“Draft Leaguer Finds Hal Richman Has Been Wrong for 57 Years.”
The Era of Rotating Home NFL Playoff Games (Revised)
1970-1974 NFL Post Season Matchups
One of my favorite questions that people ask is, “Why did the 1972 Dolphins have to play the AFC Championship Game on the road?” The inevitable pat answer is that this happened during the era during which the NFL rotated home playoff position every year, which is technically true but immaterial, as the Dolphins actually were not the road team in the 1972 AFC postseason; the AFC West champ Raiders were. The Dolphins were on the road for the AFC Championship Game because of who they played, and beat in the first round, and that matchup was actually set by a few factors that are not so obvious.
These factors deserve a deep rewind. As Strat-O-Matic football gamers it is not merely enough to understand the rotation system; you have to know how to accurately apply it in each conference and for each situation where the Wild Card might change from the real-life team. I get e-mails on this every so often, and since I’ve already posted on Division and Wild Card tie-breakers I figured I might as well post on how to determine matchups during this odd period in NFL History, 1970-1974.
Excel sheet of all matchups, 1970-1974
First a few details on the NFL in the near post Merger era. Before the Merger, the NFL had sixteen teams and they were organized into two conferences and four divisions, each of which would send one playoff representative. There was no Wild Card. In the first round in the East, the Capitol Division winner (in the Late Sixties, usually Dallas) and the Century Division winner (Cleveland) would play to decide the Eastern Conference’s representative in the NFL Championship; The West had a Coastal Division (Baltimore or LA) and a Central Division (Minnesota) and those teams played for the Western Conference berth.
The merger changed everything – the League now had 26 teams and these were divided into 2 conferences, each of three divisions. The old system generated 3 playoff games in the 1969 AFL and 3 playoff games in the NFL and the Super Bowl; the new system could not have less playoff games, as these generated tremendous revenue for the home teams. So, the League added Wild cards in both the NFL and AFL, which meant that there would be two Divisional round games and a Championship Game in each Conference, the same as in 1969. But there was one more wrinkle- the newer, bigger league wanted to distribute these playoff games to every region of the United States to drum up more interest. This requirement seems quaint now, but you have to remember - it worked. The NFL would add two more teams within half a dozen years and expand from fourteen to sixteen games comprising a season two years after that. Rotating playoff games built the nationwide interest in the NFL we know today.
The Sporting News 1970 Football Edition
The NFL named the Champions of the Eastern Divisions of both Conferences the home teams for the 1970 first round, and the NFC Central Champion and AFC West teams were also set to be hosts.
The actual rules for playoff seedings and matchups seem simple on the surface. Two division champions would be designated as home teams and one division champion would be designated as the road team. Here’s where it gets fun- the Wild Card could not play the division champion from its same division in the first round of the playoffs. If this happened, the matchup would rotate again.
The Sporting News 1970 Football Edition, Redux
Special Thanks to Tommy Nobis, Ace Researcher!
From The Sporting News, for the 1970 NFC Team
A (East Champ) and Team B (Central Champ) would be the home teams, and Team C
(West Champ) and Team D (Wildcard, or second place team with best percentage in
conference) would play on the road, with Team C at Team A, and Team D at Team B
– unless Team D and B were in the same division, which they were. The alternate rotation used in this case would
place Team D (Detroit) at Team A (Dallas) and Team C (San Francisco) would be
at Team B (Minnesota). In the Championship Game round, the NFC Rotation for
1970, 1971, and 1972 is Team C, Team A, Team B, meaning the West Champs (SF) should
host the NFC Championship game if they won in the Divisional Round, which they
did. If SF had lost, the 1970 NFC Championship would move to Team A (Dallas) if
they won in the first round, and the last possibility would be Team B (Minnesota).
This is how San Francisco was the road team
for the Divisional Round but hosted Dallas in the 1970 NFC Championship Game
where the Cowboys broke their hearts, as they always did back then.
Real Life 1970 NFC, using TSN’s Alternate
Rotation to keep Lions from playing Minnesota in first round
In the last post, I entertained the strong
possibility the 1970 Giants should have won their last game and the Eastern
Division. What would happen then? Let’s
also assume the Cowboys win the toss and the Wild Card and Detroit is
eliminated. The primary rotation is Team C (SF) at Team A (NYG), and Team D
(Dallas) at Team B (Minnesota). This is
a legal scenario, so this would have been chosen. Now C is the Home Team for
the NFC Championship game so if SF wins they host the winner of Dallas/
Minnesota. If they lose, the next team in the rotation (Team C, Team A, Team B
in 1970) or Team A would be chosen, and in this scenario it will be either SF
or the Giants.
Alternative 1970 NFC Scenario where Team A and WC are in
same division with rotations A,B,C in the Divisional round and C,A,B in the
Championship round.
What happened to the 1972 Dolphins? The AFC uses the same rotations as the NFC but
the Teams are different –Team A is the East Champion, Team B is the West
Champion, and Team C is the Central Champion.
The Divisional rotations would be Oakland (B) at Pittsburgh (C) (to
their historical regret) and Cleveland (D) at Miami (A). The AFC Championship Rotation goes C, A, and
B, so Team C, Pittsburgh, since they won, hosted Team A, Miami.
1972 AFC Playoff Rotations
Remember the goal was to bring playoff games
to as many new venues as they could to drum up interest.
The 1972 NFC had the Washington Redskins (Team A) and the Cowboys as the Wild Card Team (Team D). Dallas could not play Washington, so Team D could not play Team A, so they went to the alternate rotations. Washington in this setting hosted the Central Team, Team B (Green Bay) and Dallas (Team D) traveled to Team C, San Francisco. This is an example of a situation where both the first (Team B, Green Bay) and second (Team C, San Francisco) seeds for the NFC Championship Game lost, so Washington hosted the NFC Championship Game:
1972 NFC Alternate Rotations for both Divisional and NFC Championship
One thing bothers me…
There’s a note at
the bottom of the second page that states if the Conference Championship game
rotates because the first or second loses then the next Championship Game would
be moved up to the next team in the cycle.
In other words the 1970 NFL Championship Cycle was Team C, Team A, and Team
B, or the West, East and Central Champions, in order. If San Francisco had lost, this would mean
Dallas (Team A and next in line) would host Minnesota (Team B). This would also mean the originally planned 1971
NFC Championship Game cycle of Team A, Team B, Team C would move up to Team B,
Team C, Team A.
This never came up in
the AFC, but in the 1972 NFC the double loss of both Teams B and C should mean
that the 1973 NFC should have a Championship Rotation of B,C,A again. It does not look like this actually happened:
1973 NFC Playoff Rotations,
showing Championship Game adhered to Original (planned) sequence for Home Team.
If the order had been changed to “B First”, Minnesota would have hosted the 1973 NFC Championship Game. They didn’t; instead the Vikings managed to defeat Dallas in Dallas. Dallas had beaten the 1973 Rams in the Divisional Game. I’m not sure why the Championship Game did not rotate as TSN indicated it should have, but in all cases the Divisional Game winner hosted the Championship game in both Conferences from 1970-1974, so I’d go with that.
How well did it work?
This Rotational Playoff Period gets a lot of stink for putting the Dolphins in Three Rivers Stadium for the AFC Championship, a place where the Steelers were already 8-0 in 1972. But the Dolphins did win. One way to judge this method is to see how many times the best team in the NFC or the AFC played the Conference Championship and then made it to the Super Bowl.
· In the NFC, 1970 is the only year of the five where the best team, 12-2 Minnesota failed to even make the NFC Championship Game, but it could be argued that 1973 was actually worse in terms of counter-seeding. Both of the best teams in the 1973 NFC playoffs had to play key games on the road, with the Rams losing in Dallas and then Minnesota winning in Dallas – but Minnesota did make the Super Bowl.
· In the AFC, the 1972 Dolphins obviously played on the road but still won, and 1974 Oakland at 12-2 lost to Pittsburgh in Oakland. But the rest of the time the system played out generally as one would have predicted.
· 1975 was the first year for seeding 1-4 and then setting the second-round matchups after the first-round outcomes were completed, and the results were mixed (as they so often are). In the 1975 NFC Dallas managed to beat the top seeds on their way to Super Bowl X, but the AFC’s top seed, Pittsburgh, held serve and made the Super Bowl.
Fred Bobberts
Tiebreakers, Part Two
“We Almost Lost Detroit” – NFL Playoff Tiebreakers and the 1970 NFC Postseason
In spite of the Rotating Home Teams playoff feature (which occurred from 1970-1974 and I will publish on this, too), 1970 is a different season than any of those four seasons because it had only had four tie breakers:
1) Head to Head;
2) Division Record;
3) Intraconference Record;
4) Points +- Head to Head
5) And Coin Flip
Clearly the League hadn’t thought through the fact that in
these new conferences with unbalanced schedules many teams would not play each
other. This was corrected later, as they added a points per game step for both
divisional and conference tie breakers for 1971 after the near debacle of the 1970 NFC
Postseason. But a potentially
controversial coin-toss end to the 1970 Season in the NFC came down to one
lucky upset. Here is how:
This is the 1970 NFC after Week 13, with a week to go:
1970 |
|||
NFC |
After week 13 |
||
East: |
|||
Dallas |
9-4 |
play Houston |
|
NYG |
9-4 |
play Rams wk 14 |
|
Central: |
|||
Minnesota |
11-2 |
clinched division |
|
Lions |
9-4 |
play Green Bay |
|
West: |
Road |
||
SF |
9-3-1 |
play NO wk 14 |
|
Rams |
8-4-1 |
play NYG wk 14 |
Now the way it turned out in real life, Dallas, SF and
Detroit all won, and the Giants lost, which meant Detroit was all alone as a Wild Card at 10-4. The NFC West was the designated road team so
the 49ers would play the Division Champion from the same division as the wild
card. San Francisco played at the Central
Division Champion Vikings in Minnesota, and Dallas hosted the Lions. Easy Peasy!
But there was a nightmare scenario if all three teams, the
Giants, Dallas and Detroit had won and they were all favored, playing at home:
1970 NFC Doomsday Scenario |
||||||||||
(Click to Expand) |
If all three won between New York, Dallas and Detroit, the
Giants, with the best division record in the East, would beat out the Cowboys
and take the Division Championship. The
next tie breaker would be HTH – but the Lions and Cowboys did not play. They
also have the same Conference record, so the next tie breaker was a coin
flip. It’s important in this time,
before the days of sneaker deals and massive guaranteed contracts, most players
still had off-season jobs and the player’s cut of $25,000 for a playoff game
was in doubt based on a coin flip for one of these three teams.
The original plan was a Backroom coin flip at NFL headquarters but
there were conspiracy theorists about possible league interference in Dallas’
favor, and one such individual threatened to sue the league. The flip was rescheduled to be televised live
on CBS. Thank goodness it wasn’t needed,
but the League had a very close call.
Ben seems to have lost his domain but this was tremendous work, and of course very useful to SOM Footballers.
For Michael Paul Payne
Start:
From 1920 to 1931, there was no championship game and the league championship was formalized by a vote of owners at their spring meetings. Unofficially at first, the tiebreaker for the championship favored the latest head-to-head meeting between the tied teams, and presumably working back to an earlier matchup if that game was tied.
In 1932, a tie between the Portsmouth Spartans (today’s Detroit Lions) and the Chicago Bears led both teams to mutually agree to hold a playoff game for the championship. This one-game playoff for the league title was added to the regular-season standings, and actually caused the Spartans to drop to third place with the loss.
A championship game has been scheduled for every season since 1933. Until the Super Bowl era, the winners of the two divisions met for the NFL Championship. If there was a tie in the standings for a division, a one-game playoff would break the tie to determine the team to advance to the championship game, with the home field determined by coin flip. (These games did not affect the standings as the 1932 game had.) In case of a three-way tie, which never happened, there would have been a two-game playoff. A series of coin flips (which occasionally happened) would determine which two teams played first to advance to the playoff game with the third team.
(FJB - my understanding is A would play B and the winner would play C. If the winner of the first match also won the second, then they win the conference or division outright and advance. If not it is possible C would play the loser of the first match and then its net points overall, since C would either have two wins or all three teams would be 1-1. This was hazily mentioned in newspapers in 1957.)
A one-game playoff was used to break these ties in the standings: (FJB note location determined by coin flip.)
Overtime was officially added to the bylaws for the one-game playoffs in 1941, since a team had to advance to the Championship games. The bylaws were amended in 1946 to include sudden-death championship games.
In 1967, the NFL moved to a prescheduled 4-team playoff for the league title. The AFL used a similar format in 1969, prior to merging with the NFL. This began a system of breaking ties through multiple methods, and ended an era of the one-game playoff. The following tables illustrate the various tiebreakers that were in place every season.
(FJB note: ties did not count in the records as a half win and half loss until 1972. This means a 10-0-1 team and a 11-0-0 team in 1971 have identical records, 1.000. For this reason I encourage gamers to tie like hell any game they can before 1972, because a loss is far more damaging than a tie, especially against a rival, just ask the 1967 Colts. Regulation overtime for one period was added in 1974.)
The AFL had a provision to use the division tiebreaker in 1969 to break a tie for the second playoff seed in either division.
(FJB prior to that only the Division Champion, East or West was awarded a playoff berth in the AFL championship and these were settled by playoff games, i.e. Kansas City and Oakland in the 1968 Western Division. In other words the 1967 and 1968 AFL did not follow the 1967 NFL into divisional tie breakers. But four teams made the playoff in the 1969 AFL).
(Per Tommy Nobis the 1969 AFL matched the East winner hosting the West’s second place team and the West winner hosting the East’s second place team,)
1967-69 | 1970 | 1971-75 | 1976-77 | 1978 | 1979 | 1980-2001 | 2002— | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1. | Pts ± H2H | H2H | H2H | H2H | H2H/Sweep | H2H | H2H | H2H |
2. | >Yrs DIV Title | DIV | DIV | DIV | DIV (skip >2 tms) | DIV | DIV | DIV |
3. | CONF | CONF (’75†) | CONF† | COM | CONF | CONF | COM | |
4. | Pts ± H2H | Pts ± H2H | Pts ± H2H | Loss COM | COM | COM | CONF | |
5. | * | Rating DIV | Pts ± DIV (avg) | SoS | Pts ± DIV | Pts ± DIV | SoV | |
6. | Coin flip | Rank DIV | Pts ± CONF (avg) | Pts ± COM | Pts ± | Pts ± | SoS | |
7. | Coin flip | Pts ± | TD ± COM | TD ± | SoS | Rank CONF | ||
8. | Coin flip | Pts ± | SoS | TD ± | Rank NFL | |||
9. | Coin flip | Coin flip | Coin flip | Pts ± COM | ||||
10. | Pts ± | |||||||
11. | TD ± | |||||||
12. | Coin flip |
Conference tiebreakers are used to break ties between teams from different divisions. Initially, they were used only to determine a wild card team, but later included conference seeding and home-field advantage as the playoffs expanded.
In most years, if all of the tied teams were in the same division, the tie has been broken using the divisional tiebreakers, even if it is to determine a conference seeding. 1970 and 1978, when the conference tiebreakers were in place exclusively for wild-card ties between same-division teams, were exceptions.
1970 | 1971-75 | 1976-77 | 1978 | 1979 | 1980-89 | 1990-2001 | 2002— | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1. | 1 per DIV (>2 tms) | H2H | 1 per DIV (>2 tms) | Sweep | Sweep | Sweep | 1 per DIV | 1 per DIV |
2. | H2H | CONF (’75†) | Sweep | COM (2 min) | CONF | CONF | Sweep | Sweep |
3. | CONF | Pts ± H2H | CONF† | SoS | Pts ± | COM (min 4) | CONF | CONF |
4. | * | Rating CONF | Pts ± H2H | Pts ± | TD ± | Pts ± CONF | COM (min 4) | COM (min 4) |
5. | Coin flip | Rank CONF | Pts ± CONF (avg) | TD ± | SoS | Pts ± | Pts ± CONF | SoV |
6. | Coin flip | Pts ± | Coin flip | Coin flip | SoS | Pts ± | SoS | |
7. | Coin flip | TD ± | SoS | Rank CONF | ||||
8. | Coin flip | TD ± | Rank NFL | |||||
9. | Coin flip | Pts ± CONF | ||||||
10. | Pts ± | |||||||
11. | TD ± | |||||||
12. | Coin flip |
Note that a W-L record disregarded tie games prior to 1972, so a 4-1-1 record calculated only the 5 untied games (4 ÷ 5 = .800). Since then, ties count as a half-win (4½ ÷ 6 = .750).
In the 1982 strike season, teams were seeded 1-8 for a modified playoff tournament using the conference standings only. Division standings and tiebreakers were not used that year.