COMMENTARY : NFL, With 12 Teams in Playoffs, Is Resembling the NHL

With American flags on their helmets and true American spirit directing their course--Bigger Is Better, Greed Is Good--eight football teams took one small step for Paul Tagliabue this weekend . . . and one smaller step for professional football.

When is too much football too much?

When an entire nation sits comatose through eight bowl games on New Year’s Day and Night, waiting for the play of the year to be called back on a clipping penalty?

No.

When one team that tied North Carolina and another that needed a fifth down to beat Missouri are declared co-national champions, sending up the cry for a 16-team college football playoff system?

No.

When Cody Carlson and John Fourcade can be called NFL playoff quarterbacks?

Bingo.

Paul Tagliabue did some wise things during his first regular season as National Football League commissioner--he sped up the games, he put the skids to Victor Kiam--but he never should have messed with the postseason.

Lesson No. 1 for the day: The NFL is not the NHL. This we know by the tempo and tone of the leagues (the NFL has less violence), the difference in the amount of television coverage, and, until this year, the playoff structure of the leagues.

It used to be that money-for-nothing couldn’t cut it in the NFL. You make the NFL playoffs, you earn it. None of this ice-the-puck-less-than-the-Winnipeg-Jets- and-you’re-in business.

No more.

Because television talked and Tagliabue listened, the NFL added two wild-card teams this postseason, raising the number from four to six, which meant 12 of 28 teams now made the playoffs. All sorts of ugly things ensued.

For the first time ever, a fourth-place team almost made the NFL playoffs.

For the first time ever, a losing team almost made the NFL playoffs.

That double threat resided in Dallas, where the Cowboys finished 7-9, lost their season finale by 19 points to Atlanta and wound up fourth in the NFC East behind the New York Giants, the Philadelphia Eagles and the Washington Redskins.

Regardless of your feelings about the shams that were the Rams this season, you had to be rooting for them last Monday night in New Orleans for a one reason: A loss by the Saints would put the Cowboys in. Theoretically, the possibilities were endless. Theoretically, a 7-9 team could make it to the Super Bowl.

Of all the times for the Rams to choke.

The end result was bad enough. The NFL got the Saints--a team that started 2-5; a team that finished 8-8 only because it beat San Francisco without Joe Montana and the Rams without any heart; a team that was outpassed by the opposition by nearly 1,000 yards; a team that was outgained by the opposition by an average of 25 yards.

In the other conference, to balance things out, the NFL also got the Houston Oilers, who had the decency to bring a 9-7 record with them--but not their best player. Warren Moon has the hand that passed for 4,600 yards this season, but it’s also a hand with a dislocated thumb.

So the job of directing the Oilers in their trumped-up wild-card run in Cincinnati went to one Cody Carlson.

The Oilers wound up dislocated, 41-14.

It was a grand afternoon of football viewing. Houston was down, 34-0, before Commander Cody could find the light of the end zone. And then, in the late game, New Orleans at Chicago, they staged the inaugural Dieter Brock Memorial Classic--with Mike Tomczak, Steve Walsh and eventually John Fourcade fluttering frozen passes all over Soldier Field.

Because one was fortunate enough to land in the arms of Chicago tight end Jim Thornton, who ran with it long enough for a touchdown, Chicago was able to win, 16-6.

These were the games that would not have been played last year. Under last year’s guidelines--one wild-card game per conference--Washington still would have rid us of Buddy Ryan and Miami still would have waged 60 thrilling minutes to edge Kansas City on a tale of two field-goal kickers.

These were good things to have happen.

But the extra games were wretched excess and nothing but. New Orleans never belonged in these playoffs and neither did the Moon-less Oilers. All Sunday accomplished was to expose the frauds and a expose a pair of divisional champions, Chicago and Cincinnati, to a pointless exercise in the rain and the sleet and the snow.

Ideally, a playoff system ought to exist to reward the teams that win the most. This one doesn’t. Two teams win their division titles and are penalized, their bye week taken away--and for what? To squeeze two more 9-7 or 8-8 or 7-9 teams into the mix and squeeze out a few more TV dollars.

They have cluttered the road to the Super Bowl and someday, the NFL is going to have hell to pay.

One of these years, the NFL is going to wake up and find Atlanta in the Super Bowl and have to think of a new name for it.