I was talking with a coworker today about the EPL. With "1" gm left (4 teams have 2 left), the following spots are up for grabs:

(1) two teams are tied for 1st
(2) four teams are battling for two spots in Champions League next year
(3) four teams are battling to stay out of 2 relegation spots

Not bad - out of 20 teams in the league, half of them have serious motivation to play out the season as hard as they can on the last game of the season. Gonna be a spectacular 2hrs of games (they still play them all at the same time so nobody has advantage of knowing what other folks are doing, right?).

The more games you play, the less you need a playoff. For example, MLB could go to two 16 teams leagues and use relegation model very well imo - top 9 teams payroll ranges from $110-198mil, next 7 between $83-97mil, next 16 go from $55-82. Yes, there are 6 teams with payrolls less than 1/3 the Yankees. They're playing a different game so why not treat them as such?