A complicated set of tiebreakers, Part 2
When it comes to figuring out who is first, the NFL has always had a plan. Just not good ones.
When it comes to setting up a dreaded “complicated set of tiebreakers” few professional sports leagues can match the National Football League. Over time, it has developed more and more complicated systems, although always for competitive reasons, not just for the sake of being complicated.
Although the NFL has played championship games officially since 1933, the league always grappled with determining who was in first place. And it’s frequently been a mess.
Initially, the league didn’t have playoffs and broke ties through some decision of the league office. There was a sketchy championship given to the Decatur Staleys in 1921.
There is a long-festering dispute over who truly won the 1925 championship: was it the officially listed champion Chicago (now Arizona) Cardinals or the Pottsville Maroons? Emotions are still heated about this in the Pottsville area. There are books written about the topic. (I know I read one of them!)
In 1932, the Chicago Bears and Portsmouth Spartans (now the Detroit Lions) ended up tied at the end of the season and had tied the two games they played against each other. The NFL decided to hold a one off tiebreaker playoff game. Which the Bears won 9-0. It was far from a normal game and you can read about it here. (If you don’t wih to click, it was played on an indoor 80-yard field.)
The upshot of the 1932 tiebreaker game was that the NFL decided to divide itself into divisions, imaginatively named East and West for most of the time, and have the winner of each division play each other for the championship. The home field would alternate divisions. Sometimes the home team didn’t seem to excited to be at home. In 1936, the team that is now the Washington Commanders was playing its last season in Boston and the owner moved the championship game against Green Bay to the Polo Grounds in New York.
However, there would be ties in the divisions as time went on. They were settled by just having the tied teams play an extra game to decide the winner. In 1950, both divisions were ties! Not much thought was put into the competitive disadvantage of having one team having to play an extra game, but it was a different era. The last playoff game like this in the NFL was played in 1965. And it was very weird with a running back playing quarterback and the game going to overtime on a field goal that probably wasn’t good and then ending on an undisputed one.
In 1966, the NFL and the AFL settled their differences and established the Super Bowl to decide on a unifed champ. The next season, the NFL expanded from 15 to 16 teams, adding the New Orleans Saints (Atlanta had joined the previous season.) With that many teams, the NFL added an extra set of playoffs and doubled the number of divisions from two to four. It wasn’t an easy decision to decide where each team would go as certain teams wanted to make sure they would be guaranteed a home game against a team that drew well.
The division names all started with C: Capitol, Century, Coastal, and Central. The only one that would look familiar to people today would be the Central, which had Green Bay, Detroit, Minnesota, and Chicago, which is today’s NFC North. The Capitol and Century were effectively the East and the Coastal and Central were the West.
Each division winner would make the playoffs with the home fields set on a rotating basis. However, with an extra week of playoffs, the NFL did not want to have to play tiebreaker games anymore. So, the NFL instituted a “complicated set of tiebreakers.”
The first set of tiebreakers were not complicated actually. There were just two criteria. The first one was overall score in games between the tied times. The second one was “team that had gone the longest without winning the division.”
In the very first season of this setup, the NFL had to use a tiebreaker. In the Coastal Division, the Los Angeles Rams and Baltimore Colts entered the final week of the season with the Colts ahead by one game at 11-0-2. The Rams were 10-1-2. The teams had tied their first game in Baltimore. So, in the final game of the season at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, the Rams needed to beat the Colts to force a tie for first and they would win the tiebreaker along with it.
The Rams beat the Colts handily 34-10 and were declared Coastal Division1 champions with an 11-1-2 record, the same as the Colts. The Rams reward for having the best record in the NFL was a road playoff game in Milwaukee against the 9-4-1 Packers. The Rams lost 28-7.
The NFL kept the weird division names for two more seasons and they completely revamped their divisions and playoff format after the merger with the AFL was completed in 1970. The league now had two three-team conferences and each division champion plus a wild card made the playoffs. This meant that their needed to be a different tiebeaker system since it was possible for teams from different divisions to be tied for a playoff spot.
So, the NFL added another layer to the mix in that teams tied for a playoff spot would be decided first by head to head games and then by record in games within a conference or division as would be relevant. (Teams played 11 games in their own conference and 3 outside it at first). After that, you entered into a “complicated set of tiebreakers”. Or so the New York Times would lead you to believe in a December 9, 1973 article “Teams in N.F.L. Contention Face Tiebreaker Contortions.”
The article outlines the various tiebreakers in place at the time: head to head, division record (if applicable), conference record, total points in head-to-head games, and then something called “point differential” (quotes were used to show weird it was, and mathematically incorrect.) Instead of just subtracting points allowed from points scored and picking the team with the better number, “point differential” used the rankings of the teams within their conference in points scored and points allowed. So if you were first in points scored but fifth in points allowed, you’d get a 6. When the New York Times revisited the topic, a week later on December 16, 1973, writer William N. Wallace changed the phrase from “point differential” to “point-rating”
There were no ties for playoff spots until 1973 when Cincinnati and Pittsburgh tied at 10-4 in the AFC Central and Washington and Dallas both were 10-4 in the NFC East. In each case, the teams were 1-1 head to head. Cincinnati had the better conference record (8-3) than Pittsburgh (7-4) and won the division. However, Washington and Dallas tied in division and conference record. Dallas prevailed because they outscored Washington on the season by a margin of 34-21. Washington advanced to the playoffs as a wild card, as did the Steelers. 10-4 Dallas would host 12-2 Los Angeles in the first round of the playoffs and defeat the Rams before losing to Minnesota.2
The NFL has tweaked the tiebreaker system several times since then, but it has left it alone since 2002. The current system greatly downplays the importance of points scored or allowed as a tiebreaker. In general, it’s not a good thing for a sport to be in the business of encouraging teams to run up the score. Or the situation that occured in 1973, where Washington could have found themselves losing to Dallas by a small enough margin to clinch the tiebreaker of total points and then running out the clock without attempting to win.3
In the most recent NFL season, there were a few ties for playoff spots, and both third wild card spots were decided on tiebreakers. In the AFC, Miami and Pittsburgh both finished 9-8. In the NFC, Seattle and Detroit were also both 9-8. In each case, the teams had met during the regular season with Miami beating Pittsburgh and Seattle beating Detroit. Minnesota and San Francisco tied for the second seed and the 49ers got the edge on conference record. Baltimore and the L.A. Chargers tied for the first wild card spot at 10-7 and the Chargers had the superior conference record.
While researching this, I was taken by the difference in the way that baseball and football fans regard playoffs and their setups. Baseball fans, as they are wont to do, hold the playoffs as a special heightened level of achievement. Even with six of the fifteen teams in each league making the playoffs, it’s still considered special and rare. Baseball fans care a lot about the setup of the playoffs, especially when 100 win teams like the Dodgers, Mets, and Atlanta, are eliminated in short series (3 or 5 games) by usurpers like the Padres and Phillies.4
NFL fans are fare more accepting, or perhaps just resigned to the fact that they can’t do anything, to the setup that the playoffs have. In the last few weeks of each NFL season, fans check out the playoff possibilities report and are ready to accept when Al Michaels tells them that Team A will clinch a playoff spot with a win or tie and if 3 of Teams B through F lose.
Consider the 2021 NFL season. On the final day, the Pittsburgh won their final game to finish the season 9-7-1. We (the fans) were told that the Steelers had clinched a playoff spot unless the Sunday night game beween the Raiders and Chargers ended in a tie. Not that people really cared just why that was the case, which would have been because it would have created a three-way tie at 9-7-1 that the Steelers would have finished third (the Raiders and Chargers would have had one fewer conference loss than Pittsburgh). But, infamously in my opinion, the Raiders won the game against the Chargers as overtime expired.
In what will thankfully be the last installment of this series which no one really asked for, we’ll look at the NHL, NBA, and some soccer. But I promise no college sports because those are even too weird by my standards.
There’s also a TL;DR version of this from another site.
The other two teams in the Coastal Division were San Francisco and Atlanta.
In the AFC, 12-2 Miami hosted both of its playoff games, but that was because the rotation favored them. The previous season, the 14-0 Dolphins played the AFC Championship game at 11-3 Pittsburgh. Nobody thought that this was weird.
Coaches George Allen and Tom Landry both said that they would not do such a thing. And since the teams still had a game to play after their final meeting, it would have been a very high risk maneuver.
Everybody loves an underdog. Until the team you root for loses to one. Then it’s either a miscarriage of justice or an indelible stain on the team’s reputation.