My newspaper tells me that tonight's NFL tilt between Atlanta and Detroit will help determine whether the Falcons clinch home field advantage on the road to the Super Bowl. The implication is that the contest is significant for this reason despite decades of experience.
In fact, tonight's clash is a near total irrelevance. The last two Super Bowl champs staggered to 9-7 records and slipped into the playoffs in the last week before eliminating all those 13-3 and 12-4 behemoths with home field advantage.
In fact, in American professional sports today simply making the playoffs is the entire goal. Period. After that, flip a coin.
Don't believe me? The football Giants weren't the only team last year to parlay a mediocre regular season into a crown. The L.A. Kings stumbled into the NHL playoffs with more losses than wins, qualified last and then swept through their conference with easy wins over the #1, #2 and #3 seeds before winning the cup in six games.
The 2011 World Series champion St. Louis Cardinals snuck into the post-season on the last day of the regular season with the worst record in the playoffs. (The 2012 World Series champs, the division-winning S.F. Giants, were a legitimate champion.)
During a thankfully truncated NBA season, the Miami Heat faced boobirds and derision because of a 9-8 start before capturing the #2 seed in the East and winning it all.
So when the NHL announces that half its season is lost, even hockey fans should applaud. Forty games seems about right if all they're going to do is eliminate a handful of awful teams. (On the other hand, the league and its players appear on the verge of another Armageddon. All involved have a bright future in Congress, once they earn their American citizenship.)
And we should all laugh when the sport's advocates promote a meaningless match-up like tonight's Falcon-Lion snoozer, as a playoff positioner. Anyone paying the least bit of attention anytime over the last three decades realizes there's no such thing.
A good rule of thumb for playoffs should be this: Qualifying should be sufficiently difficult that some good teams get left out. That ensures that playoff qualifying is an accomplishment and that a good team will win the title irrespective of who catches fire for a couple of weeks in the post-season. Major League baseball and the NFL are both straddling the line, which the NBA and NHL long ago breached.
The NFL is reportedly considering the addition of two more teams to its playoff lineup. It is difficult to overstate how awesomely awful this idea is. Adding two more palyoff slots guarantees that an 8-8 team will parlay a couple of fluke wins into a Super Bowl championship. Blecch.
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