The first Monday night playoff game was in the NFL. It has its first expanded playoffs in a non...well, less COVID season. It was a bust. Some were wondering what all the fuss was about after one good game.
It is natural to say that the expanded playoffs made this happen. It makes for garbage entertainment to let in a team that wouldn't have been good enough in the past and then drop a team that would have gotten a bye into the first round. The suspicion about the 2-7 seed matchups was made pretty concrete by the teams. The Bills and Colts were both good games last year. The Niners-Cowboys was the only one of the four that ended up in a close game that the Niners would have gotten in the previous system.
It could be one of those years where the league's goal of parity never really came to fruition. The Cowboys only won over a playoff team, the Eagles, and an OT win against the Pats, and that was all the Cowboys could muster. Three-fourths of the South drown in the rain, as did three-fourths of the North. If you had half a clue about what you were doing, there were a lot of easy wins to pick up. It could make it hard to figure out who was good and who wasn't. The 17th game added a lot of wear-and-tear on the teams that aren't as well equipped to deal with rifling through their depth. They would probably be higher seeds if not for that.
We knew that the North below the Bengals was trash. We won't know about the South until the Titans show up next week, and there will be plenty of picking the Bengal.
It is hard to see why the league would care about a 2-7 game. Everyone will watch, networks will drop anvils on each other for the right to get more playoff games, so this is what we will be served from now on. I want to live in your optimistic world if you think that MLB will see this and decide to expand the playoffs so they can have more trash rounds. It must be nice.
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