Exploring the NFL’s Playoff Format: Six Options for Improvement

Evaluating the NFL’s 14-Team Playoff Format: A Five-Year Review

As we dive into the 2024 NFL season, it’s hard to believe we’re already in the fifth year of the 14-team playoff bracket. The league’s decision to expand the playoffs from 12 teams to 14 was primarily a financial move, designed to generate more revenue. By adding a team in each conference and eliminating the first-round bye for the No. 2 seed, the NFL created two extra playoff games, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars for the league’s owners.

With five seasons of wild-card rounds behind us and the College Football Playoff expanding to 12 teams this season, it’s a natural time to assess the NFL postseason. Beyond the financial gains, what has the expanded playoff format accomplished? Are the playoffs more entertaining for fans? With nearly half of the league’s teams making it to the postseason, has the postseason been diluted? Should the NFL consider changing the format again? Lions wide receiver Amon-Ra St. Brown certainly thinks so.

Let’s start by examining the lessons learned from the first five years of the 14-team era and explore how the league could tweak things, for better or worse.

How has the 14-team bracket affected the NFL?

1. The No. 7 seed has mostly been cannon fodder. Facing a No. 2 seed that would have previously enjoyed a first-round bye, the 10 No. 7 seeds since 2020 have collectively gone 1-9. The only 7-seed to win was in 2023, when the Packers stomped the Cowboys 48-32. This season, the Packers lost by 12 points to the Eagles as the 7-seed over the weekend, while the 7-seed Broncos gave up 31 unanswered points to the Bills after an early touchdown.

It was exciting to see Jordan Love and the Packers in last season’s bracket, but most 7-seeds haven’t exactly looked like Super Bowl contenders. Were Bears fans excited about the chances of Mitchell Trubisky and their 8-8 team in 2020? Did a Dolphins team limping to the finish with Skylar Thompson under center have high hopes in 2022? Probably not. The 7-seed has mostly given flawed teams the right to get stomped on the road.

By play-by-play metric DVOA, though, the 7-seed hasn’t advanced terrible teams into the postseason. More often, it has added a team that deserved to get in based on pure performance. The average seventh seed, by DVOA, has been the league’s 11th-best team in football entering the playoffs. That includes two top-six teams from 2024 — Packers (fourth) and Broncos (sixth).

The only team that had no business getting in was the 2021 Steelers, who were outscored by 55 points and ranked 24th in the league by DVOA. ESPN’s Football Power Index (FPI) pegged them as the 20th-best team that season. They won two regular-season games against playoff teams all season, and then Patrick Mahomes threw for 404 yards with five touchdowns against them in a 42-21 Chiefs wild-card victory.

2. The top seeds are still reaching the Super Bowl at the same rate. With only one team in each conference earning a bye under the 14-team format, teams have been more incentivized to land the No. 1 seed. Theoretically, it should pave a clearer path to a Super Bowl, as those teams are the only ones that can’t be upset in the wild-card round and get to face the easiest opponent left in their bracket at home until the Super Bowl.

It’s an even smaller sample than the one I’m using elsewhere in this piece, since it’s unknown which team will make it to the title game, but things haven’t shifted dramatically. So far, 50% of the 1-seeds in the 14-game format have made it to the Super Bowl. The only championship game in which both top seeds advanced through the bracket was Super Bowl LVII, when the Chiefs beat the Eagles.

From 2002 (when the league expanded to 32 teams and evolved into its current divisional structure) to 2019 (the final year of the 12-team playoff), guess what percentage of No. 1 seeds made it to the Super Bowl? Exactly 50%. Five of those 18 seasons ended with 1-seeds dueling in the championship. In the one-team bye format, there’s no evidence top seeds have been any more successful than they were in the past.

3. The value proposition of the 2-seed has changed. If No. 7 seeds are 1-9 since 2020, that means No. 2 seeds are 9-1 in the wild-card round under the new format. Facing seemingly overmatched teams feels like a benefit to pushing for the No. 2 seed, but it’s also a step down from the previous 12-team playoff, when the No. 2 seed earned a bye to the divisional round.

Before, the difference between the 1- and 2-seeds wasn’t as significant. Though teams would rather play the lowest-seeded team in the divisional round and host a potential 1-2 matchup in the conference title game, both franchises got to take off for the wild-card round. Now, the 2-seed doesn’t get that extra week to rest.

Will teams stop caring about the No. 2 seed? There’s only one example of a team concretely passing up an opportunity to compete for that spot. In 2020, the Steelers sat Ben Roethlisberger and several other stars in the final game of the season, even though a win and a Bills loss could have given them the 2-seed. (The Bills won, so it wouldn’t have mattered.) The 2022 Vikings rotated their starters out in the second half of a Week 18 game against the Bears to keep alive their chances of claiming the 2-seed, but they were already ahead by multiple scores.

What changes could the league consider? Time to put on our thinking caps. The league doesn’t necessarily have to make any changes to the postseason, but is there anything it could do to improve the quality of play and/or make the end of the regular season more meaningful? Let’s run through some options and weigh the pros, cons, and plausibility of each:

Option No. 1: Go back to a 12-team playoff

• Pros: There would be fewer teams perceived to be hopeless entering the postseason, although as I mentioned above, those 7-seeds are better than most think. There hasn’t been a 7-seed make a deep run yet, but given that 6-seeds such as the 2010 Packers won a Super Bowl, a 7-seed running the table probably will happen eventually. A 12-team playoff would presumably go back to the two-bye system, which would make the 2-seed more valuable, albeit at the expense of the 1-seed.
• Cons: There would be two fewer playoff games. The NFL would lose the $140 million in television rights fees it receives on a yearly basis from those deals, plus the revenue generated from those games. And as a result …
• Plausibility: Nil. There’s no way the league would return to the 12-team playoff. And while the No. 2 vs. No. 7 games have mostly been uncompetitive, I was surprised to see that teams making it into the playoffs as the 7-seed have been mostly good, according to DVOA. I’m not sure there should be a push to reduce the playoff size, even if it were possible.

Option No. 2: Move to a 16-team playoff

• Pros: What about going in the opposite direction? Adding two more teams would mean half the league makes it into the postseason, which would theoretically create more meaningful action in the final weeks of the regular season. More playoff spots mean more teams having something to play for in early January, which would probably mean fewer games in which a team that definitely isn’t tanking trots out its third-string quarterback down the stretch.
• Cons: The only realistic way to do a 16-team playoff would be to do an eight-team bracket in each conference, which would mean no bye for the first seed. Leaving play-in games aside, the NBA and NHL have managed to do a 16-team playoff bracket without any byes for many years, and the NCAA tournament is four 16-team brackets without any teams getting a week off. But football is understandably a different animal.
• Plausibility: Slim. The league would undoubtedly love more revenue, but there would be significant pushback from teams that want to earn the right to rest for the wild-card round. It could also remove incentive from teams to play hard late in the season, given that the benefit of landing the 1-seed would be reduced to home-field advantage and potentially easier opponents within their bracket. This might seem more realistic down the line, perhaps in a universe in which the NFL has 18 regular-season games and adds a few expansion teams.

Option No. 3: Reseed the playoffs based on record, regardless of where each team finished within its division

• Pros: This has come up more often in 2024, as the Vikings became the first 14-win wild-card team in league history. While teams in the NFC South spent Week 18 seemingly sputtering in their attempts to clinch the division, I can understand why people felt the Vikings deserved a home game more than the Buccaneers or Falcons.
• Cons: NFL schedules are mostly defined by the division in which teams play, which would give good teams an opportunity to rack up a gaudy record in a weaker division. In 2012, for example, the Ravens finished as the 4-seed when they won the AFC North with a 10-6 record while facing the second-toughest schedule in the AFC. In this scenario, the 5-seed Colts would have jumped them for a home game, having gone 11-5 against the league’s easiest schedule, including only three wins over teams with winning records. Is that a fairer system?
• Plausibility: Reasonable. I suspect there will be conversation about this during the offseason, though I’d be surprised if the league actually changed the format so soon. History tells us there won’t be as many 13- or 14-win wild-card teams, so the sort of extreme example that cries out for a structural switch probably will not happen often.

Option No. 4: Take away home playoff games from divisional champs without winning records

• Pros: OK, this one seems more realistic. Hosting a playoff game would become the NFL’s equivalent of becoming bowl-eligible — a team needing nine wins to qualify. If it wins its division with a sub-.500 record, as the 2022 Buccaneers (8-9) and 2020 Commanders (7-9) did, its first-round matchup would be on the road at the best wild-card team. Given that those teams both lost badly at home to the Cowboys and Bucs, respectively, it’s tough to make the argument they deserved to play at home.
• Cons: Things don’t always go that way. In 2010, a 6-9 Seahawks team clinched the division with a win over the Rams in Week 17. Instead of playing an 11-5 Saints team in New Orleans, they hosted Drew Brees & Co. in Seattle. What happened next registered on the Richter scale. Those Seahawks rode home-field advantage to one of the biggest postseason upsets in recent memory.
• Plausibility: This could happen! No NFL team wants to win its division and miss out on the revenue of hosting a playoff game, but for every 8-9 team that would lose its right to a home game, there’s another 12-5 team that would benefit from getting its game at home. It’s theoretically possible a sub-.500 team could be stuck in a brutal division and win eight games against a tough schedule, but I don’t see any recent examples. This one seems like a winner, even if it wouldn’t play out often.

Option No. 5: Only reseed the wild cards across conferences

• Pros: Keeping the AFC and NFC separated until the Super Bowl felt meaningful right after the merger, but in 1971, the eventual champion Cowboys played only three games against AFC competition before the Super Bowl. With the move to the 17-game schedule, the 2024 champion will have played five games against teams from the other conference.
• Cons: Well, not everybody likes new matchups. There wouldn’t be as many scenarios in which the Ravens and Steelers play each other for the third time in a season. That didn’t exactly lead to a thrilling matchup in this season’s wild-card round, but those third games between divisional rivals can be fun. I’m also just not sure there’s a huge appetite for cross-conference playoff matchups among everyone, even if they’re fun to me.
• Plausibility: Probably not. This would seem like more work than it’s worth, and owners would probably prefer the familiarity of facing a longtime rival than a team they see once every four years. With so many potential opponents in each round, scouting would also be a nightmare, which could lead to sloppier games.

Option No. 6: Let teams choose their opponents in the wild-card round

• Pros: This would be incredible, offering a real benefit for finishing as the 2-seed in each conference. In this scenario, immediately after the final regular-season game Sunday night, there would be a live show where the higher-seeded teams chose their opponent for wild-card weekend. The 2-seed would have its pick of the 5-, 6- or 7-seed. The 3-seed would then choose between the two remaining options, and the 4-seed would end up with whatever matchup remains.
• Cons: I’m hardly the first person to come up with this idea, and everyone else who brought it up for their respective sports has the same critique: Coaches would never go for this. Teams are usually terrified of giving their opponents anything resembling bulletin-board material before the playoffs. The Rams used Lions coach Dan Campbell saying he would see Vikings coach Kevin O’Connell in two weeks as a rallying cry before their blowout win over Minnesota. Imagine an NFL coach going on camera and saying he wants to play a certain team. The first upset would get somebody fired.
• Plausibility: Never happening. It would be fun, though.