The playoffs of the NFL they were born by chance. When the league was created, the champion was the team with the best win-loss percentage not counting draws. In 1932 the Chicago Bears and the Portsmouth Spartans (current Detroit Lions) finished the regular season tied 6-1-6 and 6-1-4 respectively, even the duels between them ended in draws.
For this reason, Joe Carr, then Commissioner of the NFL, made the decision that both teams play a playoff game to decide the champion, a game that was considered one more game of the regular season. The Bears won 9-0 to become champions, while the Spartans dropped to third place in the standings by dropping to a worse percentage than second-place Green Bay. Packers.
The game was a huge hit with the public and media coverage, at a time when professional football barely drew attention to the all-powerful college football. So much so, that at the next owners’ meeting it was proposed to change the competition format.
Since then, the NFL decides its champion by a system of playoffs after playing the regular season. The party was baptized as the NFL Championship Game, which after the AFL-NFL merger was replaced by Super Bowl. The playoff format has expanded over the years: At first, only the division champions played. With the successive team expansions, the champions began to enter each division within the conferences. Finally, the calls started coming in. comodines, teams that did not win their division, but were invited to enter the postseason, received what was called a Wild Card (invitation card).
The denominations of the Divisional and Wild Card rounds are kept for a historical matter. In the current round of wild cards in the NFL, both division champions and those teams with the best record play. Today, only the team that finishes with the best record in each conference goes directly to the Divisional Round.
Expansion of the NFL Playoffs
In 2020, the NFL made the decision to increase the teams that go to the postseason to one per conference, going from six to seven, which means that 43.75% of teams are eligible for the Vince Lombardi trophy after the regular season. After several years hearing complaints about teams that entered with poor records, even negative, leaving out teams with better records, the NFL thought that the best solution was to expand the format.
This, of course, is the official explanation, because the real one is that the NFL, thirsty to earn more money in uncertain times, and in full negotiation of television contracts, expanded the format so that those pay even more money for the extra matches.
As simple as that, more games means more money for broadcasting rights, even if this is at the cost of offering a very mediocre product, like the one we have seen in the two years that the new format has been in force.
The NFL knows that the public is hungry to watch football, and that audiences are unbeatable (even if they are getting closer to a saturation point). Instead of caring for the product based on a principle of greater scarcity and higher quality, they decided that giving more matches is the solution. In short, the NFL is “adding water to the wine”. This league, in a logical act of greed, opted for this after extending the regular season by a week.
If we say that Judas sold Jesus Christ for twelve pieces of silver, we can also say that the NFL decided to sell itself to television stations for eighteen games.
Round of wild cards or round of humiliations?
The Wild Cards round has left us with four games decided by 30, 23, 21 and 16 points: that is, at least, more than two touchdowns per game, which tells us about the tremendous inequality that existed. Going into detail, many of those markers were made up in junk time, but on the field, the superiority of the winner was much greater than what each marker says.
Since the format was expanded, the teams receiving the seventh seed, the bottom of each conference, are 0-4. And what is even worse, the two number seven teams were not even minimally competitive, the Steelers for the AFC and the Eagles for the NFC were nothing more than mere sparrings for Chiefs and Buccaneers, respectively.
A league that sells equality and flag parity, and boasts that a high percentage of regular-season games are decided by less than a touchdown, shouldn’t offer six games to kill or die from Saturday to Monday where the second parts were left over in at least four games, and where the winning team ended up walking on the field and wasting time due to the ineffectiveness and lack of quality of the rival.
It is true that the Wild Cards round has been the usual scene of bad matches or very unbalanced matches (in the end, like a playing card or a coin, it has two faces), but what we have been seeing as fans in the last couple of years, and especially this one – with the aggravating circumstance that the teams have played an extra regular season game – has no justification.
Well, yes it does, the television stations pay a lot of money to offer more space for this mediocre product and we, the fans, are so thirsty to see the NFL, that we begin to settle for anything, however mediocre or bad it may be. , as long as it is our team the one who can play those games and not the other, even at the price of a humiliation exit.
In the end, the TV stations will be happy for the audiences, and the fans too. For the same (apparent) price, they play more games, even if they are as lopsided and sleepy as the Steelers vs. Chiefs, or worse, the Cardinals vs. Rams where the commentators spent more time talking about the celebrities who attended SoFi Stadium, or that defensive coordinators could be future head coaches, because absolutely nothing remarkable happened on the field.
