Nobody needed another NFL team in playoffs thanks to new CBA

The NFL Collective Bargaining Agreement finally got signed, and one of the big changes is the addition of another playoff team. It’s supposed to add more competition, but it only rewards bad NFL teams.

A few years ago, Major League Baseball added a sixth playoff team, leading to a one-game Wild Card Game. It was one of the best decisions the league made, because it seemed like it added two or three teams to the playoff race every year, and it brought the drama of a “do-or-die” scenario every year. Since the NFL already has a win or go home scenario in their playoffs, Sunday’s decision to add an extra team to their playoff format was only there to add worse teams to the race for the Super Bowl.

Each conference will now have seven teams make the postseason, 14 teams total. Only one team in each conference would get a playoff bye, meaning just the Baltimore Ravens and San Francisco 49ers would be eligible for that playoff bye.

There’s two reasons we’re not all for this proposal. The first major faux pas here is this breeding of “competition” only rewards bad teams in the name of short-term dollar figures. Less is more is one of the reasons the NFL is the most popular sports in the country. The fact that Americans only get this sport for 16 weeks of their favorite teams (now 17 thanks to the new CBA), and that every game matters is a major reason every single game is must-see TV. Take away that “must-see” factor, even just a little bit, may hurt things like TV ratings in the long run.

Think about some of the teams that would be in the playoff race from last season. If the NFL added that seventh playoff team, the Pittsburgh Steelers and Los Angeles Rams would be the teams who made it. Neither one of those teams did enough to be considered a playoff team. The Steelers were a fun story, trying to win with a guy named Duck Hodges at quarterback, but they were nowhere near a playoff team. The Rams were just a mess.

Every other team was .500 or worse. That would put teams like the Dallas Cowboys, Denver Broncos, and New York Jets in the playoff race. Were they playing good football? Does anyone think those teams deserved playoff contention?

It’s been five seasons since a 10-win team missed the playoffs. In 2015, the 10-win New York Jets missed it by percentage points. That same season, the eight-win Atlanta Falcons would have made it into the postseason.

Sure, the NFL is adding an extra two playoff games to Wild Card Weekend, but think about this. Last season, we’d be throwing the injury-riddled Pittsburgh Steelers to the wagon that was the Kansas City Chiefs. In the 2018 season, that same Steelers teams would go up against the eventual champion New England Patriots. Over in the NFC, the mediocre Minnesota Vikings would go up against the soon-to-be NFC Champion Los Angeles Rams.

This is just going to add a blowout to the NFL playoffs first weekend. It puts an average-to-bad team up against one of the NFL’s best. This is a clear money grab that will be nice for a season or two, but get really boring in no time. We complain about teams under .500 staying in contention, but this will almost guarantee that those teams will actually make the playoffs.

There may be an argument that this makes the competition at the top even better, and most teams can never quit for that number-one seed. On the contrary, last season, the Patriots and Chiefs were fighting for the number-two seed, and neither had a shot at the Baltimore Ravens. The race in the NFC would have been fun, but no more fun than it already was. It already saw the New Orleans Saints, Green Bay Packers and San Francisco 49ers fighting for two seeds. This would take one of those slots away from one of the NFL’s best.

Overall, we’re obviously against the expansion of the playoffs. It’s clear it’s the NFL just trying to get another piece of a pie in their mind will never end. However, in the end it just adds one more game of bad football we didn’t really need.