The genius of Pluribus is that, like with Breaking Bad, Gilligan has clearly taken pieces from other shows that he likes and retrofitted them onto the world that he wants to live in.
With Pluribus, at least early, I see a lot of The Leftovers and a bit of Severance, but it’s not exactly the same.
It’s inspired by rather than copied from.
Gilligan did the same with Breaking Bad: borrowed the familiar, reshaped it, and made it new.
The AFL has no such genius.
They take an idea, they simplify it and apply it a little bit worse than the original was.
The latest example of this is the AFL’s truly stupefying decision to bring in a wildcard round to expand the finals series.
The notion of a wildcard is copied exactly from the NBA and the NFL.
The NFL has long had a wildcard structure.
In the NFL, there are two conferences with four divisions each, and 32 total teams.
Their playoff process works so that the winners of each division are guaranteed a top-four playoff seed.
From there, the next best three teams by record each get wildcard spots.
This works because there will always be years where some divisions are stronger than others.
Reasonably, winning 14 games should get you a playoff spot and the Vikings got one.
The league that the AFL has copied most closely, however, is the NBA.
In the NBA, they recently introduced a play-in tournament.
The NBA has two conferences and 16 teams in each, with eight making the playoffs.
In 2020, the league introduced a play-in tournament where the teams that finished between 7th and 10th play each other for the right to make the playoffs.
Sound familiar?
It’s the same, except it’s not.
In the NBA, 7 plays 8 and 9 plays 10 first.
The winner of the 7-8 matchup gets into the playoffs while the loser plays the winner of the 9-10 matchup.
The higher seeds that had better regular seasons get a double chance in the NBA.
In the AFL, it’s just going to be the winner of 7-10 gets in and the winner of 8-9 gets in.
The AFL is not like the NBA.
You can’t play two games in three days so why are we copying them as if there’s no difference?
They’ve copied it, but just made it a little bit worse.
This change means you can reasonably ask what’s the point of the season?
If 7 and 10 have the same chance of making the finals, why bother playing the six months leading into the weekend that used to be before finals?
More than that, the AFL already had a meaningless game problem.
Hasn’t this just made it worse? Or made it worse for the good teams at least, while the teams in the middle part of the bottom 8 are going to be alive longer?
You could maybe mount a bad faith argument that actually this rewards excellence because if you get in the top-6 you’re safe.
Balderdash.
Why should Sydney last year, with their 12 wins and percentage of 97 have the same right to make the finals as Gold Coast with their 15 wins and percentage of 124?
It gets to a larger trend of the AFL justifying its annual trip to the States by generally copying American ideas.
I can’t remember the last structural innovation from the AFL that felt original.
You get the sense that if the NFL told the AFL to jump off a bridge, the only thing that would slow the fall is the drag from the erection they get from following American sports.
I’m not telling you that this is going to ruin the AFL, I find it funny and embarrassing more than offensive.
I’m also not going to tell you this is about money since everything is about money.
The AFL exists to make money, and this will probably make it more money.
It’s not breaking news that the AFL wants to wring cash out of the product.
Finally, I’m not telling you that I’m not going to watch these wildcard games.
I will, and I’ll probably enjoy them because single elimination is great.
All I’m telling you is that I wouldn’t trust the AFL to create a recipe, and they’re lucky that the game is so good that all of their tinkering around the margins hasn’t wrecked the on-field product yet.
Yet.