A Mad Dash for the Playoffs Doesn’t Produce a Champion

With half the playoff spots in the NFC up for grabs in Week 17, the NFL and FOX will call this the biggest weekend of the regular season. In reality, Week 17 is more like a weekend of exhibition games before the playoffs. History has repeatedly shown that teams still scrambling to make the playoffs aren’t really title contenders, meaning any team that needs a win this weekend to get into the playoffs isn’t good enough to get to the Super Bowl.Since the NFL expanded the playoffs to 12 teams in 1990, no team that needed to win its last game to reach the postseason has made the Super Bowl. And while fans and the media will scrutinize every imaginable tiebreaker scenario, those scenarios are probably irrelevant to the question of who will win the championship. Only two of the 78 teams that have played in the 39 previous Super Bowls entered the playoffs on a tiebreaker.So although the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Carolina Panthers, Dallas Cowboys, and Washington Redskins will fight to make the playoffs this weekend, the real Super Bowl contenders from the NFC are the three teams that have already made the playoffs – the Giants, Seattle Seahawks, and Chicago Bears.The AFC race is even less interesting, with all four division winners and the top wild-card spot already determined. In the AFC, Cincinnati visits Kansas City on Sunday in a game that, at first glance, looks important: The Chiefs are fighting to earn a wild-card spot against the AFC North champion Bengals. But don’t expect much of an effort out of the Bengals, whose goal will be to avoid injuries. And no matter what Kansas City does, the playoffs are probably out of reach: The Chiefs need to catch the Pittsburgh Steelers in the standings, which would require the 5-10 Detroit Lions to win at Pittsburgh.Whether Kansas City or Pittsburgh nabs that sixth and final playoff spot in the AFC, the Steelers and Chiefs aren’t battling for a chance to play in the Super Bowl – they’re battling for a chance to lose in the playoffs. The Steelers or the Chiefs would have to win three consecutive games, all on the road, to reach the Super Bowl. A likely scenario would be games at Cincinnati in the first round, at a well-rested Indianapolis in the second round, and at Denver in the AFC Championship. The Steelers and Chiefs are good enough to beat any of those teams on any given Sunday, but they’re not good enough to beat all three of them on three straight Sundays.Since the NFL added a sixth playoff team in each conference in 1990, the sixth seed has never gotten to the conference championship game, let alone the Super Bowl. And when the sixth seed loses, it usually loses a blowout: Sixth seeds have a record of 9-30, and those 30 losses have come by an average margin of 17 points.The true Super Bowl contenders are the teams that have already clinched a playoff spot – Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Denver, New England, Jacksonville, Seattle, Chicago, and the Giants. Teams that clinch this weekend are essentially playing for the right to lose to one of those teams.If Week 17 is less important than most fans think at the bottom of the playoff race, it’s utterly irrelevant at the top. The top two teams in each conference – Indianapolis and Denver in the AFC, Seattle and Chicago in the NFC – have secured their spots, meaning they’ll treat the season finale like a preseason game and rest many of their top players. Only a few years ago, NFL teams wouldn’t dream of treating a regular season game like an exhibition – the Broncos had sewn up home field advantage throughout the 1998 playoffs, but John Elway still played the entire game and threw 36 passes in the final week of the regular season.But that was the end of an era. The next season, the St. Louis Rams clinched home-field advantage early, then rested their starters and lost the final game to the 4-11 Eagles. With all their starters healthy, the Rams won the Super Bowl. Since then, teams that have already locked up playoff spots have realized that the end of the regular season can go from meaningless to downright harmful if a key player is injured. Though some teams believe they need to win in Week 17 because they want to keep momentum going into the playoffs, the 1999 Rams showed that staying healthy is more important than having momentum.During Week 17 last year, the strategy of resting starters in the final week of the season reached new levels. Six teams that knew their playoff positions were secure – Pittsburgh, Green Bay, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, San Diego, and Atlanta – either benched their top players completely or played them for only a few series.Some commentators have suggested that eliminating the wild card and allowing only the four division champions into the playoffs would make the end of the regular season more exciting. (That argument was voiced in many circles when Major League Baseball expanded its playoffs in 1994. George W. Bush, then owner of the Texas Rangers, was the only baseball owner who voted against expanding the playoffs.) But there’s too much network television money in those first round playoff games for the league to consider such a concept.So the current playoff format is here to stay, even with Super Bowl contenders looking past Week 17 to the postseason. That makes the most important game this weekend the one between the two worst teams: The Houston Texans take on the San Francisco 49ers in a game that could determine which team gets the first pick in next year’s draft. As fans in Dallas and Washington dream of the playoffs, fans in Houston and San Francisco dream of Heisman Trophy winner Reggie Bush.Mr. Smith is a regular writer for FootballOutsiders.com.

A Mad Dash for the Playoffs Doesn’t Produce a Champion

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