What, tables and flowcharts weren’t enough for you? You want actual commentary by people who know stuff? OK! You got it: the playoff buzz, just for you.

Now who’s gonna come babysit Tiny Coach and Scout so we can cover all the games tonight? (Please form an orderly line with references in hand.)

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Per the Miami Fury Facebook page, the Savannah Sabers have forfeited their first round playoff game today, which means the Fury have a bye and will compete in round 2 next week against either Atlanta or Tampa Bay. The Sabers were the Division 5 runners-up, and Divs 5 & 6, as you may remember, have no wild card, meaning that the only other team that could have taken their place (as the Zydeco took the Mustangs) would have been the Tennessee Train, who went 1-7 for the season. So in that sense, Miami’s bye makes sense.

But in the larger picture, I think it’s worth doing a little examination to see why two teams that made the playoffs couldn’t make it to their games. Is that an indication that too many teams are in the playoffs to begin with? Or that teams should be fundraising all season as if they already knew they would have post-season away games? Or is it some other reason? I actually have no idea why Savannah forfeited, and I wouldn’t have even known they did if I hadn’t been checking the Fury’s FB page to try to find info about following the game. This change isn’t currently reflected on the WFA site and I don’t have any independent confirmation of it but I’m assuming Miami knows what they’re talking about.

Updated bracket is here. Happy gameday to everyone playing! It’s a gorgeous day in Boston; I hope it is where you are, too.

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This just in: the Lonestar Mustangs, wild card team for Divisions 7, 8 and 9, have declined their playoff spot as not enough team members would be able to travel to St. Louis on Saturday. Enter the Acadiana Zydeco, who would be described here as a scrappy little team with a lot of heart if that weren’t, like, the most patronizing thing I’ve ever said ever. So rephrase that in your head to something else, taking into consideration that last year, the Zydeco were essentially screwed out of a playoff spot when an in-division team folded mid-season and automatically handed the third division team two “wins” in the way of forfeits. So hey! Karma! Personally, I’m psyched to see them in the post-season, and not just ’cause I have a soft spot for Louisiana in general. In fact, I’m so psyched that I don’t even mind redoing the bracket. AGAIN.

Current as of 6/10/13 at lunchtime: PDF | Excel

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Last week of regular season! Games along with gametime (in EST and local) are listed below, along with notes about playoff implications if relevant. Please note that there may be implications to home field in some of these games but since I still don’t know how that’s being decided, I can’t tell you which ones might matter. Hate that.

Of note: Today’s Let’s Confuse Militia Cheerleader Award goes to the Central Cal War Angels, who put out a press release entitled “Division Title Game!”, which contained the following:

On Saturday June 8 (7pm), at Golden West High School’s Community Stadium, the undefeated Central Cal War Angels (7-0) are taking on former 3-time National Champion the Sacramento Sirens for the Women’s Football Alliance Division Championship. The winner will secure a first round home game in the WFA National Championship Playoffs.

Now hold the phone. Division champ is decided by in-division record, then by head-to-head record, then by head-to-head point differential.

Because their division only has two active teams and the season was bizarre, the War Angels and the Sirens have only played one game against each other: War Angels won, 24-6. So Central Cal has an in-division record of 1-0 to Sacramento’s 0-1.

If the War Angels win by even one point, they are the division champions. In order for the Sirens to be div champs, they’d have to win by more than the War Angels did – namely, 19+ points. So it’s not a winner-takes-all kinda thing.

It’s also ridiculous because BOTH teams will automatically be in the playoffs since the winner and runner-up in that division go and there’s only two damn teams.

As I mentioned above, I don’t know the details of the home field thing but Backseat Coach sent me a link to an article that says this:

King said if the War Angels can beat the Sirens by 22 points they would lock up home-field advantage in the postseason, and the possible three ensuing games would be played in Visalia.

First, whoever wins that division gets home field in the first game, because it’s a “blue” division. So that’s Central Cal if they win by anything, and Sacramento if they win by more than 19.

Does she mean that the War Angels would need to win by 22 points to get home field advantage in the second round? I’m gonna see if I can reverse-engineer the home field process to see what those 22 points could represent and maybe THAT will give me some insight? Or maybe Lisa King (she of the War Angels and the WFA) is just as confused as we are, which is kinda evidenced already by that press release. Well, now I know what I’m spending my lunch break doing. Mmm, salad & spreadsheets.

Anyway, the whole game rundown thing is below. As ever, if you see anything inaccurate, please let me know.

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This home field thing is getting my goat. And frankly, between my two-year-old and the heat wave we just had, I don’t have that much goat left to get.

Let me clarify something, here: I do all of this analysis and spreadsheeting and bracket-making and all that not because I don’t have anything better to do, but because the friggin’ league – whose job it is to do this – won’t do it. It’s absurd that teams would not know the playoff structure by the end of the damn season. And lest anyone start with the “Well, everyone who needs to know already knows” song and dance, let me share with everyone the playoff document produced by the WFA.

At first glance, it looks like a lot of information. Upon further review, it’s utter malarkey. I may have mentioned once or twice that it does not include the procedure for actually determining division winners. It also appears to include tie-breaker criteria for determining home field, but in reality, none of it actually works. Observe:

Criterion 1: “Blue div winner”. This apparently means any of the divisions in any of the five shades of blue on the bizarrely-colored list of divisions, some of whom have a bye for the first week and some of whom don’t. OK, whatever. That leaves eight matchups to determine.

Criterion 2: Head to head. Not a single one of the eight matchups includes any head to head regular season games. So whoop-dee-zip to that.

Criterion 3: Common opponent. Lovely in theory. Impossible in practice. In not one of the matchups have any two teams played the same common opponent the same number of times. I played Team A twice. You played Team A once. How do we compare that in a way that’s fair? Do you average the scores of my two games? Just look at the first one? Or the last one? Compare winning percentage? All of those are deeply flawed if you ask me. Which no one did. But you’re still reading. So I’ll keep talking.

Criterion 4: Record. All regular season games? Inclusive or exclusive of interleague games? If it’s exclusive of them, you’re gonna be comparing an unequal number of games in a few of the matchups. (Is a 4-4 record better than a 2-4 record? Discuss.)

Criterion 5: Point differential. As above, do interleague games count? What about prior playoff games for later rounds? Is there a 40-point cap per game again or not?

Hence the gotten goat. Not only can I not finish my g.d. bracket, but unless there’s some super-secret OTHER memo that’s circulating around, there are a number of teams who will need to travel a hefty distance in like a week and a friggin’ half but no one knows for sure who they are! Here, you figure it out.

This brings me back to the beginning of this post. I’m not doing all this crap because with two jobs and two kids I have all this copious free time and I’m tired of playing mah jong. I’m doing it because I feel like if you drag your ass to practice multiple times a week and you put your body on the line next to your teammates every Saturday and you give up time with your family and your friends in order to try to make your team better and you do this all for months at a time AND you pay your own money to be able to do it, the absolute least you fucking deserve is some legitimate clarity around the rules of the goddamned league as they pertain to making and advancing in the damn playoffs.

GOAT. GONE.

ETA 6/12/13: OK, I figured it out.

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First off, a big thanks to all who answered my desperate pleas over the last few days for more information about criteria for making the playoffs. I received a fair amount of conflicting information, though, some from coaches or owners of teams, which lends credence to my statement that the WFA sucks ass at communicating. We’re one week out from the start of playoffs and the people running the teams don’t know what they have to do to get in? That’s just absurd. I received (from a few sources) the “official” WFA playoffs document, but as with last year, it contained the bracket layout and some info about home field (hopefully more accurate than last year’s) but contained no info about how division winners would be determined. No tie-breaker criteria, nothin.

So then I found myself in the land of pure speculation (overall record? in-division record? head-to-head for tiebreaker? point differential? in all games or common opponent or head to head or oh my god?), and was only delivered from that land by Backseat Coach’s new BFF, Neal Rozendaal (or “DC Neal”, as he is now known in our household), who is the staff writer for the DC Divas, the husband of one of the players and a fellow advocate of common freakin’ sense when it comes to all this crap. DC Neal passed on to us the information he had received directly from Lisa King of the WFA, stating the following: division winners are determined by in-division record. Should two teams have identical in-division records, tiebreaker criteria is head-to-head matches, going to point differential if the head-to-head matches were split. OK! Now we’re getting somewhere.

But it’s a weird somewhere, yo. This means that if you go to the standings page on the WFA website, you can see each team’s overall record and their in-conference record…neither of which have anything to do with their actual standing, which is in fact based on their in-division record – which you can find nowhere. Unless you’re me, of course, and Microsoft Excel is totally your bitch and you craft a series of formulas based on data cut and pasted from the WFA website while your partner does all the laundry. THEN you can get the “real” standings.

Fun things to note: of the thirteen divisions, there are eight in which teams in the same division play an unequal number of in-division games. Read that sentence again, ’cause it’s important. Case in point: check out Division 8. Playoff favorite is KC Titans, who currently have an in-division record of 5-0. St. Louis Slam are 5-1. Those two teams play each other next Saturday. If St. Louis were to win (unlikely, but not out of the realm of possibility) that would give them an effective record of 6-1 to KC’s 5-1. The only way I know to compare records of uneven numbers is winning percentage, which would be 0.833 for KC and 0.857 for St. Louis, making St. Louis the division champion…even though KC would very likely have been 6-1 as well if they had had the opportunity to play another in-division game. Gah!

So. Armed with the accurate criteria for determining actual standings, I can tell you the following (with about a 94% degree of confidence. It would be 100% but I’m really tired, you guys):
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