The NFL owners are proposing some rather radical changes to the NFL regular season as well as the structure of the playoffs in the current CBA negotiations. One of the most significant changes on the table is the addition of a seventh playoff team in each conference.
This would be a huge change in how teams do business in the regular season. Teams at the top would fight even harder in hopes of getting the No. 1 seed and the only bye week. While teams near the bottom would see a much more complicated playoff picture with a change in a dynamic like this.
NFL analytics expert Warren Sharp decided to go back the last 10 years and see how this change would have impacted the playoffs each year. This is where things get interesting for the Pittsburgh Steelers. According to Sharp, if there had been a seventh playoff team in each of the past 10 seasons, the Steelers would have made the playoffs four more times including this past season.
To offer some perspective on what that would mean. If the Steelers had made the playoffs four more times in the last decade, they would have made the playoffs every single year. No one is saying this past season’s matchup between Devlin Hodges and Patrick Mahomes would have gone the Steelers way but you cannot minimize a team’s ability to field a competitive team every season.
