Too much emphasis placed on winning your division

This is a topic that I won;t just be reserving for baseball. But I'll start it out using the example of the NL West. Right now the Dodgers are leading the West with barely over a .500 record. The Diamondbacks are currently 3 games back at the moment and are under .500. There are currently 6 teams better than the Dodgers in the NL and there are 8 teams currently better than Arizona in the NL. Yet one of either LA or Arizona will make the playoffs simply because they won their horrible division.

Whether it be MLB, the NFL or the NBA, in my opinion winning your division is one of the most overrated ways of determining playoff seeds or playoff spots in general. It may very well be the worst in baseball where only 4 teams in each league can get a postseason bid. And in recent years, the wild card team, the one team that got in without winning their division has been the team to at least make it to the World Series, if not win it all. If you are in a very tough division and finish maybe in 3rd but still have a better record than another division winner, you get punished for being in a tough division while a team like the Dodgers will get rewarded for being in a division full of teams that would not come close to winning any of the other divisions.

In the NFL while it's only been one week, in the NFC the three best teams in my mind seem to be the Cowboys, Giants and Eagles. All of them come from the NFC East. Now the good news is they all can make the playoffs as there are 2 wild cards. But the bad news is what if they both have better records than at least one if not more division winners. They won't get homefield at all in the playoffs (although for NY that's not necessarily a bad thing as we saw last year). Having said that the NFC North looks to be awful right now as does the NFC West where Seattle typically wins with only 9 wins. You can be a team that isn't remotely worthy of a playoff bid but because they're in a horrible division they get in.

The NBA probably does the best job of managing this now because one team if they have a better record than a division winner will actually get a higher seed. In addition if the lower seed has a better record than the higher seed then the low seed will get homecourt in the series. Having said that there can be more than one non division winner that is better than a division winner and will get screwed out of a higher seed because they didn't win their division.

In sticking with baseball, overall, the Cubs, Milwaukee, the Mets, the Phillies, St. Louis and now even Houston are better than the Dodgers, and all these teams plus Florida are better than Arizona. But the NL West winner will get in over half of these teams because they won a horrible division. The postseason should be the teams with the best records and should have nothing to do with winning your division. Winning a tough division can be a huge accomplishment. But winning a weak division means absolutely nothing and should not mean anautomatic playoff spot.