October 05, 2007

The Playoffs, As We Know Them, Are Bunk: My (quixotic, admittedly) proposal for overhauling the playoff and regular season system for all of American sports.

It occurs to me that we're doing it all wrong in North American sports. Or rather, there may be a better way.

In the NFL, NBA, NHL & now NASCAR, teams fight and claw their way around the continent for months at a time for a coveted and often short-lived slot in a month-long (or so) playoff format, while the other teams sit around and do nothing. It just seems kind of anticlimactic and lopsided, and it diminishes the importance of the games in the regular season. Teams coast home instead of pushing right to the end, the players are fatigued and injured from a long season of attrition, fans lose interest, and the excitement consolidates into a few select markets instead of staying league-wide right to the end of the playing year.

By comparison: in European sports (specifically but not exclusively the soccer leagues), the last game of the year is the end of the regular season, and instead of starting the playoffs immediately afterward, there are set breaks over the course of the season where the successful teams from the year before get to have their playoffs, their various champions leagues, their exhibition matches, and the like. They're the same for everyone, and they serve more or less exactly the same purpose playoffs do. The teams that have earned those extra dates get the corresponding revenue, the trophies still get awarded (in fact, you could even award more trophies this way; imagine a US baseball version of the FA Cup, with, say, the top AAA teams in a lottery-draw round-robin with a few major league teams. It wouldn't have the prestige of the World Series or anything, but it would be another fun thing going on during the season, and no owner would sneer at the extra gate revenue.)

Aside from the season being the same length for everyone, which levels the playing field from year to year, and the playoff dates being played the same way they normally would, this also would ensure sustained interest through the entire year, instead of trying to cram a concentrated sliver of hype into one month, when everyone involved is starting to get punchy and could use a break from your sport. And it would have the added bonus of giving the regular season a little extra weight. In hockey, the President's Trophy is given to the team with the best record in the regular season. Wouldn't it be cool if (a) every league had one of those, and (b) it meant something? More hardware for the teams means more interest league-wide. More often than not, the best team in the regular season doesn't win the playoffs, so at least this way there would be two different teams who could point at something shiny and say, "well, last year was a success for us, and now we want to win the double!"

In baseball, for example, The Boston Red Sox would have won (oh, let's make up a name) the Commissioner's Trophy for the best record in the regular season, and it might not be that horrible contraption they give away at the end of the World Series, but it would be something they could put in a trophy case even before the playoffs start. And then you could schedule, say, two four-day breaks a week or two apart, to play the LDS games, and then a few weeks after that you repeat the process for the LCS's. The non-playing teams could even have their all-star game in one of those breaks, and the other teams could have exhibitions or trips or teambuilding or strategery or whatever during that time. It all works out. And if you still want to hold the World Series in October, you totally could, though the regular season, having been expanded by three weeks or so, would be ending just before or just after it.

Same thing would go for hockey & basketball. Nothing is going to replace Lord Stanley's Cup or the Larry O'Brien Trophy, but there's always room for other trinkets. And the NFL could fit this neatly into their bye-week system without even breaking a sweat. You think people wouldn't get excited about a playoff game in Week Eight for the right to play in Week Eleven? Tell me you couldn't sell that.

I know, I know, it'll never happen, if only because people here (meaning: the sports punditocracy, who fear change more than many Amish people) wouldn't ever give it a shot. But I've been rolling the idea around for a while in my mind, and I had to see if it looked as reasonable written out as it did in my head.

So seriously, why wouldn't that work here?

posted by chicobangs to commentary at 04:07 AM - 0 comments