2012 Super Bowl: Maybe Sneaking into the Playoffs is Good Strategy

It happens every year. Teams that rolled all season and have wrapped up divisions and playoff home-field advantage begin resting starters to avoid injuries in weeks 15, 16, and 17. Almost inevitably, what had been the NFL's hottest teams just a few weeks earlier come out flat in the playoffs and go home early. Think this year's Packers. And to be fair, with this year as an exception, we've seen that in Indianapolis as much anyone has. Is there a connection between the "resting starters" and the going home early?

You'd have to be in a coma or hate football to not know that the New York Giants beat the New England Patriots 21-17 last night in the Indianapolis-hosted Super Bowl. Eli Manning bested his older brother's one Super Bowl win by doing what he's done all year: calmly driving his team into position to take the lead with less than one minute to go. Manning was assisted by Mario Manningham's version of "the catch," in what would become the Giants' sixth straight win to end the season. You see, after week 15, the Giants sat at 7-7, on the verge of missing out on the playoffs.

As I watched this Giants' team's impressive run, I thought back to the last time they won the Super Bowl (in 2008), and I checked and confirmed my suspicion: that team had not been good enough in the regular season to earn a first round bye, either. Is that a trend? At least two other teams immediately came to mind: last year's Packers (10-6 regular season, earned a wildcard playoff birth) and the only Colts' team during the Manning era that won the Super Bowl (finished 12-4 in the regular season, not good enough to earn a first-round bye).

So with a question forming (Something like, is it a mistake to rest players late in the season? Or: are teams that earn a first-round bye in the NFL playoffs really at a disadvantage?), I decided to do some quick Wikipedia research. For time's sake and because I'm really only interested for this question in the modern NFL game, I looked at every Super Bowl Champion since 2000. In what I already know is a small sample size, here is what I found.

Overall, it's a pretty mixed bag. Of the thirteen Super Bowl winners I considered, seven of them had earned a first-round bye. One of the more interesting cases was the 2010 Saints, which began their season 13-0, lost their last three, then recovered in time to snag a playoff run and a Super Bowl win. Of the six winners that came from a wildcard round, five have come in the past seven seasons. Only two teams that have won a Super Bowl since 2000 have had the best record during the regular season.

So maybe it's not enough to cast aside the "resting starters" philosophy, although recent Super Bowl winners definitely seem to be ones that don't. At the very least, though, we should be able to acknowledge that maybe a few losses during the regular season aren't really such a bad thing.