New Year’s glass way more than half full? At least you can say the College Football Playoff Selection Committee isn’t involved here. That said, it's high time for the NFL to tweak its – mostly sensible – codified rules determining who advances to the playoffs.
As currently constructed, said rules will ensure a team with a losing record hosts a playoff game this season. So, too, might a divisional "champion" one game above .500. Meanwhile, teams with a dozen wins or more might be sent packing on the wild-card road, their relative sin thriving in a subset of similarly elite teams.
It shouldn’t be this way.
If you watched Saturday afternoon’s literally waterlogged slog between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Carolina Panthers – the Bucs won, sort of, 16-14 – then you probably didn’t feel like you were witnessing some juggernaut deserving of the comforts of being home next week ahead of its postseason opener merely because an 8-9 record is sufficient to win the lowly ACC, er, NFC South. (OK, maybe we should find a way to get the Atlanta Falcons or New Orleans Saints, who are presently playing much better football than the Panthers or Bucs, an at-large bid?)
Additionally, it’s not unprecedented for a team seeded fourth − as the eventual NFC South champs will be − to wind up hosting a conference championship game if enough chaos befalls the teams seeded above it. By comparison, the Seattle Seahawks faced the possibility of finishing the regular season with a 13-4 mark and probably no postseason home game – just a year after quarterback Sam Darnold’s previous team, the Minnesota Vikings, got stuck with a wild card after going 14-3 (the most wins ever by a team that didn’t win its division).
