So the NFL owners have proposed a plan to expand the regular season to 17 games and add a seventh team to each conference’s playoffs.

Well, how about this idea?

EVERY team makes the playoffs. Sort of.

Here’s my pitch: keep the Super Bowl tournament as six teams in each conference.  We can debate seeding later, as I don’t think winning a division title necessarily means a team should automatically get one of the top four seeds in their conference.

Meanwhile, the other 20 teams (10 in each conference) qualify for something we’re going to call the Best of the Rest.

Here’s how the Best of the Rest would work:

1. The bottom four teams in the standings in each conference play in the first round.
   For example, last season would have seen Cincinnati at Cleveland and Miami at the Chargers in the AFC and Washington at Carolina and Detroit at the Giants in the NFC. (NOTE: NFL playoff standings can be found here.)
2. The second round sees the 7th-place team in the conference hosting the lowest-seeded winner from round 1, the 8th-place team hosting the other first-round winner, the 9th-place team hosting 12th place, and the 10th-place team hosting 11th place.
   Here’s how that would have worked for the 2019 season:
   AFC
   CIN, MIA or LAC at Pittsburgh
   MIA, LAC or CLE at Denver
   Jacksonville at Oakland
   N.Y. Jets at Indianapolis
   NFC
   WAS, DET or NYG at L.A. Rams
   DET, NYG, or CAR at Chicago
   Arizona at Dallas
   Tampa Bay at Atlanta
3. And then so on, lowest seed vs. top seed and so on, just like with the “real” playoffs. Get rid of the Pro Bowl and have the Best of the Rest finale take place that weekend. (If you really want to bring the other top players to Orlando for a weekend, just do some skills competitions during the weekend. Probably more exciting to watch than the Pro Bowl.)

There you go. Every team plays at least 17 games without having to figure out some weird formula for what that 17th game is. More teams get in the “playoffs.” Problem solved.