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Sunday, September 23, 2001

It's all about the money. That should come as no surprise, because that's why they call it professional football. Money and not fairness is the overriding issue for the NFL as it tries to save the four wild-card games played in the first week of the playoffs.

It's gotten to the point where one of the options would be to play the wild-card games Wednesday/Thursday and make the winners come back and play again Sunday/Monday.

If they don't play, there will be only one wild-card playoff team in each conference instead of three, reducing the total number of playoff teams from 12 to eight. Some in the league have insisted that competitive reasons are compelling them to try to keep the number of wild-card playoff teams at six and not two, so more teams have a shot at making the playoffs.

That's a nice, sporting kind of reasoning. The real reason, however, is this: The NFL will lose about $50 million if the wild-card games are not played.

"They don't want to give 50 cents back, let alone 50 million," said Tom Donahoe, president and general manager of the Buffalo Bills.

The NFL can't be blamed for that, but they could tell the truth.

The competitive reasons don't fly anyway. Since the NFL added a third wild-card team to each conference in 1990, there have been 44 wild-card teams seeded either fifth or sixth in each conference.

Not one has made it to the Super Bowl, and 32 of them lost their first games. Just two reached a conference championship game -- Indianapolis (beaten by the Steelers) in 1995 and Jacksonville in '96. Three wild-card teams have reached the Super Bowl, but all were seeded fourth as the No. 1 wild card.

The coaches, of course, want the extra four playoff teams because it can mean their jobs. An owner will look much more favorably on a coach who squeezes his team into a wild-card playoff berth than he would if it is left out of the playoffs.

Coaches and players also want to believe that the extra wild-card berths give them a better chance of getting to the Super Bowl. That is exactly what New Orleans Coach Jim Haslett said Thursday on Fox Sports Radio. Of course, that is not true. All 31 NFL teams have a chance right now to get to the Super Bowl, no matter how many wild-card berths there are.

Money is the reason the NFL finds itself in this fix in the first place. Normally, the season would have begun Sept. 2, but because that was Labor Day weekend and TV ratings have suffered in the past, the NFL delayed its openers until Sept. 9. More TV ratings, more money. But by doing so, they had to eliminate the extra week between the conference championship games and the Super Bowl.

Had this been a normal year, that extra week would have given them time to play the 16-game schedule, all playoff rounds and keep the Super Bowl in New Orleans on Jan. 27, as scheduled.

Donahoe was incredulous when he heard the NFL has discussed having teams play what would amount to three games in 14 days.

"I don't know how you can do that. It's very difficult to play two football games in a week, there's just not enough recovery time for the players and for injuries ... You couldn't do that, it's physically impossible.

"I think they'll try to come up with something to keep the playoffs intact, but if you can't do it, you can't do it and you have a different form of playoffs this year."

Ed Bouchette can be reached at ebouchette@post-gazette.com