When we were kids, we used to laugh at the NBA playoffs in the sense that 16 of the 23 teams in the league qualified, making the regular season itself somewhat irrelevant and boring to a fan with a short span of attention. At the same time, only 4 of the 26 MLB teams qualified for the postseason, while just 10 of the 28 NFL teams made it to January. We didn’t watch any hockey in the 1980s, truthfully, outside of the Olympics.

But the NHL was like the NBA in terms of postseason silliness (and even worse!): 16 of 21 teams made it the Stanley Cup playoffs, demonstrating you had to really suck in order to miss the championship tournament. In the days since, things have become both better and worse: 16 teams make the Cup playoffs these days, but there are now 32 teams in the league, and the NHL has resisted temptation to keep its regular season a farce.

The NBA has expanded its postseason access, somewhat, giving 4 extra teams a chance to qualify now in the post-Covid universe. With 30 teams in professional basketball, it means that 20 of them can make the playoffs, in theory. That’s still a two-thirds majority, so if your local five cannot make the play-in games, well … then your local five really stinks. We’ve yet to see a No. 9 or No. 10 seed make a deep playoff run.

The NFL started watering down its playoffs in the early 1990s, adding 2 more wild-card teams to the Super Bowl preamble. Now, with 32 teams in the league, 14 of them make the playoffs. That’s still less than half of them, which is good, but we still see a team under .500 make it in every so often, and that should never happen in any sport, in truth. Yet it happens all the time in the NBA and the NHL, thanks to saturation.

MLB added more teams to its playoff tournament, too, and now, there are 12 postseason slots for 30 teams to chase. These are the slimmest odds, still, of any sports league discussed above, but what we find today with payroll disparities, etc., are a few haves and a lot of have nots. Today’s standings demonstrate that if the MLB playoffs started tomorrow? The final National League playoff team could be under .500 overall.

That is just a disgrace after a 162-game season. If you can’t finish above .500 after 162 games, you don’t deserve a shot at the World Series. That’s just common sense: a team with a losing regular-season record has never won a major professional sports league championship, but it’s bound to happen the more chances occur for the possibility. That’s just the way the odds work, really. It’s more likely to happen in two sports.

Baseball or hockey. Upsets occur more often in the postseason for these sports as the nature of the games themselves dictate quirky things happening with frequency. A bad team that has gained admission to the postseason dance can make a run to the final championship round and shock us all. Think about the 1991 Minnesota North Stars: a 27-39-14 record in the regular season, and they still almost won the Cup Finals.

Perhaps the worst team to win a Super Bowl was the 2011 New York Giants, a group that was outscored during the regular season. The 2006 World Series champion St. Louis Cardinals won just 83 games in the regular season. By contrast, the 1978 Washington Bullets look good with a 44-win season before they went on to win the NBA title. The 2012 Los Angeles Kings, with just 40 wins, won the Stanley Cup, by the way.

The Cardinals, with their 83-win season, did the deed in an era with just 8 playoff teams out of 30 in MLB. It was a fluke, for sure, both winning a division with a record barely over .500—and making it all the way to the World Series before winning it. Someday soon, unless some remedies are applied, we will see a losing team make the playoffs and win a league championship … and it will probably happen in baseball first.