As I mentioned in my "Rules for 2009" thread, this was the only real topic up for debate towards the end of last season. Luckily, there wasn't really anything to debate last year, as the playoff teams were clear-cut. However, I want to address this before it becomes an issue... Here is where we are at... The original rules for this league define the wildcard tie-breakers as follows:



First of all, the debate on which is more important, total points or head-to-head, has gone on for ages... Frankly, this thread was not created to stir up that argument. We'll save that for another day... the league has used HTH as the first tie-breaker in the past, and it will stay that way this year.

The problem with the above list, though, is that there is a very good chance that wild card tie-breakers will most likely be used to compare teams from DIFFERENT divisions, not the same division (especially since we only have six teams making the playoffs each year, from four different divisions). In other words, division record is really irrelevant when comparing teams that are not from the same division. So, my question is simply this... Do we want two different sets of tie-breakers, one to be used in determining division winners, and the other for wild card determination? Essentially, should we include the division record as a tie-breaker in determining the divsion winner ONLY, or just simply leave it out all together.

MFL does not allow a league to set up two different sets of tie-breakers, but that's really not the issue... More than likely, we'll end up manually setting the playoff matchups on MFL anyway. The question is simply... do you think division record is significant that it SHOULD be included, or should we make things simple, and just eliminate division record (using total points as the first tie-breaker AFTER head-to-head)?

Regardless, I'm thinking this should be the list of WC tie-breakers:

1) HTH
2) Total points
3) Total points (in HTH games)
4) Bench points

The question is if division record should be inserted in between #1 and #2, for division winner determination only, or if we should have both sets of tie-breakers mirror each other.

Please feel free to post your thoughts here, or just vote and let the poll do the talking.

Good work on getting this going. It almost became an issue last year. I do believe that division record should be important in determining standings within the division but not as a tiebreaker between teams from different divisions.

Vote recorded

+1