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The Carolina Panthers lost six straight games this season, during a stretch when they were among the worst teams in the NFL.
They salvaged their floundering season with four straight wins to close the season and finish atop one of the league’s worst ever divisions at 7-8-1.
On Sunday the Carolina Panthers, who as recently as December 7 were third in the atrocious NFC South, will host a NFC Wild Card game.
In a division where awful would have been deemed adequate, the Panthers are being rewarded for mediocrity.
Not since the 2010-2011 Seattle Seahawks has a team with a losing record qualified for the NFL playoffs.
Carolina’s record is worse than the seventh seed Philadelphia Eagles (10-6) and the eighth seed San Francisco 49ers (8-8). They would have finished fourth in the NFC West and third in both the NFC East and NFC North. And yet, due to the NFL’s rules, they get to host the Arizona Cardinals, a team who had an outstanding season hampered by injuries and until recently held the top seed in the NFC.
The irony is the Panthers’ recent run of form and home-field advantage means they will likely eliminate the unlucky Cardinals and progress on to the divisional playoffs, where they will face the Packers or Seahawks. Much like the 2010 Seahawks, who knocked off the Super Bowl Champion New Orleans Saints at home in the Wild Card game, qualifying for the Division Championship would be a huge overachievement and terribly unfitting for such an average season.
Between Week 2 and Week 14 the Panthers went 1-8-1. Cam Newton couldn’t move the offense down the field, the Panthers struggled to gain yardage on the ground, and the defense was allowing 31 points per game.
To their credit, the Panthers got back to playing the simple style of football that won them a division last season – running the ball and playing solid defense.
Running back Jonathan Stewart had half of his total rushing yards for this season in the past four games and the Panthers’ turnover ratio over that span was plus 6.
But had the NFC South not been so remarkably awful, the Panthers’ win streak to close the year would have been nothing but a promising sign for a forgotten team to take into the off-season.
The NFL needs to stop rewarding bad teams for simply playing in a bad division. If your division is so awful that no team can even string together an 8-8 season then you do not deserve representation in the playoffs.
What is this obedience the league has with the division system anyway? It is simply used to sort the teams out into relative geographical location, foster and preserve rivalries and ensure that in a 16-game season there is a system to ensure the schedules have some consistency. But wouldn’t we prefer the best teams qualified for the playoffs?
Why not keep the division process the same, but when selecting the top-six teams for the postseason, rank them based on their overall record in the NFC and AFC? The best two teams, regardless of division, get the week off, third plays sixth and fourth plays fifth. This could lead to better quality teams playing in the business end of the season and more wild card spots, meaning more competitive games late in the regular season.
Why are we punishing the 10-6 Eagles for a solid season? Doesn’t the NFL want the best teams in the league to qualify for the postseason? Surely implementing a new set of rules that precluded the qualification of bellow .500 NFL teams would only serve to make the NFL stronger?
The shame of playing in the NFC South is softened somewhat when you allow one of those teams to host a postseason game. Take that away from them and watch them get better next season.
The measure of success should be gauged on consistency, not the ability to get hot and scrape your way into the playoffs.
What do you think? Do you like the NFL’s current NFL seeding system?
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