Roger Goodell Thinks Resting Players Is For Pussies

Commissioner Roger Goodell made his annual "State of the NFL" address last week, most of which I found shallow and pedantic. But one interesting thing that he said was that he was considering re-tooling the playoff seeding rules to give more weight to regular season records. This bit is taken from the Buccaneers web site.

"You qualify if you win your division, then you have the two wild-card teams. I think what we'd like to look at is if a wild-card team has a record better than a division winner, should that give the advantage to the wild-card team that has the better record? That will probably be our short-term focus. But as we look at how we continue to innovate and we continue to make our game more interesting to our fan base, we'll probably look at the broader issues at the same time."

The obvious advantage to this is to minimize situations like the Bucs had this year when they charged full ticket price for what amounted to preseason games in December. If dogging the last game of the season could potentially eliminate your home field advantage and all the filthy lucre that comes from hosting a playoff game, chances are pretty good you'd play all your best players and try to win. And we would be spared the insult of having the coaching staff tell us that they are trying to win when they are starting players that were on the practice squad the previous week.

At least they don't bring in third-string cheerleaders for those games.