There may be more NFL teams playing for their playoff lives than we initially anticipated this weekend, if a new proposal is agreed upon by the NFL Players Association.
According to reports from ProFootballTalk, the league is considering expanding their postseason in an effort to compensate for the cancelled Bills-Bengals game.
Based on rumblings from the league, it doesn’t appear as though anyone has any interest in resuming Monday night’s contest between the Buffalo Bills and Cincinnati Bengals. The players don’t want to play it, and the league doesn’t to try and fit it into their schedule.
Just cancelling the game and calling it a “no contest,” however, will create an uneven advantage for certain teams when it comes to playoff seeding. Specifically, the battle for top seed in the AFC (which comes with home-field advantage and a first round bye) would be affected by strictly using winning percentages.
Some ideas that have been floating around are the possibility of a neutral playing site for the AFC Championship Game, or the possibility of having the top seed decide between home-field advantage or a first round bye (with the second seed taking whichever option the top seed doesn’t choose).
Another very interesting possibility that would change the entire landscape of week 18 is the possibility of the league expanding the playoff field to eight teams and eliminating the bye week.
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By taking this approach in the AFC, the cancelled game wouldn’t result in one team unfairly getting a bye week. However, if they were to adopt this structure with the AFC, they would also have to do it with the NFC. And all of it would require the approval of the NFLPA.
Via ProFootballTalk:
The question then becomes seeding the AFC playoffs without Bills-Bengals. Winning percentage becomes the most obvious method. But there are concerns about equity, given that the winner of the Bills-Bengals game would have been in position to be one of the top seed AFC seeds.
One possibility would be to add an eighth team to the playoff field in the AFC. This would eliminate the bye for the No. 1 seed.
To ensure competitive balance, there would have to be eight teams in the NFC, too.
The NFL Players Association would have to agree to a temporary expansion of the playoff field.
By adding an eighth team in each conference, a handful of teams who were eliminated from the postseason last weekend would suddenly have life again, which would likely change their approach to their week 18 contests.
As such, the NFL will have to let teams know how they plan to proceed ASAP, so that every club has a chance to gameplan accordingly.
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