7-9 Ain't So Bad

The 2010 Seattle Seahawks, finishing the season at 7-9, are now the only team with a losing record ever to make the NFL playoffs (nice job, guys).

Predictably, all the brilliant minds in football commentary (i.e. New York-based reporters who are pissed that their 10-6 Giants are out of the playoffs) have been up in arms about this since it became a reasonably likely possibility, calling for changes in the playoff structure so teams with better records automatically play at home in the playoffs, or even changing things to deny any losing team a playoff shot altogether. Some even said that the commissioner should step in right now and boot a 7-9 Seahawks team from the postseason.

This got me thinking: What's the worst team that could make the playoffs? Theoretically, of course. The NFL's 32 teams are broken into two conferences of four divisions, each with four teams. Each team plays six games within its division (each other team twice), and ten games against teams outside its division (under a formula I could describe, albeit in 1,200 or so words I don't feel like typing).

So theoretically, if all four teams in a division lost all ten of their non-division games, and all four went 3-3 in their six division games, they would all finish at 3-13, and one would have to be "crowned" the champion by some sort of tiebreaker. Of course, this could only happen if the teams in this imaginary shitty division put eighth-graders out there every week or something.*

Point being, the Seahawks' 7-9 is far from the worst that could happen under the current system. If it's taken this long for a single 7-9 team to make it (the current format goes back to 2002, and the NFL used a similar one before that), who cares if it's an "injustice" of some sort?

Seattle fans get to pay playoff ticket prices to watch their team get the shit kicked out of them one more time, while the Saints get the next-best thing to a first-round bye.


* And that would be child abuse