NFL playoff seeding is illogical, and intolerably cruel | GRUFF, Vol. 8

Is the NFL, and its punditry at all concerned that a 14-wins team is going to have to go on the road for the playoffs? And, like everyone else, there is a suggestion for the College Football Playoff.

Scribblings on the sport I love unapologetically…

Vikings-Lions on Sunday night

Irony sharpens irony, in fair Detroit, for two blursed franchises with reclamation arms aiming at the No. 1 seed in the playoffs.

The climax to the National Football League regseason competition, Game 272 — it will be 360 before you know it — pits my Minnesota Vikings and the Detroit Lions on Sunday night.¹ Sam Darnold and Jared Goff is the quarterback matchup, just as the NFL chatterati prophesied back in August.

One team earns the No. 1 seed in the NFC half of the playoffs. The other slides to the No. 5 seed and starts the playoffs on the road, against a team with fewer wins since the NFL playoff format is sooooohhhh dumb.

There is no valid argument that a 14-3, or 14-2-1 team, should have done more if it wanted to avoid an away game in the wild-card and divisional rounds. Earning the No. 1 or 2 seed has become the critical path to reaching the Super Bowl. In the last dozen seasons, almost every Super Bowl-contestant team has been seeded No. 1 or 2.

The only exception to the rule was the T— B—-y-quarterbacked 2020 Buccaneers during the pandemmy season. The Buccaneers were a No. 5 seed, with the fourth-best record in the NFC.

It is illogical. When it affects true fans of the Detroit Lions, who went 30-plus seasons without a playoff victory to cheer, it borders on intolerable cruelty. By every generally accepted and peer-reviewed fancystat, the Lions have pulled out all the stops, even when their defence is too bunged-up to stop anyone.

Here are Pro Football Reference’s ranking of the top teams by Simple Ranking System:

1. Lions, 13.1

2. Ravens, 9.7

3. Bills, 9.4

4. Packers, 9.0

5. Eagles, 8.4

6. Vikings, 6.9

7. Buccaneers, 6.7

8. KC Mahomeys, 6.3

This seed was planted some time ago by Vic Fangio, who ironically works for the No. 2-seeded Eagles. The Eagles can rest starters, including 2,000-yard rusher, since they have the No. 2 seed after earning fewer wins than the Lions and Vikings.

When he was Denver's head coach in 2019, Fangio averred that the NFL should eliminate divisions entirely. Two conferences of 16, top six in the playoffs.

“I don’t think there should be divisions. I think you’ve got 16 in each conference. Everybody should play each other once. That’s 15 games. Then if you want a 16th game, you play a natural rival from the other conference — Jets and Giants play every year, Eagles-Steelers, Texans-Cowboys, etc. — play every year … The divisions always float. There are some that are easy some years, some that have a bunch of good teams, that switches back and forth every couple years. I just think that’d be a good way to avoid it.” (Pro Football Talk, Dec. 12, 2019)

This presumably was a response during a newscycle when the league commissioner had maintained:

“Teams go into the season, the first objective is to win the division. That’s what they work on: Win the division, go to the playoffs,” (Ibid., Dec. 11, 2019)

The Lions, Vikings, and even the Green Bay Packers have done the same amount work as any division winner with 10 or 11 wins. They happen to play in the same division. They have, hop into whatever weeds you want about the relative strength of schedule and player health, earned more wins than the AFC South, NFC South, and NFC West first-placed teams.

It is awkward to bring this up as a diehard fan of one of the teams involved in this showdown. It might sound like bargaining. Or hedging against the worst-case scenario. Or patronizing to Lions fans.

However, in all sincerity, this has been a burr for several seasons. It is wrong to expect fans to accept a system that creates all-or-nothing thinking and favours some mid teams due to geography.

Then the mid team granted home field beats the wild-card team with the better record. Ah-hah! Say the apologists. They were better than their record. The 12-4 wild-card team was fraudulent.

Not so fast, my friend. That is post-hoc justification for bad thinking. Also, as someone who committed to the bit when the Vikings pulled off a 13-win season in 2022 with 7.5-win talent, I am a court-approved arbiter of NFL fraudulence.

A Coatesian hunger for clarity is at the heart of this. The excessive subdividing of pro sports is, once again, sooooohhhh dumb.

The four-team divisions in the NFL and five-team groupings in MLB and the NBA, need to get gone. They might serve a purpose for marketing. They are an insult to the intelligence and the passion of the audience. Eagles fans will not cease to hate Dallas, the Giants, Washington, and themselves if the NFC East were to go away.

This is half the crux of today’s scribble. The other half is about taking the right tack as Vikings fan, letting it play out, enjoying the windfall, and c’est la vie. There is no such thing as an overconfident Vikings fan.

And, even if the divisions are retained, the playoffs should be seeded according to won-loss records. As a reminder, here is the current playoff picture in the NFC, where all seven teams have clinched:

• BYE: Lions

• (2) Eagles vs. (7) Packers

• (3) Rams vs. (6) Commanders

• (4) Buccaneers vs. (5) Vikings

How does it change with fair seeding?

• BYE: Lions

• (2) Vikings vs. (7) Buccaneers

• (3) Eagles vs. (6) Rams

• (4) Commanders vs. (5) Packers

The sports-following public is rapt over the NFL playoffs either way. There is just no ignoring cognitive dissonance. Or you try explaining to a newcomer or casual NFL fan how this playoff system makes any sense.

That idea from Vic Fangio, who has been a head coach or coordinator for nearly 25 seasons, has been a strand in Sager’s head for a long time. Now, on the eve of a No. 1 seed showdown on Sunday Night Football, seemed like an opportune time to pull it out. After all, the Vikings will need to be opportunistic on Sunday.

All of this, honestly, overarches the rooting interest in the actual Vikings-Lions showdown on Sunday night. Or any looking ahead to a chance they could have a rematch in the divisional round (Jan. 18-19) or NFC championship game (Jan. 26).

Football is too complex to project that far in advance. Or it is simple if Kansas City three-peats as Super Bowl champions.

On to the second half. Well, first we need to dip into a bit of cynical conjurin’ concerning the College Football Playoff. And it involves an example from U Sports, which people will just love.

CFP semis: Notre Dame Fighting Irish-Penn State Nittany Lions, Ohio State Buckeyes-Texas Longhorns, plus a Duck becoming a crab

The Everything Turns Into A Crab theory seems to apply to what happened to the Oregon Ducks against Ohio State in a New Year’s Day bowl game slash playoff quarterfinal. All part of college football rushing into becoming a playoff sport and becoming a bit more like the NFL, and everything else.

Oregon was the only unbeaten team in the regular season. And the Ducks got boatraced by Ohio State, which has seemed to snap to it since Nov. 28.

Now, here is a hot take: the College Football Playoff is working essentially as intended, apart from the absence of a team that played in the SEC before this season. The Texas Longhorns being in the SEC is only a marriage of convenience.

It is hard to resist digressing into some alleged algorithmic misinformation afoot. A great thread from analyst Jeff Fuller wonders about ESPN’s proprietary metric, FPI. Teams from the two conferences, the ACC and SEC, who have dedicated TV networks owned by ESPN, keep moving up in FPI at the expense of their Big 12 counterparts, even though the latter’s teams won more bowl games.

Algorithmic misinformation to control the narrative? That is sports in 2025, along with everything else.

Saying the playoff is working as designed sounds so affectedly contrarian. Seven of the eight games have been decidedly unsuspenseful, with double-digit margins. The average winning margin for two-loss Ohio State, two-loss Penn State, two-loss Texas, and lost-to-a-MAC-team-at-home Notre Dame is 16.9 points.

Texas almost spit the bit, as you know. The Arizona State Sun Devils offered poetry, valor, and a vomiting-on-the-sidelines triple-threat tailback Cam Skattebo. The team whom Spencer Hall likened to “the guy at the wedding in the tuxedo T-shirt” came within one fourth-down stop of taking out Texas. The Longhorns’ escape in double overtime lowered the winning margin by a point and change. Of course, so did Ohio State burying heretofore undefeated Oregon before halftime.²

So why is it working? Cynically, college football is a blowout sport. Big teams want their show of force. It’s about only a select few who can play.

The difference between being seeded 1 to 4 and 5 to 8 is having to play an extra game, but that is only skin off of the athletes’ hides, and they are supposedly well taken care of thanks to NIL Lucre.

Notre Dame, Ohio State, Penn State, and Texas all got the additional exposure and revenue from grafting an eighth home game during the first round on Dec. 20-21. The athletes are the only one bearing the risk.

Then these teams get a neutral site for the quarterfinal against a conference winner. That includes additional exposure ‘n’ revenue from playing in at least one, and now two, of the ‘traditional’ New Year’s Six bowl games.

that previously mentioned Coatesian hunger for clarity. Who is actually the best team when the college football schedule, which was only 12 games, now stretches to 17, and conference counterparts don’t all play each other?

Now, there will be some politicking about format tweaks. Valid, good-faith questions have been raised about also making the quarterfinals on-campus home games.

The spoils afforded to the champions of the ACC, Big 12, and a second-flight conference such as the Mountain West will also be up for negotiation. What if were to tell you there is a rule in Canadian university sports — originating in men’s basketball — that they are free to adapt to their self-interested ends?

So, up here in Unibball, the eight-team, single-elimination nationals are always a 4/4 split of conference winners and the other invitees. No conference-winning team can be seeded lower than No. 6 in the bracket. It is known as the Québec Rule, or Top 6 Rule.

Québec has a compact five-team basketball conference that plays cutthroat during January and February. In the 2000s, a pattern emerged. The Quebec rep would drawn against the Dave Smart-built Carleton Ravens juggernaut in the 1 vs. 8 quarterfinal. It didn’t do much to narrow the regional differences.

So, in the spirit of compromise and regionalism, what is more Canadian, the top 6 rule was enacted. It put respect on winning the conference, although, ironically, a No. 8-seeded host team put Québec on top in 2024.

Suppose the top four conference champions, instead, have to be in the top 8 seeds of a 12-team CFP. On the back of a napkin, the CFP seeding changes to:

Feel free to look at that re-imagined bracket. Would any of the first-round games would have been tighter than the average 19.25-point margin, at least after you account for the likely oh-the-humanity outlier of SMU at Ohio State?

Tennessee-Arizona State is at least a contrast-in-styles matchup, with the SEC team forced out of its comfort zone. An Indiana-Boise State game is the exact type of middleweight undercard bout that the Playoff should accommodate. There is still a Notre Dame home game for the Friday night slot.

Of course, the potential quarterfinals are the actual semifinals. That is the giveaway that the bluebloods might resist change. Their desire to win isn’t joined at the hip with ESPN.

Meantime, Big 12, ACC, Mountain West and The American take this into the meetings. It is like setting up a screen pass. Give the appearance of retreat and opening. Okay, Boise State and Arizona State should not have been seeded so highly. And then, after luring them in, plop the ball to get your RB1, such as Skattebo or Ashton Jeanty into space and racing through the secondary, man did this football analogy ever click.

Four bluebloods are through to the final four. That’s who benefits.

FanZenny Football, but with a baseball movie

There is no urgency about the Vikings’ prospects on Sunday. Chalk that up to the passing of years, and getting the sports movie speech I did not know I needed.

As someone who turned out TV and is newly turned 48 years old, an offering… something something to share about being a minimalist diehard fan.

Something that is just too convenient to be coincidental is that the actor Josh Duhamel is also a Vikings fan and has portrayed Bill (Spaceman) Lee in a movie. Duhamel portrayed that at most leftist of lefthanders in the baseball biopic Spaceman (2016, dir.-writ. Brett Rapkin). It was called “underwhelming and conventional” by traditional reviewers.

It is a biopic that covers a semi-obscure sportsperson at a low moment in his life; that hardly seems conventional. Some brief details: It’s a midlife crisis and anti-establishment semifictionalized character study. The story takes place in 1982 when Lee was let go by the Expos, ending his major-league career. It is not great but it is watchable.

Anywho, if I was trying to explain how I try to follow the Vikings and Blue Jays, it comes at the top of the third act of Spaceman. At the 55½-minute mark.

Cast out of organized baseball, Duhamel’s Lee is slumming with beer leaguers in Longueuil, Que., which he actually did.³

Shrugging off a skein of L’s in Act 2, Lee rolls up to the ball diamond in his Volkswagen van. Producing a coffee can of “ganja resin straight from the fields of Kingston,” he talks his teammates into hotbox in his van before a game, explaining they need to free their minds.⁴

Thinking is like death. They call it ‘playing the game’ for a reason. We all know how to play this game; maybe some of us play it better than others …. But it’s just muscle memory, just muscle memory. What we’re really looking for is freedom: to just run out to that emerald-green field and just be free.

For an introvert with an anxiety disorder, this pep talk outflanks Kurt Russell in Miracle, Billy Bob Thornton in Friday Nights Lights, and Al Pacino in Any Given Sunday. It is a reminder not to think too much or overcomplicate Sports! — enjoy your entertainment on your terms. The emerald-green field, of course, could be a couch or recliner or whatever you plunk upon for seven hours of commercial-free football on NFL RedZone.

It is presumed Lee was a great BS’er, but like another antihero movie from my youth, it’s about what layer of it you can live in. Go find the animated sequence with voice-over follows.

At the plate that day, I went 7-for- 8 with 3 home runs. Every pitch to me, no matter how fast, arrived at the plate like a gentle little leaf … All I had to do was catch it on the end of the bat and serve it back to the universe. And in the outfield? Pfffffffft. I felt no urgency whatsoever…

But on the mound? That was where I channeled light. I combined the sacrifice of Jesus, with the patience of Buddha — and then mixed in the control of Sandy Koufax, jussssst to get a little Judiasm in there. I was Vishnu with a polyester V-neck. The batters tried to guess what pitch I was thinking of throwing but they couldn’t, because I had ceased thought entirely.

Cease thought entirely. Those of us with anxiety are so often hard-pressed do that. It should been treated as a valuable asset. A good organization and endeavour needs those of us “who (are) quietly turning ideas over and over in our minds.”

And football is such a strategic, stop-and-start game that one cannot help but get pulled along to armchair coach or armchair quarterback. What you would have done in the situation — kick the field goal or go for it on fourth down? blitz or play coverage? make a change at quarterback?

The Vikings are kind of the perfect team for this. No one really knows which way it will go with Sam Darnold in the protective pocket — he threw three interceptions against Jacksonville! — but he continues to be enough. And the Brian Flores-guided defence epitomizes being wily ’n’ resourceful.

In between games, there are so many, too many frankly, content creators. They create a fog and weeds of predictive models and talking heads. Going into it all that sounds about as fun as attending an Evening With Doug Ford. No thanks.

You need a microdose of that, sure. As a fan of one of those teams that is synonymous with ‘beautiful suffering,’ one craves it.

The Vikings offer 17 or more 3¼-hour blocs from late summer through early winter to be defiantly optimistic. Committing to that bit means phasing out hunting for slights in the media, or paid football knowers underestimating their chances. They have to keep a distance from this.

It helps they are a balanced team. The Vikings are the only one of the top eight teams in SRS where the defence and offence each account for more than 44 percent of the team’s value. Being able to win in different ways seems like a good security blanket.

Of course, the Lions would be No. 1 in SRS on the strength of their offence alone. They arereally good, and circling back to the original point, it is brutal they still have to play it out in Week 18.

One has always known that chaos, entropy, and randomness have far more sway over W’s and L’s in the NFL than the commentary acknowledges.

How that comes out with me, these days, is quiet confidence. Whatever those fortunate enough to have professional obligations to drive engagement have to say is just air — and I know this was not the case for me in most of my fan existence.

Either way, my mind is open to nearly all potential outcomes for the Vikings and Lions, up to and including a 48-15 rout by Detroit. Lions coach Dan Campbell must know what a Scorigami is. And if the Vikings pulled it off, well, even better.

SKOL, y’all.

Friendly reminder

I post about current affairs in Notes and on Bluesky (n8sager). Hopefully, this is enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind.

Dec. 19, 2024-Jan. 4, 2025
Hamilton and Loyalist Township, Ont. : on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, Omámíwinini, and Mississaugas.

1. Forty teams and an 18-game schedule. Sigh audibly.

2. Shutdown Fullcast, “40 for 40 FINAL BOWLS: Clear Eyes, Bulldongs,” Dec. 30, 2024.

3. In 1991, Lee was among several athletes who did comedy at the Juste Pour Rire / Just For Laughs comedy festival in Montréal. He said, “I played senior baseball in Québec after my release. It was just an excuse to get away from the wife and drink. It was the same as the majors.” Ah, the stuff you remember from the Scorecard feature in Sports Illustrated.

4. The one in Jamaica, not the one in southeast Ontario.