The Lions have proposed playoff seeding independent of division championship. Even if the proposal fails, it will spark a conversation for the powers-that-be.
Earlier this week, Competition Committee chairman Rich McKay addressed the situation during a call with reporters.
He said that the issue has come up before, but that it hasn’t been a recent topic.
“It has been discussed, but it’s been a little while, so it’ll be a fresh discussion,” McKay said, via Nolan Bianchi of the Detroit News.
McKay added that, at one point, former Panthers owner Jerry Richardson sold his colleagues on the importance of winning a division.
“I think, maybe a year or two later, we had another discussion about this,” McKay said. “But it was a little different. It was the idea of re-seeding after round one, as opposed to taking away the division championship as an automatic home game.”
This year, that approach would have sent the Rams to the Lions for the divisional round, and the Eagles would have hosted the Commanders. In the AFC, the games would not have changed; it still would have been the Texans at the Chiefs and the Ravens at the Bills.
Even though the Lions haven’t proposed re-seeding after the Wild Card round, the owners can do whatever they want — as long as 24 want to do it.
If the NFL would eliminate the automatic home game for division winners, the NFL also should reconsider the scheduling formula to ensure that it’s a more fair and equitable reflection of the best teams in the conference, relative to the other teams.
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