NFL playoff thread

Norv Turner?

 

The league office, because it gives them one more playoff game to sell, even if one of the teams playing in it sucks.

 

Expanded playoffs, like Thursday night games during the regular season and the talk of going to 18 regular season games, makes me question Goodell's motives more and more. When he took over for Tagliabue, he inherited the No. 1 sports league in the country, if not the world (fans of EPL and NBA, have at it!), but I'm wonder if its getting overexposed under Goodell. Why? More cash?? Yeah, of course, but at what price?

 

Still an advocate of the 14-team playoff system. Top team in each conference gets a bye, everyone else plays. Six games: three on Saturday, three on Sunday. Each can have its own window, so people can watch all six if they really want to.

It gives one more playoff spot to a team that deserves one (like the 10-6 Bears), without watering down the field too much in most years. With as much parity as exists today, I think 10 wins warrants a playoff spot. There might be some circumstance where a team has a really weak schedule and gets 10 mediocre wins, but I'll take that over leaving a deserving team at home.

 

I'm not comparing rookie seasons. I'm comparing 2012 seasons.

Griffin's injury shows again how fragile an athlete's career can be. We simply don't know what he will or will not do someday. It's pointless to speculate. All I am basing things on is what is NOW.

 

Favre had a great year in 2012, didn't he?

 

Even your backtracking is poorly thought out, Mark.

 

In most seasons there is one deserving team that doesn't make the playoffs. By deserving I mean a record that is 9-7 or better, preferrably 10-6.

This year it was the Bears, and it's hard to feel too sorry for a team that started 7-1.

The best part of it would be that it would keep things more interesting late in the season. It doesn't matter what we think though, it's going to happen...

 

Ending the byes would also end a lot of the motivation for those top teams to go full-bore through Week 17. The Texans-Colts game, for instance, I doubt Houston puts a lot of effort into that game knowing only that it leads to some hypothetical home-field advantage three weeks from now. (Historically, there is very little advantage to being home for the conference championship game.) Redskins-Cowboys, Redskins may have already been in and maybe RG3 sits. Vikings-Packers suddenly isn't all that thrilling and Peterson is probably resting up or at least taking a lighter workload.

So yeah, you might draw some meaning out of Raiders-Chargers on the low end. But it's going to cost you a lot of drama at the top.

 

"Well, we can't sell the 18-game regular season, but by gum, we can just add games to the playoffs!"

Nothing is sacred.

 

What's sacred about the current playoff set-up?

 

Yeah, when 9-7 teams are winning the Super Bowl and 8-8 teams are winning divisions, it's not like the current system is only rewarding deserving teams...