Giants president John Mara: Expanded NFL playoffs unlikely this season

John Mara (left) poses with a guy who knows a little bit about the postseason. (Jim McIsaac/Getty Images)

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said there is "a tremendous amount of interest" in expanding the playoffs from 12 teams to 14 last month at the league's owners meetings.

But Giants president John Mara, a member of the league's Competition Committee, said he doesn't expect the additional wild-card game to debut until the 2015 season at the earliest he told Bob Glauber of Newsday on Tuesday.

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"I don't think it's going to happen this year," Mara said. "I think it's kind of late. We have a May [20th owners] meeting [in Atlanta], but I sense that we'll wait a year before we do that. It hasn't been voted on yet.

"[The league] would notify us in advance [of a potential vote], but I'm thinking it's probably not going to happen for another year or so. My guess is that it's going to pass at some point."

Under the proposal, there would be three wild-card games in each conference, with only the top seed getting a bye to the divisional round. While no schedule for Wild Card weekend has been formally discussed, one possibility could be two games on Saturday, three on Sunday and a Monday night game.

If that system had been in place last season, Arizona (10-6) would have been the added playoff team in the NFC, and Pittsburgh (8-8) in the AFC, based on tiebreakers.

Currently, 37.5 percent of NFL teams make the postseason (12 out of 32 teams), which is far less than the 53.3 percent of NBA and NHL teams that make it, and slightly more than the 33.3 percent in MLB. Adding two more teams would push the NFL's figure to 43.7 percent.

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