NFL team owners voted Friday to pass a group of adjusted playoff scenarios resulting from the league’s “no contest” cancellation of the Monday night game between the Buffalo 토토사이트 Bills and Cincinnati Bengals.
The league’s resolution opens the door to a possible neutral site game in the AFC championship, based on a handful of potential outcomes. It will also create a coin-flip scenario to determine home-field advantage for a Bengals-Baltimore Ravens wild-card game if the Ravens defeat Cincinnati on Sunday. These alterations override the league’s previous ruling on canceled games, which would have followed traditional seeding rules based on overall winning percentages.
“We believe this is a focused approach that would only affect four teams and directly address the potential inequity of 30 teams playing 17 games and two teams playing 16 games,” said NFL commissioner Roger Goodell in a Zoom call on Friday.
The team owners’ vote became necessary after the league took the unprecedented step to cancel Monday night’s game following the hospitalization of Bills safety Damar Hamlin after he suffered cardiac arrest during the first quarter. Due to playoff seeding being in the balance for Buffalo and Cincinnati, Goodell and the league’s competition committee drew up multiple scenarios that would work to eliminate potential seeding “inequities” due to the Bills and Bengals playing one less game in 2022-23 than other playoff qualifiers.
The decision to allow the Bills and Bengals to complete 2022-23 with a 16-game schedule now places specific AFC title game qualifiers on those two teams for only the 2022-23 season. That means the change is a one-time alteration that will also allow Goodell to choose the AFC title game site. According to the resolution: