[cognito20]

For my money, the fairest playoff system in professional team sports is one that has not been mentioned, since we've been sticking to American sports....the playoff system in European, specifically English Premiership, soccer. Simply, their playoff system is not to have a playoff at all. The 20 teams play a 38-game regular season, home and away against every other team. 3 points for a win, 1 for a draw, 0 for a loss. Team with the most points at the end of the 38 games is the champion. (If teams are tied in points, the first tiebreaker is total goal differential, second tiebreaker total goals scored.) End of story. The team that played the best that season ALWAYS wins. 10 on the scale of the poll.

Their knockout "playoff" system, if you can call it that, is known as the FA Cup. Every professional and semi-professional team in England, as well as quite a few amateur teams, are entered in a blind-draw, single-elimination knockout format, home team selected randomly (and if the match ends in a tie, it's replayed at the -other- team's home stadium). Winners advance, losers go home. The higher-level professional teams are seeded into a later stage of the competition so that they only need to win 6 matches to win the Cup, but that's the only advantage they're given, while a team full of amateurs from the local pub would have to start from the pre-preliminary rounds and win 15+. These FA Cup games, while being the closest thing to the American "playoff" system, are completely separate from the league format described above. The team that has the most points in the Premier League is the "champion", while the winner of the FA Cup (who doesn't even need to be from the highest league....a team from the #2 division got all the way to the Cup Final before losing to Manchester United in 2004, and 2 teams from the #2 division WON the Cup in the 1970s, Sunderland in '71 and West Ham in '79) is just the "winner of the FA Cup", although that is quite a prestigious honor in its own right.