The Sporting Life:
The Public Professor’s
Saturday Sports Column
Today at 4:30 PM EST, the NFL will step into the realm of the bizarre. The 7-9 Seattle Seahawks will open the post-season by hosting the 11-5 defending Super Bowl champion New Orleans Saints.
Many people, and just about everyone in the Crescent City, are griping that Seattle should not
be hosting a playoff game. To me, that’s like saying Rod Blagojevich really needed to get a better toupee. Yeah, sure, whatever. No. Rod Blagojevich really needed to not be the goddamn governor of Illinois.
Seattle shouldn’t be hosting a playoff game because of their sub-.500 record? Wake up! The Seattle Seahawks should not even be in the post-season. They are losers.
Losers.
They lost more games than they won. That makes them the opposite of winners. That makes them certified losers. And I don’t care if they get slaughtered by five touchdowns or go on to win the Super Bowl. The bottom line is that they do not deserve the 
opportunity to even try. They haven’t earned it. That they’re in the playoffs, much less hosting, is pathetic. How could something like this happen?
Well, we first headed down this road when the NFL most recently re-shuffled its divisions back in 1995. It created eight divisions with only four teams in each division. Do the math. They were setting themselves up for this eventuality. Considering that almost half the teams in a given year have losing records, it’s almost inevitable that if you do this long enough, you’re going to end up with four losers in the same division. It took all of 15 years to come to fruition. And it’ll happen again. Maybe not next year, maybe not in another fifteen years, but it will happen again. Mark my words.
Okay, so this isn’t hard, we just fix it, right? Wrong. It seems very unlikely that losers will be banned from the NFL playoffs. At best, they might be barred from hosting a first round game. Why? Because many of the muckety-mucks in the NFL seem to regard divisions as sacrosanct. They cling to the notion that if you win your division, then of course you’re going to the playoffs.
To me this is a real head-scratcher. It’s very obvious why divisions shouldn’t be sacred. In 
fact, it’s as plain as the hair flowing from Troy Polamalu’s helmet. It’s because divisions aren’t real. They’re make believe. They’re an artifice, something that the league itself created. It’s not like the NFL’s 32 teams fell from the heavens and landed in their current divisional alignment, which for the record, could barely have worse geographic continuity if they were the result of a drunken seven year old throwing darts at a map. Left handed.
Divisions themselves aren’t inherent to football, or any other sport for that matter, so they’re simply not that important. They’re a mere contrivance to help organize scheduling and reinforce rivalries. But here’s what is natural to all athletic competition: the notion of a meritocracy. The idea that things are settled on the field, and that victory is to the worthy. It’s as basic as two people racing, and the first one to the finish line wins. End of story. In team sports things are a little more complex (how many of you know the difference between a chop block and a crack back block?), but the basic idea is exactly the same. Two sides compete, one side wins, one side loses. End of goddamn story.
The first professional team sport in America, baseball, didn’t even bother with divisions for 
its first century of existence. Hell, there wasn’t a post-season for several decades. Leagues simply awarded a pennant to the team with the best record, the team that won the most games. At the end of the season, the team on top got a weird little flag and a hearty handshake. Everyone else? Go to hell! The best team’s the winner and the rest of you are bunch of also-rans. Indeed, that’s still the way they do it in most professional soccer leagues around the world. The World Series was originally a dare from the upstart American League to the established National League. Turned out to be a good money earner, so they kept it. But it’s not like divisions and post-season play are part of God’s plan on Earth.
Okay, fine, tournaments are good fun, rah-rah-rah and all that jazz. Besides, the NFL is built for thrills with its single-game elimination format, similar to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament or the World Cup. Fine.
However, while figuring out who should qualify for the playoffs and who shouldn’t ain’t no fancy pants rocket science, it is nonetheless important. Because when you dilute the meritocractic elements of athletic competition you don’t just risk diluting the entertainment value. You also undermine the credibility of the entire endeavor. You risk delegitimizing everything, and if you do that, people just might stop giving a shit.
ESPN writer Mike Sando recently wrote that the “Seahawks enter the postseason with 
nothing to lose, everything to gain and no obligation to apologize.” I agree completely. It’s not their fault the system’s broken, and they have every right to try and take advantage of the opportunity that has been wrongfully presented to them. But let’s not take Sando’s sentiment too far.
When asked about his losing team winning a division and going to the playoffs, Seahawks coach Pete Carroll said, “I hear that’s never happened before, and I think that’s kind of cool.”
No, it’s not cool. It’s dumb, it’s boring, and it’s mildly insulting to anyone who cares about professional football specifically and the fairness of athletic competition more generally.
You can also find me every Saturday at Meet the Matts.