Should the NFL change its playoff format?

[Alidar Jarok]

Leave the divisions as is, but reseed the playoffs so the team with the higher winning percentage hosts the game.

The appeases both camps, right?

This gets my vote. Winning in the division should count for something, but not everything.

But teams with better records are often left out of the playoffs for 'division winners'. Two years ago the 8-8 San Diego Chargers, the 'AFC West Champion', made the playoffs while the 11-5 New England Patriots sat home.

True, but division play creates rivalries and forces teams to build to compete with the other teams in the division, which encourages diversity in team structure and strategy, making cross-division games more interesting match-ups. It also makes the good teams in the division better overall, resulting in better seasons. I wouldn't want to give that up just for easier play-off seeding. I say this as a fan of a team that competes in a division with another perennial play-off team and which has often gotten the fuzzy end of that lollipop in the seedings.

There's no need to eliminate divisions... just the automatic playoff berth that accompanies winning a division.

That makes divisions next to pointless except to have unbalanced schedules. Teams that failed to make the Wild Card got beat out by two teams that didn't win their division, but were still better and could easily have remedied the situation by winning more games in their division. I do think they need to reseed so a crappy division winner doesn't get homefield, but that's as far as I'd go.