This Sunday, around 200 million people across the globe will sit back on their recliners and watch the Super Bowl, the self-proclaimed greatest sporting event in the world.
What they probably won’t realize inbetween watching the $3 million, 30-second Bud Light commercials and listening to the asinine drone of announcers John Madden and Al Michaels, is that this year’s match-up highlights one of the terrifying truths of modern sports—the regular season has become relatively meaningless.
The regular season is no longer a grueling strain of time that separates the contenders from the pretenders. Case in point: this year’s Arizona Cardinals, the NFC’s representative in the Super Bowl.
Arizona had a mediocre regular season. They finished with a 9-7 record that included a 28-point loss to the Philadelphia Eagles, a 21-point loss to the Minnesota Vikings, and a 40-point loss to the New England Patriots. They limped into the playoffs by winning the worst division in football, a division in which the second-place team, the San Francisco 49ers, finished a meager 7-9 only because they won four of their last five games. They had the worst rushing offense and the 26th-ranked scoring defense in the NFL. The Arizona Cardinals weren’t anyone’s Super Bowl pick in the NFC.
Surprisingly, Arizona came out strong in the Wild Card playoff round and defeated rookie phenom Matt Ryan and the rebounding Atlanta Falcons 30-24. The next week, the Cardinals had to travel to Carolina and face a Panthers squad that had already beaten them in the regular season. Perplexingly, the Cardinals handily beat the well-rested Panthers 33-13. Finally, in the NFC Championship game, Arizona pulled off their most shocking defeat of the postseason—they beat a scorching Eagles team that had already slaughtered them in the regular season.
Arizona’s run to the Super Bowl has been nothing short of remarkable. But it proves that what happens in football’s first 16 games doesn’t mean much by the time January rolls around. Maybe that’s good for the old sports catchphrase that anything is possible, but it leaves a sour taste in the mouths of most traditional sports fans.
The regular season is supposed to be a period of discovery. A team is supposed to find out what it’s made of and create an identity that will either make or break its season. Instead, the playoffs have expanded and opened thats doors to identity-less, mediocre teams who sometimes make phenomenal runs to championship games. The Cardinals are a completely different team now than they were in the regular season. They have created a new identity out of the postseason air.
The casual fan may be hypnotized by what seems like a true underdog story, but the traditional fan knows that no matter what the final result is, the underdog is more lucky than he is talented.
Though it will never happen, the playoff field needs to be shortened to only include the best teams from the regular season. The change would both reward the league’s best teams for consistently navigating their way to success for 17 consecutive weeks and reward football fans by ensuring the best competition will play out come postseason time.
The NFL should revert to its three division, four playoff team format. If that were still the case, the Cardinals, formerly of the NFC East, would have finished behind both the New York Giants and Philadelphia Eagles, leaving them out of the playoffs.
The NFL, that traditional sell-out of American sports, is too concerned with making money to ever reward the best teams in the league by making the playoffs the elusive sanctuary it’s meant to be. Even if the Cardinals are lucky enough to win professional football’s holiest of holies, I would rather watch a team that is actually good.
Contenders vs. Pretenders. That’s poetry, Tom. Keep up the good work.