I agree with you, but we both know that the league was making their decisions based on vibes and social media pressure.
In fairness, when the league wrote its rules regarding going by winning percentage, they were probably envisioning a situation in which it was simply not possible to continue play. For example, a tornado strikes the stadium, or the power grid fails and the stadium loses power. They weren't thinking about what happens when one team simply decides that they don't want to continue.
I wish the league would revisit that specific issue in the offseason and clarify that it's fine if you're too upset to play, but the result is a forfeit. With my economist hat on, I feel really good about such a rule. If a team feels that strongly about it and they're willing to accept the consequences, no problem. The harm from the injury follows the player, just like every other injury, and teams are given the correct incentives to either play on or call it a night. The way we're doing it now creates a situation where a team can stop playing and then negotiate the result on social media after the fact, usually with raw appeals to emotion. That should be shut down.
Back in the early days of the NFL, there wasn't a set, unified schedule for the entire league. Here is an example of the
standings from 1923. There were 20 teams . . . and their total games played were 12, 12, 10, 12, 7, 12, 7, 12, 10, 8, 10, 8, 9, 7, 7, 8, 7, 11, 3, and 4. On top of that, back in those days, ties counted as "no contest" and were not considered as wins or losses (nowadays, they are considered 0.5 of a win and 0.5 of a loss). The point being, the league has used winning percentage to determine standings and seeding for 100 years. That became irrelevant once the teams all played the same number of games, but it's not like this situation wasn't addressed years ago.