playoffs

i've had it with leagues, conferences and divisions within professional sports. all it does is create a culture of striving to be good enough rather than the best. in the past when travel was a bigger issue and attendance was more dependant on traditional rivalries it made more sense. travel is not that big a deal now. old rivalries are great, but if a team is good they'll sell out every game no matter who is coming to town.

teams that are not very good should not be rewarded by playoff appearances simply because the other teams in their region suck. the playoffs should showcase the best teams in the league, simple as that. when you base playoff spots on local achievement you cheapen what it means to be in the playoffs and reduce the quality of the games. if you're a fan of a sport you watch the playoffs whether your team is in it or not. if everyone is watching you should try to put on the best games possible. to do anything less it to abandon your fans. this is especially important given the growing viewership of american sports internationally.

do you really want to show these people some sucky division winner getting pounded instead of two of the best teams battling it out? do you really want a championship that was won in a system that excluded teams that could have possibly won it? do you really want a system in which the it is likely that the best two teams will meet lower than the championship round and the championship round itself is a blowout? such things can only make the championship less meaningful.

currently teams that belong to a certain league/conference/division play more games against teams in the same l/c/d than those outside it. to determine who the best playoff-spot-number teams in the sport are you need to have each team play as many others as possible. this creates a different problem in different sports.

there are 30 teams in major league baseball, each of which plays 162 games in a season. there are two leagues and each league has three divisions. teams play a lot of games against the others in their division, some against their fellow league members and few games against the members of the other league. (i can't find anything on the exact rules for ratios, anybody got a link?) i find the fact that the national league has 16 teams in it while the american league has 14 very annoying. this means that one division has 6 teams in it, another 4 and 5 in the rest. i don't really care how this came about, it's stupid. having the best record in a division is the key to getting into the playoffs and the current set up makes in inherently harder for some teams than others.

the top team of each division advances to the playoffs, along with the top remaining team in each league (the wild card). i've heard a few people say recently that maybe baseball can add two more teams and then just have 8 divisions of 4 teams each. i think this would one of the worst things they could do. the wild card is the best part of the current system. the team that gets the wildcard earns it by competing against the entire league, not just the division. a wildcardless system would only further the good enough culture that permeates baseball. right now if a team isn't the best in their division they can still make the playoffs. without the wildcard they could not and would have less reason to keep giving maximum effort.

this year the padres overall record was 82-80 and they won their division of five teams. so they make the 8-team playoff, despite the fact that their record is the 14th best. 6 teams with better records didn't get to go to the playoffs. a lot of extra money and prestige comes from getting to the playoffs and the padres simply do not deserve it. it is even worse when you consider the fact the teams play division-heavy schedules. the padres come from the worst division in baseball. the 6 teams that got left out got better records than the padres did by playing against better teams.

clearly the system sucks. why not have everyone play everyone else, take the top 8 teams and really find out who's the best?

30 teams, 162 games. if each team plays every other team 5 times that's 145 games. so what to do with the extra 17? first i would add one more and then have each team play one extra game against the 8 teams "above" them and the 8 teams "below" them in the previous year's final regular season rankings. visualize the rankings as a scrollable list that wraps around when you get to the top or bottom. this would make the worst team one rank above the number one team. so the number one team would play extra games against teams ranked 2-9 and 23-30. the number two team would get 3-10, 24-30 and 1. the good thing about a system like this is that it encourages teams to never give up at the end of the season even if they are totally out of the playoff picture. all things being equal, the higher the rank, the easier the schedule will be.

of course home field advantage is an important consideration and would have to be rotated for each team pairing year to year. the DH rule could then be a team to team thing, rather than a league thing. at the beginning of the year a team could declare itself as using a DH or not and then all visiting teams would have to play the same way.

and simple as that the top 8 teams in baseball would make the playoffs every year.

the nba playoffs are not nearly as bad about leaving deserving teams out but it still happens. this is mostly due to the fact that 16 out of 30 teams make the playoffs. the timberwolves still got left out last year. their record was 9th in their conference, but 15th overall. but when you factor in the fact that they played more of their games against the better teams of the western conference it becomes clear that they deserved to be in the playoffs.

they already play 82 games a year in the nba. add five more and you have an easy everyone plays everyone 3 times setup. rank them and send the top 16 to the playoffs. though it hasn't occurred in the last couple years, for a while the western conference finals were generally considered to be the matchup of the best two teams in the nba because the west was so much stronger than the east. this was reflected in both the results (numerous lopsided victories by the western conference team in the finals) and tv ratings. such a situation would be far less likely to occur in a conferenceless system.

the nfl is a much more difficult problem because there is no way you can have all the teams play each other. the regular season is 16 games long and it would be unrealistic to expect more to be added due to the strenuous nature of the game. i would still like them to do away with automatic bids to the playoffs for winning a division. a simple system in which last year's ranking decided the regular season schedule - 8 teams above and 8 teams below - and the top 12 going to the playoffs would work for me. i rarely feel like an undeserving team makes the playoffs in the nfl though, mainly since the league is so well balanced. the team from the nfc north this year is 5-9 though, i'll be annoyed.

in summary, screw tradition. playoffs without automatic bids means more competition and competition brings out the best in sports. the better a sport it the more successful it is and the more entertaining it will be. no automatic playoffs == better for everyone. except the padres.