NFL division winners need to stop getting automatic home playoff games

Winning your division in the NFL is an important goal every season. It comes with an automatic playoff bid and, at worst, a home game in the first round. But with ample evidence that not all divisions are created equal, do all division winners really deserve the same privilege?

This is well illustrated right now in the NFC. In the NFC South, nobody has a winning record. The Atlanta Falcons and New Orleans Saints are tied at 5-6 while the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are 4-7. Any of them could still win the division, but odds are that none of them will be better than 9-8 when they do it. Somebody could even win with a below .500 record.

The Dallas Cowboys are the heavy favorites to wind up as the NFC’s top wild-card team and the fifth seed. That would put them on the road in the first round against the NFC South “winner.” While they have some tough December games coming, it would take an epic collapse for Dallas to wind up with a worse record than whoever comes out of the South.

After Thursday’s win over the Seahawks, Dallas has the second-best record in the entire conference. The only issue is that they’re stuck behind the Eagles in their own division, which caps their seeding potential at the fifth seed if Philly takes the NFC East.

2023 isn’t the first time we’ve seen this issue. In fact, we saw it last year when the 8-9 Buccaneers won the NFC South and hosted the 12-5 Cowboys in the first round. Washington was 7-9 when they won the NFC East in 2020. Even more common is when a division winner doesn’t have a losing record overall but also doesn’t have one of the four best records in the conference.

In 2019, Philadelphia won the NFC East with a 9-7 record. They hosted the 11-5 Seahawks in the first round, who had the third-best record in the NFC but were bested by the 49ers within their division. What really made this one goofy, though, was Seattle had actually beaten the Eagles during the regular season.

A home playoff game is a reward. Less travel for the team, another game for the home crowd; it’s supposed to acknowledge what a team accomplished and give them a boon to start the tournament. So why are the rules set up to reward mediocrity?