For the fifth time since 2010, and for the third time in the last four years, an NFL (specifically, an NFC) team could win a division with a losing record this season — and for the third time, that division could be the NFC South (it was the NFC West in 2010 and the "NFC Least" in 2020).
This means that, for the fifth time since 2010, a team could not only the make the playoffs with a losing record, but also get a postseason game at home with a losing record.
It's long past time for the league to do something about this.
But what?
The simplest thing to do is to seed the seven playoff teams in each conference strictly by record — so that while a division "champion" with a sub-.500 record still makes the playoffs, they can do so as a 7-seed and play all of their potential playoff games on the road.
Another way is to make it less likely for this to happen again going forward.
And how could that be done?
By changing the schedule format to increase the number of games played within the same division; specifically, by having every team play their three division rivals three times each (this was actually done in the 1930s — most recently in 1936, when the then-Chicago Cardinals and the Packers played each other three times).
And the CFL has done this since 1986: that league, which has nine teams, with a four-team East Division and a five-team West Division, has each team in the East play two of their three division opponents three times and the other one twice, while over in the West, each team plays two of their four division rivals three times and the other two twice.
If this was done in the NFL, all four teams in the same division would play 17 out of 17 games against common opponents. And we've seen this movie before: from 1967 through 1969, all four teams in the same division of the 16-team, pre-merger NFL played 14 out of their 14 games against common opponents.
And once an 18th game is added to the regular-season schedule, as it almost certainly will, that "18th game" can be a first-vs.-first, second-vs-second, etc. game, based on the previous season's standings (e.g.; if the rotation calls for the East to play the North and the South to play the West, the teams from the East play one game against the corresponding finisher from the South, and the teams from the North play one game against the corresponding finisher from the West, with the assignments rotating in successive years, as is done now).
The NBA has been a lot more amenable to making appropriate changes to its playoff format than the NFL has, often to rectify glaring inequities that had arisen: for example, in the 1971-72 season, after the then-Baltimore Bullets (now the Washington Wizards) won the Central Division with a 38-44 record, the format was changed so that, in each conference, only the two division winners and two wild-card teams would henceforth make the playoffs.
As the league grew, so did the number of teams that qualified for the postseason, their number rising from eight to 10 starting with the 1974-75 season, to 12 in 1976-77, and to 16 in 1983-84. With the pandemic, the "play-in" games were added, increasing the number of playoff qualifiers to 20.
Concomitantly, the league began to devalue division titles in seeding its postseason participants, and by 2016 the division standings were disregarded altogether, making it possible for a team to win their division and not make the playoffs at all.
While the NFL ever doing the latter will be impossible to sell, the next best thing is to let a division "winner" with an 8-9 record in — but that's all.
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