Click Here to Watch the Video FULL size Freaky plays like this are called lucky sometimes. Luck favors the foolish; but nothing is as foolish as the playoff picture in the NFL West. The NFC west is currently led by two teams fighting it out for a home playoff game. Seattle Seahawks and the St. Louis Rams are tied on top. There is a very good chance that the NFC West will be won with a 7-9 record. Right now they are both 6-8. They cannot do better than go .500, and that is if they win the rest of their games, which is impossible as both teams play each other week 17. Imagine that, possibly two 6-9 teams playing each other for a chance to win the division. How pathetic is that? The Arizona Cardinals are 4-10; they are two games out of first place! The San Francisco 49ers will probably fire Mike Singletary as their head coach because of poor performance. But how do you fire the coach of a team that is only one game out of first? Meanwhile, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, which so far has beaten each and every team in the division except Seattle (Tampa Bay plays Seattle this week), will probably go 9-7 yet miss the playoffs. Tampa Bay could go 10-6 and miss the playoffs.
Bucs results vs NFC West vs St. Louis W18-17 @ Arizona W38-35 @ San Francisco W21-0
Fact is, one of the NFC West teams with a 7-9 or, heaven help us, a 6-10 record can win a division and host a home playoff game? Seattle plays at Tampa Bay then hosts the Rams. The Rams have a home game vs the 49ers that would be the last gasp home for the team with the City by the Bay. If the Rams win out, the division is theirs at 8-8. If they lose the first, they would be 6-9, same record as the 49ers. If Tampa Bay Beats Seattle which they should, all three NFC West teams could be logjammed atop the division with identical 6-9 records, fighting for a ‘right’ to host a home playoff match. It should never happen again. I was always against any kind of rule that gave a playoff seeding advantage to a wild card team with a better record than a division winner. The division is sacred, it must be won, but these days, each division only has 4 teams in them. There are only 6 division games now, where their used to be 8, half of the 16 game season playing your division mates. With the NFL about to go to an 18 game schedule by all accounts, that is the time to change the rules, because only 1/3 of all games then will be divisional ones, not enough to give a losing team a home game while a team with a winning record stays home and watches a team they beat. I propose that a winning record is required to host a playoff game, and that no team with a sub-.500 record is allowed to advance to the post season. Their spot should be taken by the top wild card team, thus each seed moving up one spot. Division winners should always play at home, but when you have 11-5 and 10-6 teams missing the post season while 7-9 teams are partying it up at home, that is simply not right.
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