What the NFL Playoffs Could Learn From the World Cup

American sports fans like to celebrate wins. On Thursday, they celebrated a loss.

Most fans of United States Men's National Team realized that a tie or close loss against Germany would likely catapult them into the next leg of the World Cup. And with the USMNT losing to the Germans 1-0 ("one-nil"), they managed to finish among the top two teams of their group, good enough to advance to the so-called knockout stage of the quadrennial soccer tournament.

It's the first time We The People have made it to the bracket portion of the World Cup in back-to-back tournaments, so hooray for us. But it left me wondering about how excited many people were to watch their team, obvious underdogs against a strong German side, get their butts handed to them.

The celebration struck some as bizarre, and almost un-American, even.

And would that sort of devotion, with the promise of advancement toward an ultimate prize, translate into other sports? Ones already established here in the states?

It just so happens that the NFL is looking to expand its own playoff system, and that effort just gained a helpful supporter in New York Jets owner Woody Johnson. "[The league is] going to study it hard. But I kind of like it," Johnson told The (New Jersey) Star-Ledger recently. "I like the idea of more playoff games."

Mr. Johnson, you want more playoff games? I'll give you more playoff games.

First, let's compare and contrast the World Cup's format with what the NFL's doing now (and feel free to skip ahead three paragraphs if you already know this).

The World Cup is really just a big soccer tournament. But it's a tournament in two acts. First is pool play, which groups the 32 eligible teams into eight groups of four. All the teams in each group play each other once, and the two best teams from that group advance to the champagne room portion of the Cup: the knockout stage.

Compare that to the NFL, whose pool play stage is really the 17-week regular season. Again, we have 32 teams, sorted into eight groups of four teams each (actually, more like two piles of four groups of four). But here, each team plays every other team twice, every team from two other predetermined divisions once, and two other games against teams with similar finishes from the previous season. And every team also gets a week off.

From there, the winner of each group, plus the two best teams from each pile that didn't win their group, play off in a knockout stage of their own. ("Knockout" is probably not the best jargon to be using when describing the NFL in 2014…but I digress.) It's a quick, simple, efficient way to let the league's best teams play off for a berth in the Super Bowl.

And the league hates it.

Fine. Let's improve on it.

Let's shoehorn another tier of games into the NFL Playoffs. Instead of one-and-done, let's institute a system that might be similar to the series structure of other leagues' playoffs. Let's blatantly steal from the World Cup and plug in a pool play phase, to be played immediately after the regular season and before the…uh…the Super Bowl tournament.

And let's make Roger Goodell and the owners happy and let in 14 teams to the party, seven each from the AFC and NFC. So we'll have seven teams from each conference in two groups: one group of four and one group of three. And the groups will have real names, not "Group A" and "Group B."

Sorry if the lopsided conferences make your brain hurt, but there's a point to it. Each team plays every other team in its group once. Highest-finishing team from each group advances to its conference's championship. Here's what that format and schedule would look like for each conference, if we were to institute this for the 2014 season (home teams are in bold):

Keep in mind, this is just the schedule for one conference. The other conference would have its games on Saturday in this model. But it illustrates the biggest incentive produced by the two-tiered playoff system.

More playoff games.

Although we've added a week to the playoffs, we've doubled the number of playoff games in each conference. Instead of five games, we now have ten. That's 20 total playoff games for the league to dangle in front of the TV networks. Do you smell that? That's the money printer going into overdrive.

Another positive of this system is that it's easy to simply add an eighth team to Group Red Meat, a feature that will surely please Goodell and his crusade for maximum moolah. And with the first, second, and third seeds each getting a guaranteed two playoff games (and the sixth-seed, presumably the fourth-best division winner from the conference), the postseason revenue is flowing toward those teams that had great regular seasons.

The revenue component is a necessary one, because while those division winners have been rewarded financially, their respective paths toward a Super Bowl do not get any less murkier. Having the best conference record does get you a first-round bye and a pair of lesser teams to presumably pound on for a couple weeks (which might seem like just deserts for a potentially-below-.500 team that sneaks into the postseason). But it also leaves that team with little margin for error to reach the knockout stage.

As for the second-best team in the conference, they would now have to play four playoff games before even reaching the Super Bowl. Including their 16 regular-season games, the big game would be that team's 21st of the season. Ditto for whatever 3-, 4-, or 5-seed that might make it out of the heavy group.

There's also a question of tie-breaking, an issue which I didn't address intentionally. Personally, I like the idea of "points scored" breaking ties, especially in that 1-6-7 group, where a blowout might be the difference between advancing to the conference title game or advancing to an early vacation.

And just as we've seen in the end of many recent regular seasons, a lack of effort could undermine the entire process. Unlike their international soccer counterparts (or in some cases just like them), certain NFL teams may not be interested in being battered around for lame-duck pool play games. Any of the third, fourth, or fifth seeds could be out of the running with an 0-2 start, creating a de facto exhibition game on national television. That's a potential embarrassment for both the league and whatever network was stuck with that game.

Workarounds for those issues exist. One is to let the teams "draft" their slots in pool play. The first seed would surely be the initial occupants of Group Red Meat. The second-seeded team would have the option to take their chances with the 1-seed and join the lighter group, understanding that they could save themselves a game if they beat the conference leaders in the pool play stage. That selection process might even make interesting Monday night television. Could seven teams sort out their preferences in that amount of time? It would be fair to, perhaps more discreetly, give the networks the same option, and let them pick from the subsequent litter of games.

Of course, most of the criticism of the NFL's plan to alter its playoff system has nothing to do with any proposed plan to change it. They like it the way it is. It's simple and easy for fans to understand. And while some take issue with the worst division winner still getting a home playoff game each season, the dialogue on the issue seems contrived when comparing it to the postseasons of the other major professional sports. The NHL and NBA playoff formats are overly inclusive; baseball's is overly exclusive, even with the silly best-of-one wild card games. The NFL has struck the balance better than any of them.

The most interesting of all the playoff formats might be that of the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series, a circuit that had no postseason structure until 2004, when the governing body essentially embedded one into the tail-end of its regular season. And praise for "The Chase" has been almost unanimous. It's a model with an important lesson: postseason drama doesn't always have to come at the cost of adding events to the schedule. It's a lesson that the NFL, as they tinker with their road maps to the biggest one-day event in sports, could stand to absorb.

Josh is a freelance sportswriter, analyst and host. You may know him from such websites as Deadspin, Kissing Suzy Kolber, With Leather, WashingtonPost.com, and Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter @JoshZerkle.