Owners unlikely to expand number of playoff teams

In fact, the NFL owners, who meet this week, never may expand the playoffs.
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
CHICAGO -- It is unlikely National Football League owners meeting Tuesday and Wednesday in Philadelphia will approve expanding from 12 to 14 playoff teams this season, a proposal tabled in March. The bigger underlying question is whether they will ever expand the playoffs.
It's not as inevitable as it seemed when the league went to 32 teams last year.
More teams usually translate to added playoff teams, resulting in more games that make more money. But the NFL is being careful not to dilute the importance of its regular season, the most meaningful in pro sports.
Kansas City Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt is pushing for playoff expansion, but the Competition Committee wants to stick to its original plan to observe at least two years of the eight four-team division format. Because the first year produced no anomalies such as 8-8 teams winning divisions and 10-6 teams staying home, Hunt wants to hurry the process.
His real objective
Hunt's real goal is to eliminate first-round byes, which would mean expanding to an unrealistic 16 playoff teams. But he has not considered that eight playoff games the first weekend could not all be televised nationally, football's big advantage on baseball, hockey and basketball.
Hunt argues that byes, currently awarded to the top two teams in each conference, provide too big of an advantage.
"I don't understand if only one team has a bye, how that's worse than having two teams who have byes now," Hunt says.
Hunt also could eliminate byes under the 12-team format, but that is an unlikely alternative as well.
The Competition Committee will point out to owners that the byes are earned during the regular season. And to award one bye instead of two would punish the No. 2 teams, who have won on average one fewer game than the No. 1 teams since 1990, when the current format was adopted. It would pave the road to the Super Bowl for the No. 1 teams.
The scenario
A look at No. 7 teams during that time reveals seven 8-8 teams and one 7-9 team would have advanced to the playoffs.
"So you'd be adding clearly a weak team and a non-deserving team in many cases because 10-6 is our benchmark," says Indianapolis Colts President Bill Polian, a Competition Committee member.
Those No. 7-seeded teams would play the No. 2 seeds under Hunt's proposed format. The Competition Committee warns of mismatches like No. 1-seeded Jacksonville's 62-7 win over No. 6-seeded Miami in 1999 and No. 1-seeded San Francisco's 44-15 rout of the No. 6-seeded Bears in 1994.