Another Championship, Another Controversy

Just weeks after the annual BCS debate swept across the country, American football fans are looking at another championship game and they’re unhappy.

Remember in 2005 when the Seattle Seahawks were not worthy of playing in the Super Bowl because they were from the “soft” NFC West?  Well, the NFC West is back in the Super Bowl, and they’re not 13-3 this time.

Unlike that Seahawks team, the Arizona Cardinals have come all the way to the pinnacle of the NFL after only winning nine games in the regular season.  Like the Seahawks, they will play against the Pittsburgh Steelers for the championship.  It’s funny how in 2005 when the Steelers made the Super Bowl as a 6^th seed, they somehow became the favorite. 

Now that the tables have turned, nobody wants the Cardinals to have even made the playoffs, let alone entertain the thought that they might win the Super Bowl.  Remember the embarrassment the league suffered when Pittsburgh went from the last AFC team in the playoffs to NFL champion?  Me neither.

That’s not to compare the 2008 Cardinals to the 2005 Steelers, and that’s not to say that Arizona deserves to be in the playoffs.  Looking at the final regular season standings, the Cardinals were – at most – seventh best in the NFC. 

On their road to the playoffs the Cardinals went undefeated in their division against three teams with a combined 13-35 record.  Between NFC West victories, the Cardinals lost to almost every other NFC playoff team: Philadelphia, New York, Minnesota and Carolina.  Not included in that list is a particularly bad 47 to 7 beating, administered by the 11-5 New England Patriots.

Forget that that same Patriots team missed the playoffs in the AFC, and the 8-8 San Diego Chargers (AFC West champions) made it.  Nobody’s complaining because San Diego lost.  Regardless, New England’s absence from the playoffs is just as offensive as Arizona’s inclusion, if not more.

Sports Illustrated writer Stewart Mandel made the argument that the Cardinals’ Super Bowl run is a convincing argument for the college football BCS system.  He writes that if the NCAA replaced the BCS with a playoff, the regular season would be devalued and we would risk an “outsider” making it to the championship, a la Arizona.

However, is the playoff really the problem?  No major sport has the same post-season controversy as college football, and those other sports all use playoffs.

The NFL playoff hardly causes the same quantity of debate as the BCS, and yet it seems the NFL draws more criticism than either the NBA or MLB.  The biggest difference between the three is that baseball and basketball play 162 and 82 games, respectively, and football plays a 16 game schedule.

Over those long seasons, it is much easier for bad teams to be weeded out, and both the NBA and MLB use series’ in their playoffs, which increases the chance that the better team will advance to the next round.

Because of the physical nature of football relative to baseball and basketball, adding games to the post-season would be impossible.  The way to avoid the complaints while maintaining the playoff system is to remove the automatic playoff berth for division champions, and just pick the best six teams from each conference by record.

In reality, changing this rule would have little effect on the playoffs, and most years the division winners would be in the top six teams of the conference.  Divisions would still be used for scheduling, but playoff berths and playoff seeds would be awarded based on win percentage.  In the case of a tie, the system would use the same tiebreakers it does currently.

If Arizona wins, no one will say they aren’t the real champions.  They’ve done everything within the system and won all their playoff games, so don’t get angry at them.  The problem is the divisional system and for the years when a division winner isn’t one of the six best teams the NFL needs to rethink it.