@JPosnanski Gotta say I'm not bothered that 7-9 team made playoffs. I'm bothered that a spectacularly crappy 7-9 team is in the playoffs.
There were three 7-9 teams in the NFL this year. I would say the Seattle Seahawks were the worst of the three. Now, that is simply my opinion, and it is contradicted by the simple fact that Sunday night the Seahawks beat one of those 7-9 teams -- the St. Louis Rams -- in order to get into the playoffs. But the game was at home, and the Rams had beaten the Seahawks convincingly when the game was in St. Louis. I don't think the Rams are a good team. But I think they're probably better than Seattle. I feel sure the 7-9 Dolphins are better.
The Seahawks were outscored by almost 100 points this year. They were absolutely demolished by the Giants and Chiefs at home. They were crushed on the road by San Francisco, Oakland and Tampa Bay. They played only four playoff teams all year, and they went 1-3 and were beaten by an average of two touchdowns. They were the second-worst rushing team in the NFL, one of the league's worst defenses both in yardage allowed and points allowed -- and this against an absurdly easy schedule. The only great team they played all year, I think, was the Atlanta Falcons. And they got pummeled.
Now, my point is not that I think the rules should have been changed to prevent Seattle from making it. I don't have any problem at all with the Seahawks making the playoffs. Everyone understood the rules before we began. And, I kind of like the division system. I kind of like that the atmosphere changes every year, and that sometimes you are in a murderous division and sometimes you're in a horrible division but the singular goal of winning the division (using tiebreakers) remains the same. It keeps things interesting.
Still, it does seem obvious that this Seattle team is not even a good 7-9 team. Let's take a look at the 7-9 teams from the last five years and their point differential:
2007 Bengals: -5
2009 Bears: -6
2006 Bills: -11
2007 Bears: -14
2009 Dolphins: -30
2006 Falcons: -36
2010 Rams: -39
2008 49ers: -42
2009 Bears: -48
2010 Dolphins: -60
2007 Broncos: -89
2009 Jagauars: -90
2010 Seahawks: -97
2007 Lions: -98
2007 Bills: -102
2006 49ers: -114
So the Seahawks do not have the worst point differential*, but they're close. And the 2007 Bills hardly count since 77 of those 102 points came in two games against the 16-0 New England Patriots.
*The last 7-9 team to outscore their opponents? The 2004 Kansas City Chiefs, which figures. Dick Vermeil did some remarkable and odd things in his tenure as coach of the Chiefs because their offense was SO good and their defense SO bad (and Vermeil often didn't seem to mind -- as long as they were scoring points, he seemed reasonably happy).That year the Chiefs scored 483 points and had a losing record -- that was BY FAR the most points ever scored by a team with a losing record. Those Chiefs outscored opponents by seven touchdowns, but still finished 7-9.
Now the Seahawks get into the playoffs and even get a home playoff game. I don't think they will beat New Orleans, and I don't think they will even stay particularly close. But at home ... it's not impossible. And, absolutely, it's ridiculous. It's also a nice reminder that playoffs are not the perfect culmination of a season like so many seem to think. Hey, I like playoffs ... especially in football, basketball and hockey. I think they lift up the games and give us thrills.
But playoffs are not perfect -- I think we forget this all the time, especially when ranting about college football's ludicrous BCS system. I don't think there's any question the BCS system is impossibly flawed, and it is in place to protect special interests, and that a playoff would be more popular with the vast majority of college football fans. Most of the negative things people shout about the BCS are, in my mind, exactly right. I think it is absurd that this year TCU went undefeated and beat a very good Wisconsin team in the bowl game and has no access to winning what people widely consider the "national championship."
But, granting all of that, the BCS system IS giving us a fascinating game between Oregon and Auburn, two undefeated teams that had remarkable seasons. A playoff might not give us that game. The best playoff system I have seen is the Death To The BCS 16-game playoff featuring champions from every conference. That system would give us college football fans a thrilling month of football that would tower over the bizarre bowl setup we have now. But it would also, every single year, give us inferior Seattle Seahawks playoff teams while clearly superior teams who had much better seasons were left at home.
The point is that when it comes to crowning a champion, you have to pick your poison. You can make the season more or less important. You can make the postseason tournament more or less important. You can come up with all sorts of tiebreakers, and division setups and wildcard entries. You can put the tension wherever you want. Every ending has its positives and every ending has its problems. The best ending in sports history, in my opinion, was a World Series that matched up the two best teams from each league as determined over 154 or 162 games. And they messed that up with playoffs.
Circle me, 2006 St. Louis Cardinals.
ReplyDeleteThank you. Playoffs are simply an avenue to give also-rans a second chance and good teams yet another hoop to jump through.
ReplyDeleteAs far as college football, would people still be up in arms if #1 and #2 were determined after the bowl games instead of before? Give all the contenders a chance to play a superior out-of-confrence game, then let voters decide #1 and #2 on January 2nd, and let them play for the NC. It too, wouldn't be a perfect system, but it wouldn't require a sea change in the D1A college football world to acomplish.
Football scheduling and how they decide who will & won't make the playoffs is just a joke.
ReplyDeleteThe NFL has TWO 10-6 teams that won't make the playoffs, One 9-7 team that won't make the playoffs yet has a 7-9 team that will make the playoffs?? Makes no sense
Tampa, NY Giants, and Phily all have 10-6 records yet only Phily gets in the playoffs because of some arbitrary tiebreaker?
Imagine if 3 baseball teams finished with the same record and they just decided the season on head-head tie breakers?
Imagine in MLB if TWO teams didn't make the playoffs with .625 win percentages yet a team with a .437 win percentage DID make playoffs?? Major League Baseball would flip-out if anything like this ever happened in their sport. Their would be drastic changes made if anything like this ever happened in MLB.
Football should just have two division in each conference. The two division winners would get first round byes and each conference would have 4 wild card winners.
I have no problem with the Seahawks making the playoffs either, but it's absurd that they get to host a far superior team. They should be seeded 6th and traveling to New Orleans (or Chicago, depending on tiebreakers) this weekend.
ReplyDeleteWhat's even more absurd than "that this year TCU went undefeated and beat a very good Wisconsin team in the bowl game and has no access to winning what people widely consider the national championship" is that the fans of TCU traveled to said bowl game or tuned in to watch the game on the tube in relative droves (at least by TCU standards), effectively endorsing the very system that denied what could be their favorite university's one potential chance at a national football title during their lifetime (except for those codgers who were alive back in 1938, of course).
ReplyDeleteWhile "special interests" are the reason the BCS exists, the fact that the collective we who complain about the BCS continue to buy tickets (less so) and watch these games on TV (more so) is the reason why the BCS has yet to and perhaps never will suffer its proverbial "death". In short, if you don't like the BCS and the bowl system, then don't watch bowl games or the BCS championship game or buy tickets to them, disgruntled college football fan.
"...if you don't like the BCS and the bowl system, then don't watch bowl games or the BCS championship game or buy tickets to them, disgruntled college football fan."
ReplyDeleteAmen. Vote with your feet and your TV.
There is a slight flaw in the "Fans should not show up argument" which I have never really seen addressed well. The bowls are currently set up as interesting matchups that will generate the most money for the bowl. Especially in the lower tier bowls. Better teams get passed up all the time for inferior teams because "their fans travel better." A small school team like TCU and Boise State are left between two competing problems. 1) Don't show up and have bowls pass in order to get a team that travels better or 2) Show up but encourage the system to stay in place.
ReplyDeleteIn any case, the BCS won't care if the TCUs of the world don't show up. There are plenty of Big name schools with one or two loss records every year that want to play in the Rose Bowl. If you really want to get on people for showing up, it has to be getting the fans of two big name schools to not show up for the game or watch it. Then it would be harder to write it off as "a small school with limited fan base can't sell tickets."
You're spot on, Matthew White. And that's the argument the ADs and coaches make to ensure that their fanbase shows up. While it would be fascinating to see one school's fanbase take a definitive stand for all of the sports world to see and admire, it takes all of college football fans tuning out to make the BCS die. And, no, they never will, and no it will never die, unless of course someone can convince the coaches/ADs/presidents that they'll get more money from a playoff system payout than from a bowl system payout.
ReplyDeleteThe Jeff Sagarin ratings have the Seahawks as the 29th best team out of 32. Go to
ReplyDeletehttp://www.usatoday.com/sports/sagarin/nfl10.htm
This is one of those ratings that takes into account record, point differential and strength of schedule. Both Tampa Bay and the Giants had a better record (10-6) and neither team will make the playoffs. Tampa Bay beat the Seahawks 38-15 while the Giants beat them 41-7.
I think the problem is that fans (some, many, most, whatever) expect/want the best teams in a championship format. A playoff system does not guarantee that, I think that is obvious. But it misses the point.
ReplyDeleteIn today's world, sport is all about money. I know, breaking news. But that is why we have the current bowl system. That is why we have wildcards in baseball and football. That is why seemingly every team makes the NBA and NHL tournaments.
As mentioned by Poz, the best solution is the old MLB format of taking the best AL and NL teams and having a World Series with no playoffs. The playoffs were the season.
Of course, college football is closest to this solution right now. The problem is that there are so many teams in so many conferences with so many questions. Parity and TV have ruined a great sport. Just look at 2010. FCS teams beat three (I believe) FBS teams including one of the teams in the Orange Bowl tonight. A non-AQ team beat what many considered the hottest team in the sport in the Rose Bowl.
So, with all of that, here is the solutions I have come up with for college football:
Option 1 - Go back to the pre-BCS system of traditional bowl tie-ins and naming a truly "mythical" national champion. It simply makes more sense than what is currently in place, and the Big 6 conferences could truly cut out all the TCUs and Boise States from their pie.
Option 2 - http://rationalmnfan.blogspot.com/2011/01/my-ncaa-fb-playoff.html
Like the 2007 Bills, if you remove the two Patriot games from the Dolphins record, they are only -2.
ReplyDeleteDivision winners should make the playoffs, but seeds and HF should go by record.
ReplyDeleteSo Seattle should be a playoff team, but as a six seed and play New Orleans in NO.
Lets not overlook two problems with tearing down the division setup: one, without divisions it would be harder to foster rivalries, especially among teams in proximity. Two, travel costs are increased when you might have to go all over at considerable expense and trouble to play in a division that really doesn't' fit; anyone remember the Falcons and Saints playing in the same division as the Niners and LA Rams?
ReplyDeleteFurthermore, this is the first time the system has ever done this, a mathematic anomaly that will not be repeated often. Comparing it to the BCS is ridiculous, because the BCS excludes an undefeated conference champion; this one includes a craptacular team who benefited from a bad conference. The better comparison is Basketball's 8-seeds.
A friend of mine who writes for Play a Hard Nine, used some of Joe's tweets for his own twitter expansion about Albert Pujols.
ReplyDeletehttp://playahardnine.wordpress.com/2011/01/02/average-pujolsian-seasons/
Off the subject, but I noticed your HOF poll has closed. The average pollster made 7.56 choices, and voted 3 in (Blyleven, Raines and Alomar) If, as I believe it should be, voters were forced to vote for 10, Bagwell and Larkin would surely have made it(as they will at some point anyway) and Olerud would have enough to get another look.
ReplyDelete@Khazad - I can only imagine that people here didn't vote for Bags and Larkin out of some sort of spite (or possibly brain injury). I think Rock and Bert are Hall of Famers, but Bagwell is one or more tiers above them, and I'd take Larkin over them as well.
ReplyDeleteAs for the playoff situation, I give it a big "who cares?". Divisions need to exists for both rivalry and travel reasons. Sure, a sub-.500 baseball team has never gotten in, but was anybody apoplectic when the 2006 Cardinals went 83-78 (.516) and then ran off and won the World Series?
The problem with these changes is the inevitable slippery slope... take it to AL vs NL, well, what if there are four 100 win teams in the AL and nobody in the NL is better than 90-70? So you make it one league, but then there's scheduling unfairness. So everybody plays 6 games against everybody - 3 home, 3 on the road. But some teams have to go to Colorado in April or Arizona in August, and some get those teams in milder months - is that schedule still fair? Besides, what's up with the tyranny of "wins" and "losses" - why don't we award playoffs based on stats that we know better correlate to individual and team performance?
The 10-6 Giants blew a 21 point lead with 8 minutes to go in the most important game of their season. The 10-6 Buccaneers were the first team to lose at home to the Lions in 27 games. I'm supposed to feel bad for them? While Seattle is terrible, it's not exactly like we had a 13-3 squad missing the playoffs here. Some years you have more awful teams than others (1991 is another good example, with the 10-6 Eagles and 10-6 49ers missing) and good teams don't make it.
Having 8 four-team divisions in NFL is just stupid. It reminds me of the "pool play" used in international events like World Cup and Olympics. At least the pool play scenario can be justified by reasons of having a large number of teams needed to be whittled down to a few in a short period of time - The NFL has no excuse except for an attempt to have some geographical significance and even that's a stretch. Maybe when the NFL makes the huge mistake of going to an 18 game regular season they can do one thing right and switch to 4 eight-team divisions but I'm not holding my breath.
ReplyDeleteLiving in a much smaller country than the USA, we can make do quite happily without playoffs.
ReplyDeleteA simple double-round-robin and the top of the standings at the end of the season wins the trophy. No playoffs, no further mucking about.
I think you need your regional divisions, but why not simply have four: one for each timezone and then have the four champions entered into a playoff? If they only play within their timezone, then you wouldn't have terrible records in the first place.
@Marco - pools in things like the World Cup are also usually fairly carefully seeded, so that the better teams are unlikely to knock each other out.
ReplyDeleteThe NFL divisions are fixed, so you can get four bad teams in the same division.
@JoeP - If you're going to finish 7-9 in a division where you get 6 games against teams that are worse, you have to be worse than the average 7-9 team, and you have to have a very easy schedule. For a 7-9 team to make the playoffs, they have to be a really bad 7-9 team.
Richard - The problem with your time-zone idea is most NFL franchises are in east or midwest. In fact, Denver is the only current NFL city in Mountain Time Zone and only 5 NFL teams are in Pacific zone...Arizona Cardinals, San Diego Chargers, San Francisco 49ers, Oakland Raiders and Seattle Seahawks. This has made for some odd divisional foes in USA pro sports down thru the years. Atlanta and Cincinnati were in MLB's NL West for 25+years and even odder - Baltimore was in NFL's Western Division back in the 1950-60s!
ReplyDeleteA college football playoff that includes all college football conference champs would this year include 6-6 Florida International.
ReplyDeleteJeff Saragin ranks all the FBS and FCS teams together, and he has FIU at 118 (there are 120 FBS teams), behind 22 FCS schools.
Why does there need to be a national champion in the first place? There's no reasonable way to do it without a playoff system, and that would be bad for all kinds of reasons. What is wrong with just having a bunch of bowl games in December and January, and not caring about who is more or less arbitrarily designated "champion"?
ReplyDeleteIn the NFL, we argue whether a 10-6 team or a 7-9 division winner should be in the playoffs.
ReplyDeleteIn college basketball, we argue whether a 19-11 team from a power conference or a 25-6 team from a small conference should make it into March Madness as an 11th seed.
In college football, we argue whether a 13-0 team should be excluded from national championship consideration.
And that, right there, is the crux of the pro-playoff argument in college football. The NFL and NCAA basketball teams "unfairly" excluded from their respective playoffs a) aren't bloody likely to win said playoffs anyway, and b) had plenty of other chances during the regular season to eliminate any doubt. You can't say that with NCAA football. If you implement even an 8-team playoff, sure, people will argue about who the at-large teams should be, but the point is that you'll be moving the bar to ensure that all potentially deserving teams should be included in the playoff. You may sneak an undeserving two-loss at-large team or an 8-4 conference champion into the playoff, but the point is that the debate then revolves around seeding and which inferior team is more deserving of a spot in the playoffs at all, instead of which superior team has to get the shaft. Our justice system is designed to ensure that hopefully nobody innocent gets convicted even if many guilty people go free; surely the same principle can and should apply to college football?
Great points, Darren.
ReplyDeleteI think part of the problem is the NFL schedule. It is very difficult to determine which teams are "deserving" of the playoffs in 16 games, against vastly different qualities of opponents. The Kansas City Chiefs, for instance (who I root for) played 3 games all year against teams with winning records and went 1-2, their only victory coming against San Diego in the season opener. They also played 2 playoff teams, one of them being Seattle, going 1-1. Seattle went 2-5 against teams with winning records, despite no one in their division having a winning record. These soft schedules help put different teams in the playoffs, but do not help gice us the "best" teams in said playoffs.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed watching that Seahawks game. I remember watching the Patriots back when Pete Carroll was their coach, and one of the criticisms he got was that he seemed like "just a cheerleader". People thought he should have been looking at play sheets or talking in his headset, but instead he was always jumping up and down and cheering.
ReplyDeleteSure enough, on the sideline the other night, there he is clapping, cheering, pumping his fists. I got a kick out of that.
I don't mind the NFL playoff format, though I think that a 7-9 division winner should play on the road, and not host an 11-5 team.
ReplyDeleteAs a long-time Seahawks fan, the 7-9 division win is a bad thing for other reasons. As Joe pointed out, the 'hawks are a pretty bad team. As I understood it, they were projected as a 3 or 4 win team this year. But they got off to a 4-2 start with some improbable wins (look at the stats for their early win over the 49ers). They won their final game over a Rams team that did what it had to in order to lose.
So now you have a team that is probably 4-12 material that will have draft picks in the middle of the draft, and a tougher schedule and higher expectations of a coach who has something to prove at the pro level. This has all the makings of a disaster over the next few seasons.
The current college system is a joke. This summer's conference realignment laid bare the real motivation and that is money. Keep the teams that have a real chance to a minimum, stack the system against the little guys and ensure the money is not widely dispersed (i.e. control the TV rights). That's why the BCS was formed, to sell the TV rights and send the money to the power conferences and offer us a few reasonably competitive games.
ReplyDeleteI used to be a supporter of the Bowl System, but after watching the greed of the last few years, my stomach has turned. Time to have a playoff, minimum 8 teams, and distribute the money to all bowl eligible teams - that will create better games.