I hope the Seahawks’ upset of New Orleans yesterday stops all the stupid hand-wringing about seed advantages going to the division winners. Weak divisions and strong divisions are part of football and it is part of what makes the NFL season exciting. The whines of those who think that the teams with the best records should make the playoffs and be seeded in order of their record border on the moronic; they might as well do what the European soccer leagues do, throw out the playoffs altogether and crown the team with the best record the champion.
Destroying division rivalries and ensuring that even more teams are out of the mix weeks before the end of the season in favor of what can only be a childish sense of “fairness” or worse, a numerological fetish, would be ridiculous. There is nothing unfair about it and every team knew what the rules were going in. Who cares if a 7-9 team made it to the playoffs and a few 10-6 teams stayed home? If you want to be guaranteed a spot, win your damn division. Going down this route is a step towards the elimination of the divisions, the conferences, and eventually, the justification for holding a Super Bowl. I dislike the Seahawks intensely and I like Drew Brees, but I am very, very glad that the NFC West champions won their first-round game.
I never liked the expansion of the playoffs to include multiple wild cards and this call to further diminish the meaning of a division championship shows that I was correct to be suspicious of it.