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NFL owners approved a contingency plan for the 2020 playoffs, but first withdrew part of that plan that could have ended up hurting the Eagles.
The original contingency plan if the NFL can’t have a full 17-week season included two more playoff teams in each conference and then rearranged those teams based on the record. For the Eagles, who lead the modest NFC East, that would have been very bad news.
But fear not.
This seems to be the fairest way to deal with it. You don’t want to cheat teams out of a playoff spot that otherwise might have deserved it. But it also didn’t seem right to change the importance of winning a division over the season. Maybe that’s something the league can look into ahead of next season.
Because, don’t get me wrong, it seems silly that the Eagles can win the division with a 6-9-1 record and then welcome a team with 10 or 11 playoff wins, but it doesn’t make sense to move the proverbial posts when the season is already underway.
So it looks like the winner of the NFC East will end up being the NFC No.4 seed and host a first-round playoff no matter what. Had the contingency plan called for a reseeding, the Eagles (or the winner of the NFC East) would likely have finished as eighth seed. Going from No.4 to No.8 and losing a home playoff game is a big deal for a lot of reasons.
The NFC East is the only division in the entire NFL without at least two teams with winning records. For nine weeks, the Eagles lead the division with a .438 winning percentage.
As a reminder, here is the ranking of the NFC East:
Eagles: 3-4-1
Washington: 2-6
Giants: 2-7
Cowboys: 2-7
FiveThirtyEight’s most recent projections give the Eagles a 70% chance of winning the NFC East, followed by Washington (17%), the Giants (7%) and the Cowboys (6%).
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