Expanding the NFL playoffs will hurt professional football

Plans for expanding the NFL postseason are apparently back on the table, something that would be bad for the league.

There is no doubt that the NFL has become the most popular sport in America. Between the rise in popularity of fantasy football to the national holiday that is known as Super Bowl Sunday, the NFL is basking in the glow of being on top of the world right now.

So in the typical fashion of commissioner Roger Goodell, they are going to try and figure out a way to both capitalize financially on that success and simultaneously dilute the product of their playoffs. For years, talks have been reported about expanding the number of teams who qualify for the playoffs from its current number of 12 (which has been the number since expanding from 10 teams before the 1990 season).

Goodell told a town hall meeting of Jacksonville Jaguars’ ticket holders that, despite the issue not being discussed at last month’s meetings, it’s not long before more teams will be in the postseason:

"I think that’s what makes the NFL great is every game means so much. That game means a great deal. You don’t ever want to lose that. You don’t want to lose the fact that every regular-season game is important. And only having 12 teams qualify, which is the smallest of any of the professional leagues by far, that’s a good thing for us.(It) likely will happen at some point, but we want to be really cautious because we really like the balance we have with the importance of the regular season and the postseason and you don’t want to mess with that balance."

We’ll ignore the fact that baseball actual has the lowest number of teams with 10 qualifying for their playoffs for the sake of this issue. Currently, teams are usually fighting until Week 17 for at least one playoff berth, making the regular season exciting and reminding teams you have to work to get to the next level.

Expanding the postseason by even one team in each conference will allow teams to coast into a playoff spot and just mail it in during the final weeks of the season. One of the few smart things Goodell has done as the boss was force the schedule for Week 17 to be divisional matchups, in many cases being not just for playoff spots but also divisional titles and home field in the first round.

It would be naive to think this decision wasn’t all about money and how the league can capitalize on its current popularity. But there can be too much of a good thing, and if the NFL gets too big it can easily fall back behind the NBA and Major League Baseball if it’s not careful.

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