NFL 2015 Schedule: NFL Playoff Expansion Plans Has Scheduling Conflicts
The NFL wants to increase the size of their playoff field from 12 to 14 teams. While it seems simple to add a few games to the season ending tournament the NFL is facing significant scheduling difficulties as it tries to add games to the Wild Card Round without playing playoff games on Monday night, which could lead to a potential conflict with the College Football Championship games.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodel said the league will probably put off the decison.
"This is something we've been evaluating over the last couple of years and I think several factors went into the decision to at least postpone the expanded playoffs," he explained. "We want to make the regular season more important, more exciting and have more teams in the race. ... We also have scheduling issues as far as when we could play the games: Saturday, Sunday, we've looked at a Monday night."
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"College football has the national championship on Monday night, we certainly don't want to conflict with that. So there are a number of factors that are going on, so we just felt the right thing to do was take another year and evaluate all this," he said.
The obvious solution to this is to have the lowest seeded teams to make the playoffs play on Thursday night. That would tie in with the league's apparent decision to tie the added playoffs to its Thursday night TV package. Under this scenario one playoff game would be played Thursday night, two on Saturday and three games on Sunday during the Wild Card round.
Giving the lowest seeded teams what amounts to one addition day off if they win is not such a disadvantage considering they would be playing the highest seeded teams the following week which is most cases had a bye for the Wild Card round.
