I am posting this deep into the night on Thursday so that you, devoted AFL viewers and readers, can read it prior to the thrilling matchup between Sydney and Collingwood!

Who am I kidding?  This will basically function as the Open Thread on Friday morning.  Hey, at least you’ll learn something while you’re stuck at work waiting for the Jets to do something else stupid.

Welcome to a Special Edition of Balls of Steel’s AFL Beat!

The current AFL finals system began to be used in 2000 as the end-of-season championship playoff tournament. The highest-ranked eight teams in the regular season participate in a four-week tournament, with two teams eliminated in each of the first three weeks. The Grand Final is played at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (the MCG, in short) in the fourth week.

The playoff matchups are called finals and each matchup has a different name.  There are four types of finals before the Grand Final:

FINALS WEEK ONE

Qualifying Final – This matches up teams in the top four to decide who gets a bye into the third week.

Elimination Final – This matches up teams in the bottom four to see who lives to the next week and who goes home.  Two teams are eliminated.

FINALS WEEK TWO

Semi-Final – Not a real semi-final in the traditional sense where the winner goes to the championship match.  These two games match the losers of the Qualifying finals against the winners of the Elimination Finals.  Two more teams are eliminated.

FINALS WEEK THREE

Preliminary Final – The winners of the Qualifying Final in Week One play the winners of the Semi-Final in Week Two for a ticket to the Grand Final.  Losers are eliminated.

FINALS WEEK FOUR

Grand Final – The Super Bowl of AFL

For the graphically-minded footy fans, here is a bracket showing the way the system works:

The system is unique in how it is structured to give increasing advantages to teams higher in the ladder.  Here are the advantages, per ladder position:

Top Two – Home Advantage for Qualifying Final.  Have a double chance in that they can lose their first game and still continue in the tournament with a home game in the Semi-final.

Positions 3 and 4 – Have a double chance in that they can lose their first game and still continue in the tournament with a home game in the Semi-final.

Positions 5 and 6 – Home Advantage for Elimination Final.  Away the rest of the tournament.

Positions 7 and 8 – Happy to be there.  No home games throughout tournament.

Hopefully, this will shed some light and context into what I’m saying when I talk about the fight for ladder positions on my AFL Beat.  It really is a system that rewards regular season performance and keeps things interesting until the very end.   It severely limits situations where teams would rest players for the playoffs during the last week or two.

It would be interesting how a similar system would work in the NFL.  Given that Herr Goodell is hell-bent on expanding the playoffs, this might be a viable solution if we were to go from six playoff teams per conference to 8.  The top four would be made up of the division winners and then the next four spots would go to the highest remaining teams.  If we were to apply this system to last year’s playoffs, we would have gotten the following matchups:

AFC

Qualifying Finals – New England (1 seed) vs Indianapolis (4 seed), Denver (2 seed) vs. Pittsburgh (3 seed)

Elimination Finals – Cincinnati (5 seed) vs Kansas City (8 seed), Baltimore (6 seed) vs. Houston (7 seed)

In this scenario, the top four seeds would have been the same as under the NFL system.

NFC

Qualifying Finals – Seattle (1 seed) vs Carolina (4 seed), Green Bay (2 seed) vs Dallas (3 seed)

Elimination Finals – Arizona (5 seed) vs San Francisco (8 seed), Detroit (6 seed) vs. Philadelphia (7 seed)

While Carolina still gets an advantage despite having a crappy record, the top eight is exactly the same as under the NFL system.  Carolina was the 8th team in the NFC by record last year, so they would have still gotten into the expanded playoff.  Since the NFL is so bound to the division system, the advantage of a top four spot as given in the AFL system seems like a fair reward.

Can you imagine Carolina getting curb-stomped by Seattle and then regrouping to meet the winner of Arizona-San Francisco?  That would be awesome!  You can play the mental matchups in your head from here and see where the system leads you.  Of course, since we have two conferences, we would need to add one more week, which I’m sure the owners would not mind, for the Super Bowl.  The more I think about it, the more I like it!

Of course, given the assholes that run the NFL, this will never happen, but it is nice to dream…