And now a word to the winners: May you continue to receive what you earn.

Lamar Hunt, the often-visionary owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, is on record as a strongly advocate of expanding the NFL playoffs to 16 teams, obliterating the bye week for the top two seeds in each conference and thereby putting every team in play on every playoff weekend.

	A banged up Brad Johnson benefitted from a first-round bye in the playoffs and led the Buccaneers past the Raiders in the Super Bowl.

Hunt's position is simple: It is ludicrous to take your top four teams completely out of action for a week in late December or early January, just as the NFL is reaching the high point on the public hype-o-meter. As the owner told ESPN.com's John Clayton, "I don't know of any business that would put its best four products in the freezer for a week."

Fine points, solidly made -- exactly as you'd expect from a man with the experience and standing of Hunt. And speaking for either the silent majority or the vocal minority, depending upon how you're feeling today, let me just say this:

No, no and, now that I mention it, no.

No increase to 16 playoff teams, from a field of 32 in all. No increase to 14 teams, come to think of it. The bye week stays for the top four teams in the NFL, and for this utterly basic reason: It remains, in the brutally debilitating sport of football, the reasonable reward for a season well played.

The NFL owners, meeting in Phoenix this week, say they aren't going to act on Hunt's idea anytime soon -- and here's hoping they never give in. As odd as it may look on paper, the bye works. It works in football as it could never work in any other sport. It works, in part, because it helps to retain the regular season as a going business rather than a mere backdrop to January.

But mostly, the bye week works because it's the proper payoff for 17 weeks of sweat equity. You probably couldn't make a case for it anywhere else in the major-sport universe. Right here, it's exactly the way to go.

	Lamar Hunt thinks he has a bright idea by expanding the playoffs, but he's really undermining the purpose of the regular season.

The notion of a cheapened season, for just about every sport, is the grizzly bear in the kitchen: Too large not to notice, too unwieldy to do much with. The NHL gets mocked all the time for the all-comers approach to the postseason that it adopted years ago, but don't look now: The NBA is right on hockey's tail. If the regular season ended today, the pro hoopsters would send one sub-.500 entry merrily into the playoffs, with a couple of others awfully close to that mediocre midpoint.

But both the NHL and the NBA do place a value on regular-season results, by awarding the top seeds opening-round series against the playoff bottom feeders and by giving the absolute elite teams home-court advantage through the postseason.

For those sports, it's the right tack in terms of reward. Baseball, too -- and that's full in the understanding that the advantage is no guarantee. The 2002 Yankees won 103 games, but they punted an early playoff game against Anaheim and never saw their home field again.

In all those cases, though, we're talking about a series of games, a sequence in which, generally speaking, home-field advantage may come into play over the long course of things, not merely a single meeting. The NFL, of course, doesn't work that way. It's one and done in the NFL's second season. You screw up a home game in the NBA playoffs, you've still got a chance -- several chances, even -- to fight your way back to a home-court advantage. Football? Say goodnight, Gracie.

The bye week is undoubtedly a weird little contrivance; it does, as Lamar Hunt suggests, have the effect of shelving the league's elite teams for the first week of the playoffs. But the issue here is whether that's really such a bad thing. Quite the contrary: I'd suggest it is the most valuable benefit the league can dole out to its top teams.

A bye week is huge in January. It's a healing week. It is a planning week. Tampa Bay, which went on to win the Super Bowl, used its bye week this year in part to let quarterback Brad Johnson work his way back to decent health -- and that was the Bucs' payoff for having put together a superior 16-game regular season.

Perfect? Not even close, but what system is? A team could earn a bye, for example, while playing a markedly inferior schedule compared with one of its top rivals. But with the setup as it currently exists, at least the NFL balances that concern by allowing the top two teams from each conference a week off rather than a single team.

And don't worry: A fraud will always be exposed in the playoffs, period. The best teams have a way of making sure that happens.

It's easy to understand some of the rationale behind the movement for a no-bye playoff system. Hunt, in particular, strikes a chord with every frustrated franchise when he says, "I can make a very strong case that the bye week is unfair."

And so it is -- to every team that didn't put together a fine enough regular-season record to earn one. For the teams with a chance to do so, the striving for a bye becomes another reason to continue playing at top level late in the season. It continues to legitimize the full schedule. And awkward or not, it works.

Mark Kreidler is a columnist with the Sacramento Bee and a regular contributor to ESPN.com