That's something I never understood about American sports and the playoff system in American sports generally. How is it that a team that lost 1 game out of every 3 it played (12-6) is declared champion over a team that had lost none (18-0).

I'm an English football (soccer) fan and have brought up this point before to friends of mine who are NFL fans and never had a satisfactory answer. Just curious if anyone else had an answer.

Thanks :)

My guess is that the Pats/Brady/Belichick combination will have the same half-life as the Yankees -- people will still talk about how great they are even if they don't win another championship for almost a decade (grin).

Great play by the defense until the final whistle (no prevent defense for the final 30 seconds!) and no mistakes by the offense -- just about perfect execution of the game plan.

As a Pats' fan, I knew the game was over when in addition to avoiding a sack, Manning managed to complete an impossible pass down field. In prior runs that would have been a sack or an interception and another New England win.

Well played ... unfortunately this means that Mercury Morris will be back the next time a team makes a run at perfection!

I don't have two hours to devote to reading Simmons' column. Can someone sum it up for me? Does he slag Glendale?

Evan,

In the NFL, playoffs comes down to who is the better team for 60 minutes on the field. The Giants improved over the course of the season and the playoffs, and the Patriots if anything maybe regressed a little bit - several teams almost beat them over the last few games. Why not let the best teams from each conference play the game to see who is the better team, rather than just anoint a winner?

The Giants defense made Brady look like David Carr out there for most of the game. In my opinion the Giants D was the MVP.

-Mike

Mike,
Exactly. That 60 minutes seems to me to nullify the entire regular season.

You have to understand that I'm used to a sport where you have 20 teams in a top division, playing each other twice (once home, once away), so that there is never any doubt or debate who the best team is over the course of a season. It just always seemed odd to me (and most of us Euros), how a team with 6 times the number of losses as another could be declared champion.

Evan,

It would be impossible for each team in the NFL to play each other twice a year, therefore, a playoff to determine a champion makes sense. The schedule is set up each year in such a way where it can favor one team over another. The Patriots, for example, were able to play the Bills, Jets and Dolphins twice, thus making their schedule easier than the Giants, who had to play the Cowboys, Eagles, and Redskins, all of whom had at least a 8-8 record at the end of the regular season.

Also, the AFC and NFC were originally seperate leagues that did not play a combined schedule until 1970. The first three Super Bowls were challenge games between the champions of the two leagues.

Ironically, rugby league (Super League in England), which is the sport that most closely resembles American football, does use a playoff system to determine it's champion.

The playoff system in North American sports comes from the set of challenges made by champions of seperate leagues in the beginning of the professional sports era. The World Series was originally a challenge made by the American League champion in Boston to the National League champion in Pittsburgh. The American and National Leagues teams did not even begin inter-league play until the 1990's. The Stanley Cup (ice hockey) was originally awarded to the champions of a tournament in 1892. The rules determining what teams could compete for the Cup evolved from a challenge series to the winner of the NHL postseason tournament over time.

Charles, I promise this will be my last post on this as I don't want to be accused of turning your site into an ESPN forum :)

The NFL really wouldn't have to play everybody twice as it does in EPL, they could avoid a playoff system entirely and still keep the number of non-playoff games the same....add two teams, one to each league, 17 teams per conference, 16 games, half away, half at home. Winner of the two conferences, play each other in the Super Bowl. But, of course, the NFL would never do this, as regular season viewing would become to slump off towards the end of the season as teams would need to finish top to advance, rather than just the top 6 (if I understand the playoff structure correctly), not to mention the loss of revenue from the other eliminated playoff games. I was just angling that the playoff system isn't designed to crown the best team over the course of the year, which is just a really strange concept to me; and how cruel it must be to be a New England fan at 0 losses and have to say you're not the champion to a team that not only had 6 losses, but didn't even win it's own division of just 4 teams.

No worries, Evan. There's a factor that needs to be discussed here, and that's money. (It always comes down to money, right?) Playoff games mean big money for franchises and TV. Back in the old days, before TV was a factor, playoffs were simple. In baseball, you had two leagues, one champion of each, and a playoff (the World Series) between them. Now eight teams get in the playoffs. It used to be that only two football teams from the NFL made the playoffs; now twelve teams do. The playoffs are basically a separate entity, which changes the calculus of the regular season. I don't disagree with anything you've said here, but the bottom line is This Is How It Is, and the reason for it has little to do with the "best" team being named champion.

One last thing: The NFL playoffs are seeded, with the top teams getting a first-round bye, and home-field advantage. The Patriots had an easier road to the Super Bowl than the Giants did - the Giants had to play one more game, and all of their games were on the road. That's as far as it goes, however. It does matter, but it's not destiny.