Philadelphia Eagles: NFC East mess should spur playoff format change

After watching the Dallas Cowboys and Philadelphia Eagles struggle in 2019, the NFL should finally embrace reseeding playoff teams by their record.

Either the Philadelphia Eagles or the Dallas Cowboys are going to win the NFC East and make the playoffs this season; that much is clear.

In fact, this scenario was pretty much a foregone conclusion months ago, thanks to the New York Giants and Washington Redskins being the train wrecks that everyone with half a brain knew they would be.

But it’s safe to say that nobody counted on this NFC East “race” being this ugly, with both the Cowboys and Eagles under .500 in the first week of December.

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It’s highly likely that 8-8 will be enough to get one of these teams into the playoffs, and there exists a possibility that 7-9 might even do the trick.

The newly crowned champion would then host a playoff game against a wild card club with a superior record, likely the San Francisco 49ers or Seattle Seahawks, a team that will possibly be sporting a 12-4 or even 13-3 record.

How does this make sense?

You can draw a straight line back to the NFL’s long-time stubbornness about rivalries and how “division games are always tough”, as they dole out a playoff home game as a reward for finishing with the best record in the sometimes random geographical clump of teams they’ve decided to stick you in.

I’ll admit that it does make things neat and tidy when you consider that out of each pod of four teams, eight pods in all, one of the teams will top the group and get at least one coveted home playoff game.

Math is fun.

But you know what’s not fun? Watching this race, even as an Eagles fan who knows that they have it entirely within their power to still salvage this season and somehow end up hosting a postseason contest at Lincoln Financial Field.

No more, I say.

While I do believe a division winner, even a poor one, should still qualify for the playoffs, I offer a solution. The NFL should decree that you have to have a winning record in order to host a first-round playoff game. Heck, even 8-7-1 would do the trick.

Or, if they want to soften that a bit, the rule can say that you can’t have a losing record. So 8-8 would still get you that sweet gate revenue.

Otherwise, a “bad” division winner should have their seeding flipped with the best wild card team, who would then host their first round matchup.

This idea, and variations on it, aren’t new. It’s just finally time to make a change.

There’s really no drawback to this, except if NFL old heads want to argue that it defeats the purpose of divisions. But it really doesn’t, because at least the division winner still gets an invite. Hey, I’d even be fine with the NFL going solely to conference standings and letting the six or eight best teams into the playoffs.

The beauty part of this simple rule change is that it doesn’t really alter anything. In fact, the situation comes up so seldom that it won’t even cross people’s minds most of the time.

But in this case, when we’re dealing with the tire fire that is this year’s NFC East, it can act as a nice little carrot/punishment for whichever of the Eagles or Cowboys finally decide they want to make the playoffs.

I see no drawback to the NFL adopting this change to its playoff format, and neither should any of those “half a brain” folks who knew that this year’s NFC East would be a two-horse race.

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It just happened to turn out that both horses were Barbaro.

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