Somewhere around late September every year, a familiar argument breaks out in sports bars and group texts across the country. A team wins ninety-one games in a season that stretches from April to October, gets bounced in a best-of-three series by a club that won eighty-four, and someone inevitably says it. That’s not the best team. The best team just lost.
They’re not wrong, exactly. They’re also not asking the right question, because American sports were never fully built to answer the one they think they’re asking.
Seventeen Games and a Guess
Start with a fact that surprises people once they hear it: the NFL didn’t begin with a playoff system either. From 1920 through 1932, the NFL had no scheduled championship game. Its champion was determined from the regular-season standings, though the league’s earliest titles were formally ratified by a vote of club owners. Then 1932 happened. The Chicago Bears and Portsmouth Spartans finished tied atop the standings with no clean mechanism to settle it, so the league staged a hastily arranged indoor playoff game, which Chicago won 9-0. The interest that game generated, along with a growing appetite for a clearer way to settle things, helped push the league to formalize the idea a year later. In 1933 the league split into Eastern and Western divisions, with the winners meeting in the first official NFL Championship Game. The Bears beat the Giants 23-21, and the modern idea of a football postseason was born essentially by accident, because a tiebreaker turned out to be more fun than a plain standings race.
From there the field only grew. Four teams in 1967, once the league reorganized into divisions. Eight after the AFL-NFL merger created two full conferences in 1970. Ten in 1978, alongside the expansion of the regular season itself from fourteen games to sixteen. The league also briefly expanded to sixteen playoff teams during the strike-shortened 1982 season before reverting to ten the following year, a reminder that even this history isn’t perfectly linear. Twelve in 1990. Fourteen as recently as 2020, part of the new collective bargaining agreement that owners and players hammered out that year. Every expansion came with a stated justification about access and competitive fairness, and every expansion also happened to create more nationally televised, high stakes football. The league’s own case for the 2020 expansion leaned on both: it pointed out that had a seventh playoff seed existed since 1990, forty-four of the sixty teams that would have qualified for it had winning records, including ten different ten-win clubs left out in the cold under the old format. That’s a legitimate competitive argument, drawn from the league’s own numbers. It also happens to be an argument that produces two additional playoff games every single January, and nobody at the NFL was losing sleep over that side effect.
It’s worth separating two things that tend to blur together in this history: adding franchises and adding playoff spots are not the same decision. New teams generally arrived for their own reasons, new television markets, expansion fees, and in the NFL’s case a merger with a rival league, and once those new teams existed, the leagues had to reorganize into more divisions just to make sense of the standings. That reorganization is what mechanically produced more division winners, and therefore more automatic playoff spots. The later additions, like extra wild card slots layered on top of an already-settled division structure, are a different kind of decision entirely, one clearly aimed at creating more valuable, more marketable postseason games rather than accommodating a bigger league.
Here’s the thing about the NFL specifically, though, and it’s easy to miss if you’re comparing sports without thinking about what a seventeen game season can actually tell you. Football doesn’t give you much data. Teams play an unbalanced schedule against a small slice of the league, one game a week, with injuries capable of swinging three or four wins in either direction depending on which body gets hurt and when. A standings table built on seventeen games isn’t lying to you, but it’s also not offering much confidence. Two teams can finish 10-7 and 9-8 and be functionally identical, separated by nothing more than a bounce of the ball in Week 4. In that world, a playoff isn’t just a business decision dressed up as fairness. It might be the most honest tool the league has, because the regular season alone often can’t do the sorting job by itself.
A Season Baseball Almost Trusts
Baseball is a completely different animal, and its history proves it.
For most of its existence, Major League Baseball didn’t have an internal playoff bracket at all. The American League and National League ran separate season-long pennant races, and whoever finished on top of each league simply advanced to play each other in the World Series, first held in 1903. The regular season wasn’t a qualifier for something else. It was the whole competition. Whoever survived 154, later 162 games with the best record in their league was, by definition, that league’s champion.
That changed in 1969, when expansion pushed each league to split into two divisions, creating the League Championship Series as a new round sitting between the regular season and the World Series. From there the familiar pattern repeats: expansion in 1985 to a best-of-seven LCS, a three-division realignment in 1995 that introduced the first wild card team in each league, a second wild card and a one-game play-in round added in 2012, and the current twelve-team format locked in by the 2022 collective bargaining agreement. Worth noting that 2020’s pandemic-shortened season briefly used a one-year sixteen-team postseason, an exception rather than a permanent step in this progression. Each real step added more teams, more meaningful September baseball for more fan bases, and more nationally televised October games. Nobody at MLB has ever really pretended otherwise. The 2012 change explicitly kept a real advantage for winning your division by making a wild card team survive a single win-or-go-home game before it could even reach the Division Series, which is itself an admission that the sport values whatever a 162-game season proves and wants a system that still respects it, at least a little.
But here’s what the research on this actually shows, and it’s sharper than most of us assume walking in. A 162-game schedule is genuinely the strongest regular season sample in North American sports. It should tell you more about which team is actually good than a seventeen game NFL season tells you about a football team. And in one sense, it does. Researchers looking at competitive balance across sports, using betting markets to estimate true team strength, have found that a good NFL team’s per-game win probability is meaningfully higher than a good baseball team’s. Football games are, in a strange way, less random than baseball games, even though football gives you far fewer of them to look at. Baseball is a sport where even a genuinely strong team often wins only a little more than half its games, night to night. One SABR analysis frames just how much noise that creates: for a hypothetical team that’s truly a .500 team, random variation alone would be expected to produce a standard deviation of roughly six wins across a 162-game season, treating each game as something close to an independent coin flip. Real baseball isn’t quite that clean, but it’s a useful benchmark for how much noise a full season can still carry even at its longest.
So when a 90-win team gets knocked out by an 84-win team in a five-game series, the honest answer to “was that fair” is more complicated than either side of the bar argument wants it to be. The 162-game season really did tell you something true and meaningful about team quality, more so than almost any other American sport’s regular season. But a short series was never built to preserve that signal. It was built to create a decisive, sellable event, and baseball has been very clear-eyed about that tradeoff every time it’s expanded the format. Multiple analysts, including a widely cited FanGraphs review of roughly sixty team-related variables, found that almost none of them meaningfully improved predictions of short-series outcomes beyond what a team’s regular-season record already suggested, which is why baseball writers have called the playoffs something close to a lottery for years.
The Table Doesn’t Blink
Now go look at what happens on the other side of the Atlantic, because England’s top flight makes a genuinely different choice, not an absence of one.
The Premier League, which began in its current form in 1992, didn’t invent the single table format. It inherited it from more than a century of English football, where the club with the most points at the end of the season was simply the champion, full stop. No conference, no bracket, no play-in game. Every club plays every other club twice, once at home and once on the road, for thirty-eight matches total. Three points for a win, one for a draw, none for a loss. Whoever accumulates the most points at the end of that common schedule wins the league. The Premier League’s own explanation of the format is almost disarmingly simple: every team plays every other team twice, and the team on top when it’s over is champion.
It’s worth sitting with what that format is actually optimizing for, because it’s not the same thing American leagues are optimizing for. There’s no mechanism in the Premier League for a team to get hot for three weeks in the spring and steal a trophy that thirty-seven matches of evidence say it didn’t earn. If you were the best team over the full season, judged against the exact same slate of opponents everyone else faced, you’re the champion. Full stop. The tradeoff, and English football is honest about this too, is that the drama doesn’t always survive to the final day. A dominant club can clinch with weeks to spare, and a team that finds its best form late in the year has no tournament to convert that form into a trophy. The reward for improvement has to show up in next season’s table instead.
Stakes at the Bottom
What’s easy to miss from an American perspective is that England isn’t allergic to playoffs. It just puts them somewhere else entirely. One level down, in the Championship, the second tier of English football, the top two teams are promoted automatically based on their table position, exactly the way the Premier League title works. But the final promotion spot goes to a playoff, which the EFL expanded for the 2026-27 season to include the third through eighth place teams, up from the previous third-through-sixth format. England will absolutely use a short, high-stakes tournament to settle something. It just doesn’t use one to settle who’s the best team in the country. That job stays with the table.
And that leads to the part of the English system with no real American equivalent at all: relegation. The bottom three Premier League clubs each season don’t just miss the playoffs. They get demoted out of the league entirely, dropping into the Championship along with the drastically reduced television revenue and prize money that comes with it. The Football League’s Second Division was created in 1892, and automatic promotion and relegation took hold by the late 1890s, gradually replacing the re-election system under which struggling top-flight clubs could petition to keep their place. Either way, the basic structure predates anything resembling an American wild card by more than a century. The logic behind it is almost the inverse of the American approach. Instead of adding stakes at the top of the table through an expanding tournament, English football adds stakes at the bottom, making nearly every match on the schedule matter to somebody, whether they’re chasing a European spot, fighting to avoid the drop, or trying to survive long enough to be competitive again next year.
A Sport That Settled It by Vote
College football makes the case in its own particularly American way, mostly because it did everything backwards compared to the leagues we’ve already discussed. For most of the sport’s history, there wasn’t a designated champion at all in the way the NFL or MLB has one. Teams played their regular seasons, went to whichever bowl game their conference tie-ins sent them to, and then the Associated Press poll of sportswriters and the coaches’ poll of, well, coaches, each independently decided who the best team in the country was. Most years the two polls agreed. Plenty of years they didn’t. Michigan and Nebraska both finished undefeated in 1997, each won its bowl game, and walked away with a legitimate claim to a national title that the sport had no mechanism to settle between them. It happened again in 2003, when USC topped the final AP poll while LSU, the winner of the actual Bowl Championship Series title game, was crowned by the coaches. Two undisputed seasons, two disputed champions, decided not on a field but by a spreadsheet of ballots.
That 2003 split was the final straw. The Bowl Championship Series itself had already been created in 1998, using polls and computer rankings, specifically to produce a No. 1 versus No. 2 title game and stamp out the risk of a split champion. When it produced one anyway just five years in, the pressure for an actual playoff, something with games instead of ballots, became impossible to ignore. It still took another decade. The four-team College Football Playoff didn’t arrive until 2014, and even then it functioned more like the BCS with two extra teams than like a true tournament. It expanded to twelve teams in 2024, a move projected to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in additional media rights revenue on its own, and earlier this month the CFP opened a 30-day negotiating window with ESPN to discuss doubling the field to twenty-four teams, a format that could theoretically begin as soon as the 2027 season if the Big Ten and SEC, who hold the most sway over any format change, can reach agreement with the rest of the CFP’s governance process.
The throughline is unusually clean by the standards of this article. College football’s postseason didn’t grow because the game changed or because seasons got longer. It grew because a bowl-and-poll system produced genuinely disputed champions often enough that fans, coaches, and eventually television partners all wanted something more conclusive, and because every step toward conclusiveness also happened to be worth more money than the step before it. Unlike the NFL or MLB, where expansion mostly followed the sport getting bigger, college football expanded its championship field almost entirely because people were unhappy with who wasn’t getting a chance to play for the title, and because a bigger bracket turned out to be a very good business.
Whether that’s a better system depends entirely on what you think a sports league is supposed to reward. It’s a genuinely different question than the one American leagues are answering, and it’s worth remembering that before declaring either side’s approach obviously correct.
The Deeper Dive
The research on all of this gets more interesting the closer you look, mostly because it refuses to hand anyone a clean, satisfying answer.
The instinct that a shorter season needs a playoff more than a longer one does hold up, but not in the tidy way it first sounds. A team’s built-in randomness matters as much as its schedule length. Academic work by Michael Lopez, Gregory Matthews, and Benjamin Baumer, comparing competitive balance across the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL using betting markets to estimate real team strength, modeled basketball talent as unusually spread out, with a strong NBA team’s advantage showing up reliably across a long, high-possession game. Their model found hockey and baseball sit much closer to a coin flip on a given night, with even a clearly better team carrying a smaller per-game edge than an equivalent NBA favorite would. That means MLB’s 162 games buy real statistical confidence over a full season, but each individual game inside that season carries a lot of noise, which is exactly why a short postseason series can undo months of evidence in a way a seven-game NBA series structurally resists a little better.
That’s the sharpest available answer to whether MLB’s playoffs are “strictly business” the way some fans assume. The honest version is more layered. The 162-game season genuinely earns a strong claim to identifying real quality, stronger than almost any other American league’s regular season. The postseason that follows wasn’t built to protect that signal. Multiple analysts, including that widely cited FanGraphs review mentioned earlier, have found limited ability to predict short-series outcomes beyond what a team’s own regular-season performance already suggested, which is why baseball writers have called the playoffs something close to a lottery for years. But that doesn’t mean the whole enterprise is cynical. Baseball has simply made a clear, repeated choice across a century of history to value a decisive championship event over a pure extension of the regular season table, the same way basically every American league has.
The NFL sits at close to the opposite end. Seventeen games, against an unbalanced schedule, is a genuinely thin sample to sort quality from noise. But a single elimination playoff bracket doesn’t exactly fix that problem either. It trades one kind of uncertainty for another, testing which team can win three or four high pressure games in a row rather than which team was best across an entire season. Both are legitimate ways to define a champion. They’re just answering different questions, and it’s worth being honest that the NFL’s format isn’t more “accurate” so much as it’s differently structured around the reality that seventeen games alone were never going to settle much.
England’s model removes that particular tension by refusing to ask a knockout tournament to answer a season-long question in the first place, which is precisely why the table has such a strong claim to legitimacy there. But it comes with its own cost, both competitive and financial. Research on promotion and relegation, including work published through Stanford’s Institute for Economic Policy Research, has found that the threat of relegation drives real economic behavior, including elevated player wages as clubs spend to avoid the drop, along with the well-documented use of parachute payments to cushion relegated teams financially. Those payments are associated with a stronger chance of bouncing back to the Premier League, and some researchers argue that gives recently relegated clubs a real head start over the rest of the Championship, though the evidence isn’t unanimous; at least one major study has pushed back on the idea that parachute payments unfairly distort competition below the top flight. The system that spreads stakes across the entire table also spreads financial risk across the entire table, and how evenly it does so is still genuinely debated.
None of this produces a tidy verdict, and it probably shouldn’t. Every league examined here made a real, historically documented choice about what a champion is supposed to mean, shaped by how much its regular season alone could prove, how random its individual games tend to be, and how much commercial value it placed on a decisive postseason event. The Premier League asks who was best across an entire season played on equal terms. American leagues generally ask who could win a tournament after that season ended. Neither question is more honest than the other. They’re just different questions, and it’s worth knowing which one you’re actually watching before you argue about the answer.
For the Curious
If this topic has you hooked the way it’s had me hooked for years, the single best next step is Michael Lopez, Gregory Matthews, and Benjamin Baumer’s research paper “How Often Does the Best Team Win?,” freely available through arXiv or Loyola’s eCommons repository. It’s more technical than anything in a typical sports newsletter, but it’s the paper behind some of the sharpest claims in this piece, and it’s worth reading in full if you want the actual math behind why baseball and hockey behave so differently from basketball on a given night.
For something more conversational, Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski’s book Soccernomics spends real time on the economics of promotion and relegation and why European football’s structure evolved so differently from American sports, without ever needing a single stat-heavy paragraph to make its case.
Worth Watching
Keep an eye on the American League and National League wild card races over these final two weeks. Several clubs currently on the outside looking in have better run differentials than teams currently holding a playoff spot, which is about as clean a live example of this entire article as you’re going to find before Issue 10 comes around.
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Written by Bob Sloop.