.
If you watched Saturday afternoon’s literally waterlogged slog between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Carolina Panthers – the Bucs won, sort of, 16-14 – then you probably didn’t feel like you were witnessing some juggernauts deserving of the comforts of sleeping in their own beds next week ahead of a postseason opener merely because an 8-9 record is sufficient to win the lowly ACC, er, NFC South. (OK, maybe we should find a way to get the Atlanta Falcons or New Orleans Saints, NFC South also-rans who are presently playing much better football than the Panthers or Bucs, an at-large bid? Sorry, I digress.)
Additionally, it’s not unprecedented for a team seeded fourth − as the eventual NFC South champs will be − to wind up hosting a conference championship game if enough chaos befalls the squads seeded above it. By comparison, at least five teams could wind up with 11 wins or more but have very little hope of a postseason home game – just a year after the Minnesota Vikings got stuck with a wild card despite going 14-3 (the most wins ever by a non-divisional winner).
It doesn’t sit right. It’s akin to Boise State getting a CFP bye week, an oversight that was quickly corrected. The NFL could have addressed its own ‘issue’ in 2025 and nearly did, the Detroit Lions making a proposal last March which encouraged league owners “to amend the current playoff seeding format to allow Wild Card teams to be seeded higher than Division Champions if the Wild Card team has a better regular season record.”
More than reasonable, it’s absolutely the correct approach for a football system rigged to produce parity. Why wouldn’t you reward teams that actually achieve excellence with a seed commensurate to win totals?
The old-school purists – and I frequently consider myself one of them – will argue that capturing a division is sacrosanct, an accomplishment deserving of the consequential home game as postseason starts. But honestly, it now sounds a lot like those empty suits who used to defend the sanctity and pageantry of the college football bowl system – and whatever would we do without the Duke’s Mayo Bowl or, clutching pearls, the Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl? Somewhat surprisingly, Detroit’s proposal actually got some traction last spring before ultimately being tabled – though maybe one sloppy Saturday in January will fuel it with future momentum.
And, granted, it was easier to defend the argument of fully rewarding division winners a few decades ago, when there were three in a 14-member conference – half of most teams’ schedules at that time made up of divisional foes, inherently making those games more valuable and compelling.
But the NFL realigned in 2002, going to eight four-team divisions across the two conferences. In the era of the 17-game regular season, 65% of a given club’s schedule is against non-divisional opponents – meaning it’s not uncommon to thrive against potentially sub-par intra-divisional rivals, struggle mightily against the rest of the league and still wind up with a crown. Strike seasons notwithstanding, the 2025 Bucs or Panthers will become the fifth sub-.500 outfit to reach to the playoffs in the Super Bowl era (which dates to 1966) – something that never occurred prior to the 2010 campaign.
And Sunday night’s winner-take-all AFC North battle between the Baltimore Ravens (8-8) and Pittsburgh Steelers (9-7) will confer a similar reward – even though the six other AFC teams that have already qualified for the playoffs all have at least 11 wins.
Divisions make sense in the NFL. They’ve maintained and/or created natural geographic rivalries, nicely inform the starting point of the annual scheduling process and afford a little extra warranted currency when it comes time to breaking ties for playoff entry. But winning one should confer no more than a playoff opportunity. No way these Bucs or Panthers deserve to be seeded higher than the San Francisco 49ers or Los Angeles Rams, teams that − along with the top-seeded Seattle Seahawks − have made the NFC West the league’s preeminent division in 2025, even as they’ve routinely beaten up on one another. Baker Mayfield’s next pick or Bryce Young’s next 100-yard passing day should have to occur as a No. 7 seed toiling in front of hostile fans while they’re accordingly derided (yet enjoyed for their shortcomings) by them.
And maybe you think this is a problem that solves itself. The last playoff team with a losing record, the 2022 Bucs, got smoked at home by Dak Prescott and the Dallas Cowboys on a Monday night stage which was the last Tom Brady graced as a player. But two of the four teams that have won divisions with losing records actually wound up advancing to the divisional round.
Bottom line? Tradition is nice. Fairness is better.
