The first attempt by the NFL to destroy its history and eliminate its divisions has comprehensively failed.
The Detroit Lions withdrew their proposal to reseed the NFL playoffs just before league meetings resumed Wednesday. In an effort to keep late-season games more competitive, the Lions had proposed a bylaw that would guarantee only the division winner in each conference with the best record a home playoff game. The rest of the playoff field would have been seeded strictly by record.
Steelers coach Mike Tomlin, a member of the competition committee, wasn’t in favor of the reseeding proposal when it was first discussed at the April league meeting in Palm Beach, Florida. “I’m a division purist, to be quite honest with you,” he said. “I love the rivalries that are division play. I love the structure of our scheduling that highlights it. I just categorized myself as a division purist. I think the division winner should get a home playoff game.”
Though there’s a desire among NFL executives to make late-season games more exciting and incentivize teams to play their starters in Week 18, there wasn’t enough support from league owners to approve Detroit’s proposal, so the Lions withdrew it before a formal vote.
The reason the proposal was pulled was because the league didn’t want a public record of how little support there was for such a prodigiously stupid idea. Which means that it will surface again the moment that the media can concoct a false narrative of public outrage over a 7-10 division champion having home field in the playoffs.
Never mind that the Vikings lost to the Rams anyhow, and not because they weren’t playing at home. The proposal needs to be stomped on, hard, every time the idiots in the media and the league office bring it up again.
UPDATE: The Tush Push survived as well.