Stop rewarding mediocre teams from mediocre divisions with home playoff dates.

The NFL is well past due on their need to realign their NFL seeding structure for the playoffs.

Having already done expansions to add more teams and extra wild card games, it’s time to correct the one last glaring error in the way their postseason is run: seeding based on division winners and not overall records.

It’s not the first time myself or any other sports fan, particularly NFL fans, have broached this idea. In fact, it’s almost a yearly occurrence now due to one division being stronger than the others year over year.

Often a very good team with an exceptional regular season record is cheated out of a home playoff date and higher seeding because one team (or even two teams) in their division ended up with better records.

This year, the NFC North was that division and three of their four teams made the playoffs (Detroit, Minnesota, and Green Bay).

There are a lot of people who know my sports team allegiances who will say this column is about sour grapes after the Minnesota Vikings (14-3) lost their season finale to the Detroit Lions on Sunday.

That loss means the Vikings finished with the second best record in their conference and ended up with the fifth seed, which requires them to travel to Los Angeles (10-7) for the wild card round.

Which is just plain wrong on all counts. In fact, both the Washington Commanders (11-6) and Green Bay Packers should be seeded higher than the Los Angeles Rams and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (10-7).

These are the NFL playoff match-ups, both NFC and AFC, for Wild Card Weekend. Screen shot from NFL.com.

Okay, with that in mind, let’s look at what the final conference standings were based on winning percentages and tie breakers in the NFC this season. Screen shot from NFL.com.

Now, let’s see the AFC standings based on conference and tiebreakers. Screen shot from NFL.com.

As we can see from the standings, the playoffs would be much different if the seeds were done by the actual standings and not overly weighted to division winners. This is particularly true in the NFC.

In this situation, the Detroit Lions would still deservedly get their first round bye.

But, in what would be a fair and appropriate turn of events, the Vikings would now be hosting Tampa Bay in the wild card game (as well as avoiding a third meeting with the Lions until the conference championship) as the two-seed.

The Philadelphia Eagles would still get their home game as a three seed, but the Rams would be travelling east to play in the unfriendly and chilly Lincoln Financial Field.

The fourth-seeded Commanders would now host the fifth-seeded Green Bay Packers.

This would be a much better reward for all the teams involved, and frankly the Rams and Bucs don’t really deserve their current situation advantage of winning weak divisions and getting home games in the playoffs.

Still, even though the AFC played out much more fairly this year than the NFC did in terms of playoff seedings, one team does deserve a higher seed and subsequent home game if the structure were improved.

The top three seeds would stay the same, but in a proper structure, the Los Angeles Chargers end up with the fourth seed and host the Denver Broncos in a Wild Card a playoff game rather than having to travel to Houston to play the Texans.

As well, this means the Bills host the Texans in the wild card round, while the Ravens and Steelers would still meet in Baltimore.

Of course, as per the NFL’s pre-planned agenda, the Mah-Swifties in Kansas City would still get their coveted number-one seed and first round bye to game plan with the Zebras on how to make it look like they’re not being favoured in the playoffs (just kidding, sort of, kind of – hehehehe).

So you see, there are plenty of teams who would be in much better positions this playoff season with a proper restructuring of the NFL seeding.

It’s fine if they want to keep divisions and let division champions automatically make the playoffs, but rewarding the winner of a weak division with an undeserved home game is just plain nonsense.

I was going to write this for Sunday morning, but I saw my former Ottawa Sun colleague and stellar sports writer Nathan Sager write a column on his own blog (check it out: NFL Playoff Seeding Is Illogically Cruel) and decided to wait a few days.

His column (yeah, I read it before writing my own to avoid too many overlaps) has some interesting ideas on how to make both the NFL playoffs and NFL regular season better.

No matter what the reasons or ideas for change, one thing is certain, it’s well past time the NFL gets their act together and fixes their playoff seeding structure to reward regular season excellence regardless of winning the division.

Click the banner to contact us about advertising and sponsorship opportunities!