WASHINGTON — If you’ve been too busy watching the top teams in football — or, you know, the Redskins — you may have missed the story developing in the NFC South. Top to bottom, the division is putrid — historically so. So much so that it may prompt the league to change the way it handles its postseason.
No other division in the NFL has more than two teams with losing records. In the NFC South, all four teams are below .500. The only hope for that to change is for the New Orleans Saints to win out, beating Atlanta at home and Tampa Bay on the road the next two weeks to finish at 8-8.
No matter how it actually plays out, and who is left standing atop the wreckage after next Sunday, the winner will find themselves hosting a playoff game the following week against a team with a better record. That could include a 10- or even 11-win team. Meanwhile, the Philadelphia Eagles — currently sitting at 9-5 with winnable road division games remaining at Washington and New York — are on the outside of the playoff picture looking in.
Much was made of the weak NFC West in 2010, when the Seattle Seahawks and St. Louis Rams both finished atop the division at just 7-9. That gave Seattle a home playoff game against the 11-5 Saints, which they won, 41-36. Many perceived this situation as unfair, as they will likely perceive the current situation in the NFC South. Of course, it helped create one of the most enduring singular NFL plays of the past several years:
NFC South teams are a combined 18-37-1 this season. When you remove the games against each other, that figure drops to 9-28-1. New Orleans seems to offer the best chance for the South not to embarrass itself in the playoffs, sporting a 4-6 record against the rest of the league. No other team has more than two wins outside the division.
Speaking of the 2010 NFC West, those teams went 13-27 against the rest of the NFL, which means this year’s NFC South is already guaranteed to be worse, even if the Panthers beat the Browns and the Bucs beat the highly-favored Packers this weekend in the final matchups with teams outside the division.
In fact, if either the Panthers or Bucs lose, this will make the NFC South the worst division in NFL history. Most of the worst divisions have come since the league’s realignment to eight four-team divisions in 2002, which makes sense since that move increased the likelihood of a lack of balance between divisions. But this is the worst such imbalance we’ve ever seen.
The Saints could actually lose to Tampa Bay and still win the division at 7-9 with a Carolina Panthers loss in either of their final two contests. Meanwhile, Carolina could split their final two games and win the division at 6-9-1 with a victory over Atlanta in Week 17, so long as the Saints lose out.
Stunningly, the Falcons control their own destiny at 5-9. If Atlanta wins in New Orleans this weekend, then beats Carolina at home in the season finale, the Dirty Birds will finish 7-9 overall and a perfect 6-0 in the division. That means, by the nature of their head-to-head victories over the Saints they would win the division and host a playoff game, despite going just 1-9 against the rest of the league.
In a sense, that would make them the champion the NFC South deserves.
Hilariously, that one win came against the 11-3 Arizona Cardinals, a team the Falcons could end up meeting again in the playoffs. Of course, it came at home, in Atlanta: The Falcons are 0-5 on the road against non-divisional opponents.
In a twist of fate, Seattle (the beneficiary of a weak division in 2010) sits as the five seed right now at 10-4, and would have to travel to New Orleans if the season ended with the standings as they are today.
This raises the question: What to do? Should the NFL take away the guaranteed home playoff game that comes with winning your division? Should it just take the top six team from each league based on overall record? If so, does that devalue the entire purpose of having divisions?
The division process seems integral to ensuring at least some regional parity when it comes to postseason representation. Abolishing a guaranteed spot for winning the division undermines the point of having divisions in the first place. But the idea of a home playoff game likely deserves reexamination.
The question then becomes this: Is it more fair to simply rank the teams based on their records? Or should we only punish a team for finishing below the .500 mark? Vote for your solution in the poll below. We won’t have a resolution this year, but maybe we’ll find a more fair solution sometime in the future.
Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey , the world’s leading questionnaire tool.
