When I first decided to try this replay, I briefly considered replaying every game from each season. Thanks to great sites like pro-football-reference.com, anyone can access any team's schedule from the dawn of the NFL, so it would simply be a matter of compiling all the generated data, and, of course, having the free time to replay every game and write game summaries for each played game. Since this is a solo endeavor, I decided to run each season's playoffs only instead. There were some changes I wanted to make, aspects of the history of the game that I wanted to alter just to see how the outcome would be affected.
It took until the 70s before there were wild card teams as part of the NFL playoffs. For years, a team had to win it's division or conference to participate in a playoff or a championship. Once the NFL realized the goldmine available through TV revenue from extra playoff games, it was only a matter of time until more teams were added to the playoff mix. The fact that the league kept expanding helped to keep deserving teams in the postseason (for the most part).
The result of extra teams in the postseason has been more improbable runs to the championship for teams that were far from dominant during the regular season, especially during the last several years. Teams that struggled during the regular season like the 2007 New York Giants and the 2010 Green Bay Packers have parlayed playing well at the right time of year into World Championships. 40 years ago, those teams wouldn't have had the chance at the postseason. In this replay, teams from the past which have finished near the top will get an opportunity to make a run at a title. I expect that, like the last few years, teams who have been forgotten in history will walk away with championships. Also, teams that dominated a specific era in the past will have to endure more rounds of playoffs to achieve the same level of success. Not every one of them will succeed.
The amount of teams entered in the postseason is determined by the number of teams playing pro football during that season. In order to be considered "pro football" the team must exist either in the NFL, or in a league that would one day merge with the NFL, like the AAFC of the late 40s and the AFL of the 60s (sorry USFL). Here is the amount of playoff teams per season...
1941-1945-4 teams
1946-1949-8 teams
1950-1959-6 teams
1960-8 teams
1961-1975-10 teams
1976-present-12 teams
In a four-team playoff, it will be 1 vs. 4 and 2 vs. 3, with the winners of each semfinal playing for the title. In a six-team playoff, the top 2 seeds will receive a bye into the second round. In an eight-team playoff, it will be 1 vs. 8, 2 vs. 7, 3 vs. 6, and 4 vs. 5. The winners from that round will meet in semifinals, with the highest remaining seed facing the lowest remaining seed, and the other two remaining teams paying as well. In a ten-team playoff, it will be 7 vs. 10 and 8 vs. 9 in the first round, with the highest seed left after the first round playing the number 2 team, and the lowest seed playing the number 1 team. In that same round, 3 will play 6 and 4 will play 5. In the twelve-team playoff, the playoffs will look like they do now in the NFL, with the top 4 seeds getting a bye to the second round.
Of course, when it comes to picking playoff teams, I can take the division or conference champions and the second place teams, maintain divisions and conferences, as well as the AFC and the NFC after the merger in 1970. Instead, I'm going to rank all teams in pro football based upon winning percentage for that season, using point differential as the tiebreaker. As a result, there will be no conference structure preventing 2 NFC teams or 2 AFC teams from meeting for a championship. If the Pittsburgh Steelers and New England Patriots make it throught that season's tournament, or if Dallas and San Francisco make it, than they meet for the championship, even if it's 2 teams from the same league in real life.
This may not seem like the most equitable approach, but, in my eyes, there is no better way to rectify the issue using whatifsports.com. There is no method provided to weight one team's results against their level of competition using this particular simulation method. For example, you can make a pretty compelling argument that the 1962 Detroit Lions, who finished at 11-3 in the NFL, were a much better team than the 1962 Dallas Texans, who also finished 11-3, but did so in the AFL, simply based upon the overall quality of players in each league in 1962. The Lions 11-3 record was achieved against much better teams, so if the Lions and Texans had met in a game that year, the Lions should win the majority of the time.
The problem with this line of thinking is that the teams on What If Sports are based on the statistics generated by each team that season, regardless of the quality of their opponents. Keeping that in mind, the Texans may have more yards per game or may force more turnovers or play better defense in the red zone (I'm just speculating, of course), and those stats, even if they were achieved against lesser competition, will be the basis of their performance on what if sports, and, as a result, this simulation.
So...expect an AFL team from early in the AFL's history to come away with a championship in this simulation. I've tried to come up with scenarios to weigh the results of an AFL team's record against the strength of their opposition, but even if I were to penalize an AFL team (or an AAFC team), there is no method to account for that strength of opposition in the simulation itself, so I've decided to seed on record and point differential, regardless of how it was achieved.
I've also never been a fan of the concept of neutral site games, in any sport. I like the idea of a home crowd influencing a game, or bad weather being a factor at the end of the season. I've always loved those films of old championship games played in bad weather, like the 1965 NFL Title game played in the mud of Green Bay, or the NFL Title game from two seasons later played in sub-zero conditions between Dallas and Green Bay, the Ice Bowl. The History of Pro Football blog is bringing back the NFL Championship played at the home stadium of the team with the better record. If Pittsburgh finished with the best record in pro football in a specific year, than the Steelers would have home field throughout the playoffs in this simulation, up to and including the NFL Title game played at Heinz field. Sure, the corporate suits would hate it, but it's the dilettante corporate suits who sterilize the game at it's zenith anyway, so good riddance. Thanks to sites like almanac.com and the Weather Underground, I can look up a specific date in history and tell you what the weather was in Chicago (or Detroit or New York), then use that weather data in the simulation.
Also...I've never really understood why playoff statistics have to be considered separate from regular season statistics. The playoff sample size is so small that, taken in and of itself, it's relatively meaningless. So why not add them to the regular season statistics? If Franco Harris ran for 1246 yards in 1975 (he did...I checked), and he runs for 340 yards in 3 playoff games in this simulation, then his season total will be 1586 for that year in the simulation, not 1246. What does this mean? It means that almost all regular season records are rendered obsolete, as they most certainly will be eclipsed in this new format with extra games. It also means that the better your team is and the farther they go in the playoffs, the more beneficial to a player's statistical portfolio. We will have more 2000-yard runners, possibly some 2000-yard receivers, and more 5000-yard quarterbacks.
We will also most likely have some different champions, perhaps different franchises separating themselves as excellent within a given era, and some new Cinderellas who history may have forgotten.
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Edit on 11/12/11...When I am listing the playoff seeds for a particular season's playoffs, I am going to list franchise accomplishments as if the 1941 season is the first season of official record keeping, meaning I will only make references to playoff appearances and championships that occur after 1941.
December 14, 1941
