Template talk:12TeamBracket-NFL

I started this template as a hack of Template:Round16, which is primarily used on articles related to the FIFA World Cup and the football (soccer) tournaments. I might modify it in the future so that there are separate parameters for the seed numbers. Zzyzx11 (Talk) 13:34, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

I see that you did the seeds. I used them to resolve the confusion over the Divisional Playoff pairings. There are now conditionals for wild-card outcomes, which make the lines between them and the Divisional games dotted unless one of the visiting team seeds is filled in for that conference, in which case they solidify. The same conditions trigger a note explaining how this all works, which automagically disappears when at least one Divisional round visiting seed is filled in for each conference. I also expanded several fields, adding room to fill vertically instead of forcing game boxes to grow just because the date/stadium information went to two lines. I also removed some things taking up space, after moving the round descriptions into the body of the bracket.The Monster 14:29, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

Rename

If you are going to use this on the Arena Football League articles, you might want to rename it. Zzyzx11 (Talk) 23:12, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Changing the existing references to NFLBracket would be a lot of work, and the name is appropriate because the template is primarily for the NFL. It happens to work for now because the AFL has changed to an NFL-style playoff format. The comment in the AFL page clarifies that it works OK with the AFL. Were we talking about the name by which casual users access the information, I'd agree that it needed to be renamed, but this is an under-the-hood bit, so it's probably not worth the effort. The Monster 03:06, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

Re-seeding information too complicated

Is it just me or does the note about re-seeding seem a lot more complicated than it needs to be?

The rule in the NFL is quite simple. The lowest-ranked team remaining always plays against the highest-ranked team remaining, and the highest-ranked team in a game gets to play at home.

Plus, I really don't like the term "re-seeding." Teams keep the seed they had since the beginning of the playoffs. The uncertainty in who plays in which divisional game (and where) stems only from not knowing which teams will be through to that round.62.30.213.185 (talk) 15:22, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Go take a look at the articles that use this template, and you'll see why it's necessary. Every year there's someone who tries to move things around because they don't understand the "quite simple" rules for the NFL playoff. I developed the conditional logic to put this re-seeding information in just long enough to keep the uninformed at bay, but so that it would go away once it's no longer needed. It's worked fairly well at that since it was put in place. Whether you like "re-seeding" or not, that's the name for it. A traditional seeded tournament (NCAA basketball, Wimbledon) assigns teams to bracket positions based on initial seeding, allowing upsets to unbalance the bracket. Professional leagues often re-seed their playoffs at least after the first round; sometimes more. That's what the people who do it call it, so that is what we call it. The Monster (talk) 14:43, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Actually I think the OP is correct on several points. Teams are not 're-seeded' -- the bracketing adjusts to the seeding after the wild card round. I'm going to be bold & change the wording to match what the parent article National Football League playoffs says, "The NFL does not use a fixed bracket playoff system. The number 1 seed will host the lowest surviving seed from the first round (seed 4, 5 or 6), while the number 2 seed will play the other team (seed 3, 4 or 5). ref." Thus, I'm using the term re-bracketing (admittedly, not the best term but not as misleading as re-seeding). Neither that article (nor the linked reference) mentions the term "reseed' at all. In fact, this season we see the term "Re-seeding" used appropriately: the proposal to re-assign seeding based on records and not division win, because of a losing team getting home field advantage in round one. I notice that the related article Playoff_format#Reseeding incorrectly uses the term 'reseeding', but I don't see any sources listed there. That page should be fixed. I also wonder if the conditional change to the bracketing should be mentioned once the bracket is set, so as to explain the inconsistencies from year to year. -PrBeacon (talk) 02:19, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

I'm going to be more bold and revert your unilateral changes. "Re-bracketing" is not what anyone calls it. Everyone calls it "re-seeding".68.94.165.151 (talk) 22:33, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

Follow-up on the above. I did some googling for "tournament re-bracketing" and found the term is in use, but isn't referring specifically to seeding the highest remaining team against the lowest, etc. Instead, this was in the context of HS sports, where the re-bracketing was done to reduce the distance the teams and their supporters would have to drive to a game. I found far more hits for "tournament re-seeding", nearly all of which used it in the sense it's used here. Several of the top hits were from people dissatisfied when the NCAA Final Four paired two 1-seeds in one semi-final game, and two 5-seeds in the other. Several of the articles said that the NCAA should not re-seed like the NFL does. The recent proposal to seed wildcards with better records ahead of low-performing division winners has been called "re-seeding" in a few places, but this seems to be a neologism; use of the term consistent with the language here has been around much longer.68.94.165.151 (talk) 04:36, 8 January 2011 (UTC)

That's fine, WP:BRD and all. But I'm still not convinced 're-seeding' is right, and Google hits don't mean much for proper terminology. I know re-bracketing isn't much better, as I said, but the teams are not re-seeded: they retain their seed numbers throughout the playoffs. Just because the improper term has been adopted doesn't make it appropriate here, I think we have a greater obligation to be clear and unambiguous for the reader, especially given the uneasy connections between athletics and academia (ie, proper use of English). -PrBeacon (talk) 07:50, 8 January 2011 (UTC)

<----+ I think the problem here is that the word "seed" has two closely related meanings in this context [1]:

a : to schedule (tournament players or teams) so that superior ones will not meet in early rounds
b : to rank (a contestant) relative to others in a tournament on the basis of previous record <the top-seeded tennis star>

Most seeded tournaments do both of these things at the same time, so there is no ambiguity. The NFL and NHL are notable exceptions that do b at the end of the regular season (according to rules), and do a in stages. You seem to be saying that a is not "seeding", but clearly both of these things are "seeding". I am 100% with you on athletics adopting incorrect terms (hearing sportscasters discuss a team's "turnover ratio" computed by subtracting giveaways from takeaways made me want to go Elvis and shoot out TVs). But this is not one of those cases. The word applies as the template has used it lo these many years.69.152.170.228 (talk) 00:59, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

Home/road

I'd note that it seems unusually silly to me to make a point of putting the home team on the bottom line always. Why not just feed teams onto the line they most appropriately belong on (i.e., whether they're coming from the top or bottom of the bracket prior)? First of all, a bracket exists to show a tournament path, not home advantage. Second, home advantage in the NFL is always determined by the team's seed, which means making a point of putting the home team on the bottom line totally superfluous. It's coming up in the present bracket, where editors have refused to simply put SF on a constant line and are instead reserving whether to put SF on the top or bottom based on the outcome of the GB/NYG game. MrArticleOne (talk) 21:24, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

One of the issues, as you stated, is that the NFL does not use a fixed bracket playoff system like the NBA or the NCAA. This is coupled with the fact that the NFL uses a single-elimination tournament. So there is that tendency for users to want to re-sort or flip the bracket based on home-field advantage (and list the scores of each match as they would appear in a normal box score with the visiting team on top and the home team on the bottom). One alternative is to do something like Template:8TeamBracket-Re-seeds and Template:16TeamBracket-Two-Reseeds, and remove most of the bracket lines altogether except for the final two rounds. Zzyzx11 (talk) 06:19, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

Were I designing it, it would look as follows. Take the NHL Bracket (you can drop the colors if you like, although I think they make a contribution). Strike the 1/8 and 4/5 boxes, and then renumber the 2 remaining boxes (i.e., make the top one 3/6 and the bottom one 4/5).Then leave the rest of it as is. The lack of connecting lines from the first to the 2nd round would visually communicate the reseeding component to the format. Spacing the 2 first round boxes close to each other and without any real stair-step relationship with the 2nd round boxes would be further visual emphasis of that. Frankly, I would put the high seed on the top line, not the bottom line, but that is mostly my taste I suppose. MrArticleOne (talk) 06:44, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

Your point about a traditional box score is a good one, but I have always wondered why Wikipedians are so hung up on this point, yet nobody seems to object to a standard NCAA tournament bracket, where teams simply feed onto the line they belong on, regardless of seeding. Is that not the first serious bracket that any sports fan is exposed to? I should think that would inform one's expectations of what a bracket exists to do. And it does not exist to communicate who had the "home advantage" (i.e., the team that wears the white uniforms). MrArticleOne (talk) 06:47, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

My design proposal for the NFL bracket would also omit what I feel is a confusing array of dotted lines that the current template uses to communicate reseeding before the 2nd round pairings are finalized. It's my opinion that my approach is a more elegant way of accomplishing that, but then again, someone with much greater coding skill than I put in place the current implementation, and it is clear that they were thinking seriously about how to communicate these concepts visually, so I do not mean to demean their effort. MrArticleOne (talk) 06:49, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

Users editing the NCAA or the NHL articles are not necessarily the same people who edit the NFL articles. Thus there is no general consistency or consensus in this regard across the board on all sports articles (much like how those editing the NFL articles like having Super Bowl championship navboxes but all those Stanley Cup championship navboxes were deleted). Chalk this up as another example of Wikipedia:Other stuff exists.

This is also why I deliberately did not mention Template:NHLBracket in my earlier comment. There have also been debates like Template talk:NHLBracket#Team order in the third round regarding the team order and the bracket lines there. And like that discussion, and those similar debates on the 2010 and 2011 Cup playoff articles, some supported your general position that it should purely display tournament path, and others supported having it sorted by home advantage. Most of those who edit the NFL football articles tend to support the latter. Zzyzx11 (talk) 07:22, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

I take it you do not think it is enough to simply say that this is misguided. MrArticleOne (talk) 14:29, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

If you are taking about rehashing and debating the pros and cons of either method, I think plenty has already been said on Talk:2010 Stanley Cup playoffs,Talk:2011 Stanley Cup playoffs, etc. If the 'Home Advantage' method is "misguided", then why does that debate happen every year on the Cup playoff articles? And as for your other concern about editors refusing to simply add a team immediately after they advance instead of waiting for the entire round to be complete, does that also happen on the NHL bracket templates?[2][3] Zzyzx11 (talk) 06:36, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

I think it recurs because Wikipedia draws a certain sort of person to edit on it, and it is a sort of blindness in that personality type not to think through the inherent purpose of what a bracket is for, which is a visualization of a tournament path. That this is so is proven by the utility of a bracket regardless of whether home advantage is even something that is a possibility in the event or not. Imagine, for example, a single-elimination tournament (basketball, hockey, soccer, choose your sport) held over the course of a weekend at a pre-assigned site. A tournament bracket would be just as useful in showing tournament path even though home advantage was a total non-factor (since the competition site was pre-assigned). There would still be a tournament path to demonstrate. MrArticleOne (talk) 22:16, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

If I wanted to force people to strictly follow tournament path, I would've used a format similar to File:SixteenPlayerSingleEliminationTournamentBracket.svg, and just purely display bracket lines. Most of the tournament brackets we have now are really box line score tables, arranged in a bracket-like fashion. Therefore, there is more of an inclination to treat these cells as separate box scores instead of purely strict tournament paths. Zzyzx11 (talk) 05:06, 19 January 2012 (UTC)

I don't think this file would be suitable simply because it implies a definiteness to the tournament path that is only true in an ex post facto fashion. But this sort of thing is appropriate for, say, the NCAA basketball tournaments (although I think most people reasonably expect the final score to be displayed). MrArticleOne (talk) 13:15, 19 January 2012 (UTC)

Colours

Is there any way of modifying this bracket so that the colours switch over when the NFC is on the top? See 2009–10 NFL playoffs for an example of when this would be necessary. – PeeJay 22:53, 5 November 2016 (UTC)