A Young Man's Manifesto on Old-Time League Structures

Sports leagues need to be redesigned, back to how they were before the 1990s.

Welcome back to my Sports Passion Project everybody, where today I’m going to be talking about something slightly different than usual. I want to talk about the importance of the structure of a sports league, and its schedule.

We all know that I’m the rare sports fan where if you gave me a choice between watching a regular season game and a playoff game, I would choose the regular season game every time. For some this sounds blasphemous, but I just get more of what I enjoy about sports from regular season games than playoff games. While the playoffs are a punchy Instagram reel, where every moment is life and death, the regular season in an exercise in longform storytelling. Not every moment is life or death, but the moments that are have had months and months to build how important they are. If you’re a subscriber of this publication, I don’t think you need me to explain which of these concepts I like better.

When a regular season is done (and designed) well, it feels like a tapestry unfolding in front of you. Several stories happening at once, all interlocking at the key moment. The perfect example of this in all of sports history in my opinion is the 1992 Hooters 500 NASCAR race.

Tis race combines the best championship fight in the history of the sport, with six men all going for it, with the retirement race of Richard Petty, and the debut race of Jeff Gordon. In the midst of this race, the two time defending champion, Dale Earnhardt, who was not in the six-way championship fight, crashed out each of the two lead drivers, neither of whom were in the six-way championship fight, and Ernie Irvan, who was always wildly fast but prone to crash, and therefore also not in the six-way championship fight, took out the championship leader in one of his crashes, setting the stage for one of the most iconic endings in the history of this or any sport.

That is the stories of ten (!) individual drivers, all combining and interlocking to make what in my opinion is the best singular event (game, match, race, set, etc.) in the history of North American sport, and since NASCAR had no playoffs back then, this was just a regular season race.

Obviously, you’re not going to get this every time, but if you just peruse around my publication, you will find things like the 2003 NFL season, which on its own is verging on double digits in terms of articles written by me, and I’m not done with it yet, only taking a small break. That regular season has story dripping from the rafters.

If even that is considered too abnormal to be used as an example in a place like this, take more innocuous football seasons like 2012 or 2010. I’ve written three articles each in both of these seasons, and I haven’t even gotten to 2012 Adrian Peterson yet.

The point of all this is while the playoffs are punchy, urgent, and important at all times, perfect for the TikTok generation, the regular season is more of a slow burn into a final crescendo, which is what I like. That’s why I like regular season sports more than playoff sports, but in my opinion, North American sports leagues over the years have been on a long, continuous quest to push people like myself away, by continuously sapping the regular season of importance. Not only importance in a playoff sense, but also an individual game sense, as modern North American team schedules are compulsively diluted, with oodles of meaningless games.

I will get into what I mean by all of this, and how I would suggest we fix it, but first, a shout out.

What inspired me to write this article of my own is the article below, written by

J. Henry

for his Camden Yards Report publication:

MLB Needs a Reset: Why a Return to the 1980s Format Could Save the Game

Joey makes some great points in here about baseball, the bloat that it suffers through, and why it did not used to feel that way. I will not restate his entire article for you. The reason I’m giving it free promotion here is that I encourage you to go read it yourself. He talks about salary caps, schedule adjustments, and all kinds of things specific to baseball, but the point I make here is going to be more general.

First, I will open with what seems to be my my foremost sports hot take, when I discuss it with others, but to me, it feels like common sense. Can anybody tell me the purpose of inter-conference (inter-league in baseball) play? To ask this question may seem like I’m being facetious, but it’s a real question. I have some smart fans around here. People with good, long, and respected sports memories, and can any of you tell me anything of importance that’s ever happened in a non-conference regular season game in any of the Big Four leagues of North America?

Think back on all the memories you have of great things that have happened in the regular season, in any sport, and when those images pop into your mind, do any of them feature a game in the non-conference? I presume that you guys respect my sports memory, and even in my sport of most expertise (NFL), I can think of only one truly iconic moment in a non-conference regular season game in the new millennium.

That moment is the famous Chiefs vs Rams game on Monday Night Football in 2018, which has gone down in NFL history as possibly the best regular season game ever, but the simple fact of the matter is that the Chiefs lost that game but got the first seed in the AFC in 2018 anyway. The Rams got the second seed in the NFC in 2018, and if they had lost this game, they would have been the second seed in the NFC anyway. In short, this game meant nothing. It meant nothing at the time it was played. It means nothing in retrospect.

It’s great football yes. I would (and have) watch it tens of times, even if it’s completely meaningless, but it’s a non-conference game, so it’s almost definitional that this game is going to mean nothing, either looking forwards or backwards.

The same is true in every sport. You can comb your memory all you want, but truly important moments in non-conference games are virtually nonexistent. If you think of the conference schedule though, important moments happen almost every week. Going back to the 2024 NFL season, there were several important games in the final week, all in the conference. Going back to the 2024 MLB season, imagine if the Mets or Braves had been scheduled to play inter-league against the Oakland Athletics in the final week, instead of the fantastic series they played against each other.

I have a simple philosophy when it comes to selecting regular season sports games to watch. A game being a conference game does not guarantee it will be important, but being a non-conference game does guarantee that it won’t be. The good non-conference games can still be fun to watch. People will watch them because they are fun to watch, but they will not be important.

This is the root of my issue with inter-conference play.

There are other issues with it too, like why should an NL team be able to dictate the AL playoff qualifiers by sweeping one AL team but getting swept by another, but my main issue with inter-conference play is that it’s just, there. It’s designed solely for the purpose of taking up space on the schedule. To put it in less nice terms, in my opinion, it’s a waste of time. Every non-conference game is a game that did not need to be played, but is being played anyways, because the owners still want to make the money from the game.

This money grubbing is the reason for non-conference play by the way. Not part of the reason. It’s the reason. Eastern Conference owners want LeBron James in their building one time per year, for the opportunity to raise ticket prices that he provides. Same goes for the NFC owners wanting Patrick Mahomes. AL owners want their shot to milk money out of Shohei Ohtani.

This perpetual itch to raise ticket prices when star players come to town has taken regular season sports in a direction I strongly dislike, towards more and more time wasting, with more and more inter-conference games. The owners justify this with phrases like ‘I want my fans to be able to see LeBron James,’ but the truth of the matter is that their fans do not get to see LeBron James, because the ticket price triples when he comes to town. Perhaps even more than that, because this past year, I wanted to go see Nicola Jokic in person for the first time in my hometown of Toronto, but I couldn’t make it, because the ticket price was 3x the normal level when the Joker came to town, and if you believe the NBA media, Nikola Jokic is nowhere near the draw LeBron James is.

This is why inter-conference play has proliferated throughout sports, like an invasive parasite that we cannot get rid of, leading us to waste more and more time on games that are virtually guaranteed not to matter. I hate this more than I hate anything else going on about sports right now, and I hate a lot.

I hate that playoffs are too big, in every North American sport. I hate that the NBA and NHL feel the need to play their playoffs under different rules than the regular season. I hate all the promoting gambling to children. I hate that sports video games these days have become vessels to do even more promoting gambling to children. I hate that the commissioner of baseball does not care about baseball fans. I hate that the commissioner of football still thinks drugs ought to be more punishable than domestic abuse. This is just scratching the surface.

Hate is a strong word, but sports are an important thing to me, so I hate all of this stuff. I have a lot of gripes with the way sports are run right now, but none of my gripes are bigger than the glut of intentional time wasting that’s come about as a result of the proliferation of inter-conference play.

That’s a lot of complaints in the complaint jar, but you guys know me. I’m not a complaint jar kind of guy. I’m a solution jar kind of guy, so in this article, I propose a solution to the structure of every one of the Big Four North American sports leagues. Joey’s article has baseball on my mind, so I’ll start there, which also helps demonstrate my point, because baseball is the ultimate example of exactly how much integrating conferences (or in this case leagues) can hurt a sport.

Going back to the formation of the sport, the concept of Major League Baseball came together as a union of two independent leagues, because if they did not come together, they were going to kill each other.

It was in the interest of self preservation that these two leagues came together, because they knew that continuing to bleed cash from each other would lead to the death of them both, not because of any kind of love for each other. These two leagues used to hate each other, viewing each other as obstacles to achieving the goals that each respective league wanted to achieve. This is why the two leagues entered open competition with each other in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and the Bay Area. The World Series at its formation was much like the college football playoff now, designed to pit the champions of the two top leagues together, to see who really was the best.

Teams of AL teams would cheer for the AL (unless it was the Yankees). Teams of NL teams would cheer for the NL. This sounds ludicrous to people who were not there, with how much baseball has changed since the times when things were this way, but just like the SEC and the B1G today, fans were intent to believe that their league was the best, and wanted their league to win the World Series. Much like how fans of Georgia still want Alabama to win the national championship, should Georgia fail to win it, for SEC supremacy, fans of the Philadelphia Phillies would cheer for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the World Series, because they wanted it known that their league was best, and every other league out there was second class.

The reason the DH was in the AL, and not the NL, for so many years was the last vestige of this ‘us against you’ culture. The American League beat them to the punch on this rule change, and at that point, the National League did not want to do what the American League was doing, because why would you copy your competition? The way to win the war is to be different, but then Bud Selig came along, and (in my opinion) ruined baseball forever.

I blame you, Bud.

Bud gets a bad legacy for the steroid stuff, but in my opinion, the worst thing he ever did was fundamentally changing the structure of baseball. Under Bud, two leagues became one league. It all cascaded from there. Four divisions became six divisions. Four playoff spots became eight playoff spots, and we got the abominable introduction of inter-league play into baseball.

There’s a reason that under Bud Selig, baseball’s popularity declined more precipitously than it had declined under any commissioner before or after him. The players’ strike hurt, sure, but the players had gone on strike before Bud Selig showed up, and baseball did not fall off the cliff back then like it did in the 1990s, because the players’ strike of the 1970s did not come with a fundamental change in the way baseball operated, like the one in the 1990s did. Things could’ve recovered, but baseball never truly got another chance.

When baseball came back from the strike in 1994, the parameters of the game had changed. We’d gone from two divisions per league in the most recent completed season to three coming out of the strike. We’d gone from two playoff spots per league to four, and we did not have inter-league play yet but it was coming.

Baseball fans did not like these changes in the 1990s, so they left in droves. Baseball fans these days like the changes, but it’s a biased sample, because what we have now is the people who did not leave when two leagues became one league, did not leave when we bloated to six divisions, and did not leave when the playoffs bloated from four to eight, or perhaps the children of those people.

There is still slight evidence of this old school culture in baseball, as even when baseball was getting ready to introduce the universal DH, just a few years ago, fan polling indicated that the majority of fans were not in favour of the rule change. Internet fans were extremely in favour of it, so yelled in happiness when it was announced, but the average baseball fan did not want the universal DH, just like the average baseball fan did not want an extra division per league, did not want extra playoff spots, did not want a players’ strike, did not want inter-league play, and etcetera. Baseball made all this happen anyway though, because their administration is not and never has been well known for respecting the wishes of the paying customers.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am one of the very few internet sports fans that did not want a universal DH, but not because of any deep seated love for pitchers hitting. I disagreed with the motivations. The main driving force behind this change was to get both leagues under the same set of rules, because for some reason, the previous 120 years of success with the two leagues being under fundamentally different sets of rules (with different umpiring offices altogether until the late 1990s) did not do enough to convince anybody that this was a bad idea.

It’d been on the death bed since Bud Selig ruined everything, but with the striking of the gavel to bring the universal DH into existence, baseball had at last killed their golden goose. With integrated schedules, rulesets, and even a damned draft lottery, two leagues had at last become one league, in everything but name, officially destroying the ‘us vs you’ foundation that professional baseball was built on top of.

So, since we’re now in a position to treat all of baseball as one thing, instead of the two distinct leagues it’d been since the 19th century, I’m going to pretend that I’m the commissioner for a while, and use this mandate I’ve given myself in order to tell both leagues to go back to being separate leagues again.

Nobody asked for professional baseball as one giant 30 team league.

Nobody asked for any sport to be a league as big as 30 teams. That is why conferences existed to begin with, to give fans a smaller subset of teams they have to truly worry about. Owners cry about travel costs, but NFL conferences are coast to coast, and always have been. MLB’s leagues are coast to coast, and always have been. When first introduced, NHL conferences were coast to coast also. I will definitively tell you right here that the only one of the Big Four leagues to introduce conferences for travel costs was the NBA. If anybody tells you any different, they are either ignorant or lying to you.

Conferences are not primarily due to travel costs. They exist because these leagues, taken as a whole, are too big. There is a reason the English Premier League (which does not use conferences, leagues, or anything of the sort) is 20 teams, and even that feels a bit large sometimes. The leagues being too big causes many problems, but in my opinion the biggest is a lack of rivalries between teams, because if you have to worry about even 14 or 15 other opponents, there is no time to focus on any one of them in particular, and this is where we get to the first fundamental change I would make to every league.

I am in agreement with Joey that baseball (and every sport) needs four divisions. I don’t want eight. I don’t want six. I want four. With these reduced (and therefore larger) divisions, that means more divisional games, and we can start getting some more hatred back into sports again. Sports teams just don’t hate each other these days, and it would be great for the health of regular season sports in general if we could coerce these teams into hating each other more.

The players are all buddy buddy now, and the reason for this, in my opinion, is twofold. Too many divisions, and inter-conference play. Both issues cause the same fundamental problem. They limit the sample of teams you play often enough every year to grow a dislike for.

College football has shown that this formula works. The best way to generate a rivalry with a team? Play them every year, without fail. Small divisions and inter-conference play work in tandem to limit the ability to do that. I’ll begin with the effect of small divisions, using my main sport as the example.

The absurdly small divisions in the NFL these days has limited the sample of opponents each team is guaranteed to play every year to just three. That’s only three teams you can truly develop a rivalry with, and if you’re a team like the New England Patriots, who after 2010 had no true divisional adversaries for a decade, you just don’t get to have any mutual hatred with anybody. I am not a Patriot fan, but this must’ve dulled the regular season beyond belief for their fans, for a decade in a row. With more teams you must play every year, this problem could be rectified.

Another way to accomplish the same goal is to remove inter-conference play. Take the NFL again as an example. Using one team for perspective, call us the Jacksonville Jaguars, there are 15 other teams in the AFC, and only 17 games to play. Taking into account that we have to play divisional games multiple times, we can’t even play games against all of our conference opponents. Why in the world are we wasting schedule slots every year to go play out of conference?

Those four (sometimes five) inter-conference games are spread amongst 16 non-conference opponents in the NFL, which is far from a guarantee of playing anybody every year, meaning you’re never going to form a rivalry with these games. However, if we move them back into the AFC, that all of a sudden becomes a lot more teams you’re guaranteed to play every year.

In my opinion, to make regular season sports fun again, my first step would be to move every league back to move to a four division structure. In the MLB, Joey’s done a lot of the work for me. Eradicate the Central divisions in both the AL and NL.

Redesigning Major League Baseball

Eliminating the Central divisions in baseball would break down this way. In the American League, KC, Chicago and Minnesota go to the AL West. Detroit, and Cleveland join the AL East, and I’m also forcing the Astros back into the NL where they belong, leaving room for two shiny new AL expansion teams. One in both the East and West. The AL would then look like this, in order of the standings as of May 27:

AL East (Seven teams): Detroit Tigers, New York Yankees, Cleveland Guardians, Tampa Bay Rays, Toronto Blue Jays, Boston Red Sox, Baltimore Orioles

AL West (Seven teams): Seattle Mariners, Minnesota Twins, Kansas City Royals, Texas Rangers, Los Angeles Angels, Sacramento Athletics, Chicago White Sox

With the addition of the Astros, this makes the NL a 16 team league again, and I cut up their Central by forcing St Louis and Atlanta into the West. Everybody else gets to be in the new NL East, so the NL divisions would be as follows, in order of the standings as of May 27:

NL East (Eight teams): Philadelphia Phillies, Chicago Cubs, New York Mets, Cincinnati Reds, Milwaukee Brewers, Washington Nationals, Florida Marlins, Pittsburgh Pirates

NL West (Eight teams): Los Angeles Dodgers, San Diego Padres, San Francisco Giants, St Louis Cardinals, Arizona Diamondbacks, Atlanta Braves, Colorado Rockies

With my four shiny new divisions, I would then cut out inter-league play entirely. The Houston Astros are never going to see their old AL compatriots again, unless they make the World Series, because in my vision of the sports world, we’re doing away with time wasting. Quite frankly, nobody cares to see the Orioles vs the Brewers anyway. Nobody is going to miss it. For every New York vs New York, there are four Florida Marlins away series where nobody comes to the AL ballpark, so I figure eliminating it will, on balance, be a good change for the quality of the regular season, not to mention all the good it does for playoff purity.

At this point, I will institute the once standard baseball formula, of reserving either six games or nine games per year for non-divisional league opponents, and leave the rest of the games as divisional. In the NL, this means either 48 games out of division, for 114 (16 or 17 games per divisional opponent) in the division, or 72 games out of division, and 90 games in division (12 or 13 games per divisional opponent). In the AL, it’s entirely different, which is okay, since these are two separate leagues again. The NL need not care about the AL’s affairs. With only seven teams per division, 20+ games against each divisional opponent seems a bit much to me, so I would use a four game series, home and home, for each non-divisional opponent. This is 56 games total, leaving 106 for divisional opponents. That’s 18 games against some divisional opponents, and 17 against others.

That seems like a lot, but to create a rivalry, you need to see teams over and over and over again. The Yankees need to feel like their 9-9 record against the .500 Boston Red Sox is what cost them the playoff spot to the Detroit Tigers in the suddenly tricky 2025 AL East. Seeing these games as numbers on a page feels like it would engender a feeling of sameness, but I promise you it doesn’t. I’ve got old time baseball fans around this publication that can attest to it.

For fun, let’s compare the New York Yankees’ schedule under my structure of Major League baseball against their actual one.

My league:

18x vs Boston

18x vs Detroit

18x vs Cleveland

18x vs Baltimore

17x vs Tampa Bay

17x vs Toronto

8x vs Seattle

8x vs Minnesota

8x vs Kansas City

8x vs Texas Rangers

8x vs Los Angeles Angels

8x vs Sacramento (Take that, MLB team that I’m not naming, how does it feel to have your name left off?)

8x vs Chicago White Sox

Real life:

13x vs Boston

13x vs Baltimore

13x vs Tampa Bay

13x vs Toronto

7x vs Detroit

7x vs Cleveland

7x vs Kansas City

7x vs Seattle

7x vs Texas

7x vs Houston

6x vs Minnesota

6x vs Los Angeles Angels

6x vs Chicago White Sox

6x vs Sacramento

46 games wasted on the National League

That’s 15 series against the National League that instead could’ve been split amongst the other league teams. These are spots on the schedule that could’ve been important games for the Yankees, that are instead being wasted on the Milwaukee Brewers and Florida Marlins and other teams in the National League that have no business playing the Yankees.

Like I said, waste of time.

This waste of time costs us two New York vs Boston series every year, two New York vs Tampa Bay series every year, and whichever of Detroit, Cleveland, Toronto, or Baltimore happens to be good at the time, it costs us two series of the Yankees playing against them too. In a format like I have designed, every division could have its own flavour, because with 106 divisional games in the AL, your divisional performance will decide whether you make the playoffs or not.

I’m sure there will be an apologist out there trying to explain to me how playing barely a third of the season against divisional opponents is a good idea, in a league where playoffs are still kind of divisional, but I will not have it. The 46 games an AL team plays against the NL are a waste. There is no benefit to playing them, when they could’ve been played against league opponents instead. Those 46 games are what make the MLB into a 30 team league, and that is the enemy here.

Fans don’t want a 30 team league. It’s too much to pay attention to. Narrowing the sample of available opponents to the teens eliminates a lot of this clutter, giving more opportunities for baseball fans to know things about what players on the other team they should be scared of, the names of the opposing relief pitchers, and etcetera. It could eliminate a lot of the hyper focusing on one’s own team that goes on in baseball now, which is a slap in the face to what baseball fandom used to mean.

I blame the 30 team league for this, which is why I’m eliminating it. We are now two leagues, which will imminently both be 16 teams large, which the schedule heavily slanted in favour of a division that will only be eight teams large. This eliminates a lot of the clutter, a lot of the bloat, a lot of the time wasting that goes on in baseball these days.

I will get to playoff formats later, but because of this tilting of the balance towards divisional games, I want playoff formats to be divisional.

Redesigning the NHL

This provides a good segue into the NHL, a league that’s playoff format already is divisional. The NHL has mostly gotten this correct actually. They already have a league of four divisions, featuring eight teams apiece, each of which play a self-contained playoff format, leaving the final four (currently ongoing) of the four divisional champions. I like all of this, and I’m not going to change any of it.

The thing I would change about the NHL is inter-conference play. The NHL is overrun by inter-conference play. Each team has to waste 32 games’ worth of time dilly dallying in the other conference. This leaves time for just three games against some divisional opponents, and only four with protected rivalry teams. This does not work for me. In my NHL, of which I am now the commissioner, I’m going to go back to when the league was at its very hottest, the 1981-1991 scheduling era, which saw divisional teams playing each other seven times each.

In the modern NHL, this is 49 games tied up in the division, leaving 33 for the other 24 teams in the league. If the NHL owners want to cry about travel costs, we can just eliminate inter-conference play, and not send the Eastern Conference teams out West at all. This leaves four games for every non-divisional conference opponent.

If Eastern Conference owners insist on playing against the West, we can play two games against the other eight conference opponents, and one each against every Western Conference team, alternating home and home every season. This leaves an 81 game schedule. Put the 82nd game wherever you want it to go. I say put it as an eighth matchup for some divisional opponent, but you can do anything you want with it. I don’t mind.

I would say the NHL is the least fundamentally broken of all the North American sports leagues, in terms of the structure of the league. They already have four big divisions and a divisional playoff format. These are both massive pluses in my book. It would literally take one email to go back to the 1981-1991 way of scheduling, and the NHL would be so back in my opinion. In literal terms, this change would increase my time spent watching hockey games by quite a bit.

Why?

Think of the teams you tune in to watch your team play against. I’m a New York Islanders fan, so for me, the TV normally goes on to watch my guys play the Rangers, Capitals, Penguins, Flyers more often than not, plus the Hurricanes are beginning to sneak their noses in there as a division rival that is always bothering us. What if instead of playing these teams a combined 18 times in the season, we almost doubled that to 35 times?

The NHL was at its very most popular in the era where teams played divisional opponents seven times per year. Don’t tell me it can’t work. It did work. When the NHL tried to get like the NBA, decreasing the importance of divisions and increasing the importance of the conferences, its popularity plummeted, because fans don’t want conferences that at the time were 13 teams. They want divisions that at the time were either six or seven. It’s simple math. Give people less to focus on, and they will focus on it more.

Redesigning the NBA

This moves us onto looking at the NBA, the league which has been designed to be broken from the very beginning. This is the league that truly needed conferences for travel costs. It does not need them for that reason anymore, but conferences have become so ingrained into the structure of the league by this point that it is difficult to get rid of them. Nevertheless, I will do my best.

First things first, I need to get the NBA down to four divisions. Currently, the league has six, and as far as I’m concerned that’s too many. However, this league does not have such easily cuttable Central divisions like the MLB did. It will take a little bit more doing to get this done.

I will begin by saying the scuttlebutt is that NBA expansion to both Las Vegas and Seattle is coming. This league of mine must be designed in order to accommodate that, so I will design the four divisions with them in mind. To this end, I will be moving the Memphis Grizzlies into the Eastern Conference immediately, so that the West will be comprised of two seven team divisions, and the East two eight team divisions, only until which point we have teams in Seattle and Las Vegas.

With only 14 teams now in the Western Conference, the line dividing them happens to lie between Denver and Utah, so the divisions will work as follows, in order of the 2025 standings:

Western Conference:

West Coast: Los Angeles Lakers, Los Angeles Clippers, Golden State Warriors, Sacramento Kings, Portland Trail Blazers, Phoenix Suns, Utah Jazz

Central: Oklahoma City Thunder, Houston Rockets, Denver Nuggets, Minnesota Timberwolves, Dallas Mavericks, San Antonio Spurs, New Orleans Pelicans

Eastern Conference:

Midwest/Non-Coastal (We can work out these names): Cleveland Cavaliers, Indiana Pacers, Milwaukee Bucks, Memphis Grizzlies, Detroit Pistons, Atlanta Hawks, Chicago Bulls, Toronto Raptors

East Coast: Boston Celtics, New York Knicks, Orlando Magic, Miami Heat, Brooklyn Nets, Philadelphia 76ers, Charlotte Hornets, Washington Wizards

At which point Las Vegas and Seattle come into the league, the agreement will be that they both become a part of the West Coast division, and Utah moves to the Central to accommodate them. That leaves the divisions sorted, but I still have to take care of the schedule. The only problem with this is that nobody in the history of this league has ever tried to pretend the NBA regular season is of any importance, so I’m treading new ground here. Even in the 1990s period everybody loves to yearn back to, there was never a schedule with more than five games per divisional opponent.

The NBA has always been more conference oriented than division oriented. However, just because creating rivalries has never really been tried by the NBA does not mean it can’t work. I won’t go as aggressive as I went for the NHL though. The culture of this league is not suited for that, but I would like to strive for NBA divisional opponents to play each other six times per season. For a team in an eight team division, this leaves 42 games tied up, and there are a myriad of things we can do with the other 40.

This leaves us just short of being able to play every non-divisional team in the league twice, which would require an 86 game season. If I were the commissioner, I would tell my owners that if they want to triple prices for LeBron James coming to town every year, get me an 86 game season in the CBA meetings, but if an 86 game season is absolutely positively not possible, and we fall four games short of being able to play everybody in the league twice, I say we split teams into scheduling pods of five.

The top four teams in each division, plus a wild card, for the top five teams in the NBA, play the best 17 non-divisional teams the following year twice each, and the worst five teams outside of their division just once. The second five play the top twelve teams outside of the division twice each, skip the second worst five, but play the bottom five twice. Continue this all the way until you get to the worst five teams in the NBA, which play the bottom 17 non-divisional opponents twice each, but play the top five just once.

This again leaves an 81 game schedule. Put the one remaining game wherever you want it. I don’t truly care.

I like this method of scheduling, because it simultaneously guarantees the owners of the good teams a home game against all the star players, as any team in the bottom two pods is exceedingly unlikely to have a box office draw on their team, acts as an extremely mild form of competitive balance, while also acting as a mild tanking disincentive.

An accompanying change with the new scheduling arrangement would be that only teams in the bottom five scheduling pod would be eligible to win the draft lottery. Other teams would be able to move up only into second place. The NHL did something like this for years, and I always liked it. In my system, teams looking to tank would be vying to get into the bottom five as a result of this, but they would also be giving up their guarantee of a home game against the top five pod, which on the 2026 schedule would consist of OKC, LA Lakers, and wild card Houston Rockets, Boston, and Cleveland. To give yourself a chance of winning the draft lottery, you must give up your guarantee of a home game against all these teams. No tripling the ticket prices when LeBron and Luca, Brown and Tatum, or SGA come to town.

Is this enough to stop tanking? Of course not, but it is an act specifically designed to spit in the face of owners who allow their teams to do so, which I’m a fan of. Plus, no teams like Dallas, who would be in the fourth of our theoretical scheduling pods, a team barely in need of competitive balance help, winning the draft lottery anymore. That’s silly. If we don’t give them an easier schedule, we don’t need to give them the best player in the draft.

The main desire of mine would be to spit in tanking owners’ faces, but eliminating the possibility of the 13th worst team in the league ever winning the draft lottery again just seems like a good way to move forward as a league. With the way I’d design the lottery system, Dallas would jump only as far as second place in the draft order by winning the lottery. The second place lottery team, San Antonio, did not finish in the bottom five either, so they would jump to only third. This leaves the third placed team in the draft lottery, but the first placed team with a bottom five record, the Philadelphia 76ers, with the first overall pick in the 2025 draft. This outcome feels just as rigged as the one we got in real life, but this time I can prove to you that it was not rigged, because my format is not real.

As far as the in-season tournament goes, we can keep it if we want, but I plan to make the end of season tournament into a divisional format anyways, so would we want two divisional playoff formats in the same season? I’m not saying we can’t do it, but I am saying I’m taking steps to make regular season basketball slightly more meaningful, which is exactly what the second tournament was supposed to do, so having the tournament feels slightly like painting a black wall black in this circumstance.

I think that is the extent of my list of my changes to the NBA. We move to four divisions. We try playing more divisional games. We see if it works, and if it doesn’t, we can move back to pretending divisions don’t exist, like we do in real life. Also, change how the draft lottery works, and temporarily abolish the in-season tournament, because the only reason it’s there to begin with is to artificially make divisional games feel more important. An actual hatred and desire to defeat your opponents, which is what I’m trying to get into the game with the extra matchups, would serve the same purpose.

Redesigning the NFL

This moves us onto the final of the Big Four North American sports leagues, the NFL, who seems like they’re in a competition against themselves to break the regular season as much as they possibly can. This league wanted to preserve inter-conference play so much that they moved to an absurd eight divisions in 2002, to prevent it from dying naturally, which it would’ve done with so many divisional games.

However, inter-conference play dying is my goal, so we’re undoing this change. Just like the rest of the sports leagues I’ve had my fingers in today, we’re contracting to four divisions. The NFL divisions, despite their geographical names, were never meant to be geographical, so I don’t see any need to redesign them with geography in mind. However, a lot of these rivalries are historic, and I don’t want to split them apart.

To cope with these competing interests, I have decided to make my new NFL divisions by combining existing ones. I will not flip any team’s conference affiliation, but in each conference, the four divisions will be combined into two different eight team divisions.

In the AFC, this proves tricky. Combining the AFC North with the AFC South basically gives us back the old AFC Central, recombining classic rivalries like Jaguars-Steelers, Ravens-Titans, Steelers-Titans, and etcetera, that we lost with the invention of the AFC South in 2002. I would love to do this, but it has the clumsy effect of forcing me to combine the AFC East with the AFC West, forcing teams in New York and New Jersey to play divisional games against teams in California. Even with my stated disregard for geography, this is difficult to justify, so with a heavy heart, even in my personal NFL redesign, I’m going to have to let the old AFC Central go, and combine the AFC South with the AFC West, leaving the North to mingle with the East. Here are how those new divisions look, in order of 2024 standings:

AFC Northeast: Buffalo Bills, Baltimore Ravens, Pittsburgh Steelers, Cincinnati Bengals, Miami Dolphins, New York Jets, New England Patriots, Cleveland Browns

AFC Elsewhere: Kansas City Chiefs, Los Angeles Chargers, Denver Broncos, Houston Texans, Indianapolis Colts, Jacksonville Jaguars, Las Vegas Raiders, Tennessee Titans

In the NFC, this exercise is actually much easier, as both the Atlanta Falcons and New Orleans Saints were already marooned in the NFC West for almost 40 years, becoming accustomed to playing divisional games in places like Phoenix and San Francisco. Regrettably for them, that history means I’m going to be forcing them to do it again with the divisional cutdown. I’m once again combining the South with the West, and the North with the East, and here are those divisions, in order of the 2024 standings:

NFC Northeast: Detroit Lions, Minnesota Vikings, Philadelphia Eagles, Washington Commanders, Green Bay Packers, Dallas Cowboys, Chicago Bears, New York Giants

NFC Elsewhere: Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Los Angeles Rams, Seattle Seahawks, Arizona Cardinals, Atlanta Falcons, San Francisco 49ers, Carolina Panthers, New Orleans Saints

As for the schedule, like I said earlier, NFL teams have only 17 games, and 15 conference opponents to get to. Inter-conference play is eliminated. I know this league bent over backwards, pulling half century old divisional rivalries apart, to keep inter-conference play, but I’m not of the same convictions. It’s pointless, and if I’m the commissioner, it’s eliminated.

I know you’re about to call me crazy for saying this, but I fully intend to have divisional teams continue to play each other twice per season. You say that’s crazy, because that means 14 of a team’s 17 available games are divisional. I say perhaps you’re right, but this wouldn’t be the first time that better than half of the schedule has been comprised of divisional games.

Once the AFC Central got the new Browns in 1999, those teams were playing ten games a year in the division, and it was fantastic. The best divisional rivalry remaining in the AFC today (Pittsburgh vs Baltimore) was forged in the fires of the 1999-2001 AFC Central, and that division really got the hatred flowing towards the Tennessee Titans as well. They had titanic battles against Jacksonville, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore. Those rivalries would’ve been fantastic to this day, but the Titans were ripped out of their historic home and placed into the new AFC South instead, killing almost all of them.

What I’m getting at is that for teams to begin to hate each other again, the NFL needs more divisional games. We can consider 14 out of 17 to be a temporary emergency measure if you’d like. Once the hatred has returned to a suitable level, we can wean back the number of divisional games just a bit, but until such point as the divisions regain their distinct identities, like they had when the football season was more than half divisional games in real life, we need to keep them apart from each other as much as possible.

The NFL these days is notorious for its homogeny, and what better way to do away with that than to play 14 divisional games? At least then you would be treated to four different flavours of football, instead of the copycat league where everybody plays like everybody else that we have now. It would be a lot like college football in this regard, where SEC teams have to build their rosters with the intention of winning SEC games. There’s a specific style that works. It wouldn’t work in the B1G, but SEC teams are not playing in the B1G.

In my NFL redesign, the NFL would become this way. The New York Giants would have to go about their rebuild with their NFC Northeast in mind. How are they going to beat the ridiculous defences of both Philadelphia and Minnesota? Build their own, or try to build an offence that can go over the top of them? It’s a question the Giants won’t be able to make the playoffs without answering.

Compare this to the actual NFL, where instead of the Eagles being a must-answer question for the Giants, they made the playoffs despite getting blown out by Philadelphia both times just a few seasons ago. The reason for this was the 2022 Giants’ 5-0 record against AFC teams, and that just drives me up the wall. Performance in AFC games should not decide the qualifiers for the NFC playoffs, but in the NFL it can and does on a regular basis.

Not in my NFL. In addition to forcing more teams to hate each other, the 2022 Giants are a chronic reason why we need more divisional games. No team with a 4-6-1 conference record should make the conference playoffs.

As for the other three games on the 17 game schedule, I suggest we create scheduling pods again. We know how obsessed with competitive balance the NFL has always been, so we will use these pods to give weak teams easy games, and strong teams very difficult ones.

I suggest we split each division into two pods of four teams, based on the standings. For instance, the AFC Northeast would be split into groups of (Buffalo, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati), and (Miami, New York, New England, Cleveland). The AFC Elsewhere would be split into (Kansas City, Los Angeles, Denver, Houston) and (Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Las Vegas, Tennessee).

My suggestion would be that we match the top pod in each division against each other, and mandate that the three non-divisional games come out of that, based on performance, and based on whether the two teams have played in a while. Just to fill the space with something, let’s say that if you did not play a team in your corresponding pod the previous season, you automatically play them, and from there, rank them in terms of performance until you reach three games, with the caveat that every team must reach three games. This sounds complicated on paper, but let me give you an example to show how it would work.

For instance, designing the Buffalo Bills’ 2025 schedule would be easy. They finished first in the Northeast in 2024. They have their 14 divisional games, then must pick from the top four in the AFC Elsewhere (Kansas City, Los Angeles, Denver, Houston) for their other three games, but since Buffalo did not play Los Angeles or Denver in the regular season in 2024, they are automatically matched up, with the third game being filled by the best available team, Kansas City. Since Houston was not matched up here, they must play each of the remaining three teams in the AFC Northeast pod.

From here, we move to second place in the AFC Northeast, Baltimore. They played all four of their available opponents last year, and must play Houston on account of Buffalo not playing them, but from there it’s a simple performance ranking, meaning Baltimore plays Kansas City, Los Angeles, and Houston in the non-division in 2025. This leaves Denver and Houston with only one game scheduled with just two teams left to go, so they must be scheduled by both.

Next comes Pittsburgh, who played Kansas City, Los Angeles, and Denver, in 2025, but Houston and Denver are automatic matchups, so the third gets filled by the best remaining team, Kansas City. That leaves one game left in the non-division for each of Los Angeles, Denver, and Houston, so they get scheduled against Cincinnati.

I can do this in the NFC too. Let’s do this using the NFC’s Northeast. Their top pod consists of Detroit, Minnesota, Philadelphia, and Washington. They must schedule their non-divisional games against the top four from the NFC Elsewhere: Tampa Bay, Los Angeles, Seattle, Arizona. Let’s go through the process, beginning with Detroit.

These four teams were actually Detroit’s first four games of 2024, which is wild, but also means that Detroit would play Tampa, Los Angeles, and Seattle in the non-division in 2024. This makes Arizona an automatic opponent for everybody else.

The first everybody else is Minnesota, who must play Arizona, and did not play Tampa Bay in 2024. This leaves only one spot on their schedule to be filled by performance, which gets filled by the Los Angeles Rams. Then we move to Philadelphia, who must play both Arizona and Seattle, both for scheduling practicality and because they played neither in 2024, and their final game gets filled by the best available team, Tampa Bay. Finally comes Washington, who schedules the final remaining non-divisional games for the Rams, Seahawks, and Cardinals.

I’ve just designed the schedules for 16 of the NFL’s 32 teams in 2025. It sounds complicated, but it’s exceedingly easy. I could design the whole NFL schedule this way if I had to, week by week.

There are a lot of divisional games in my design, but a whole division is not the same. They all have the same flavour, but in 2025 the whole NFL has the same flavour anyways. You’re still only playing an individual team a maximum of three times in a season including playoffs. That’s the same maximum as exists in the real NFL right now. The Steelers and Ravens played each other three times last year. Philadelphia and Washington played three times. Nobody complained, so while it may feel like the league, and all these leagues, will get samey as I’ve explained my redesigns on paper, I promise you that they will not.

Seasons are long. Roughly six months long in every league except the NFL, which is only slightly shorter these days. Even if we move to my way of doing things in every one of these leagues, 17 games per divisional opponent in baseball is just one series against that team per month. Six divisional games in the NBA is one game against any particular team per month. Even seven games, like I’ve proposed in the NHL, still makes it just one game against a team per month, with a random two game month sprinkled in there somewhere, and the two games per divisional team in the NFL is the same as it’s always been.

Now that I’ve finally gotten through explaining exactly what I want to do to all these league structures, it’s time to talk about playoff formats:

Playoff Formats:

Once again, I’ll begin with baseball. I do not mean to go on a playoff contraction rant here, but 12 playoff teams is too many. 12 playoff teams is a clever ploy by the owners to cut leaguewide payroll, because an 86 win playoff cut off is a lot cheaper to achieve than a 96 win playoff cut off. We as fans can argue whether or not the 12 team playoff format being a scam designed to cut leaguewide payroll is good or bad for us, but I don’t think there is any argument as to whether or not it is actually a scam designed to do just that. It definitely is, because twelve teams as a baseball playoff format sucks.

The first round byes do not work, because you cannot just stand in the box and hit 100 mph after five days off. Therefore, any format with a bye involved is out the window for me, and 16 teams as a baseball playoff format is even more laughable. This leaves the conversation of whether having LDS series is good for baseball or not.

I’m not convinced even having an LCS series was good for the game of baseball. It certainly didn’t help in terms of popularity or growing the game, but with the four division format, we have to at least have one of those. The question I’m asking myself is whether or not we ought to allow a second team per division into the dance.

With the schedule so slanted towards divisional games, the playoffs must be divisional. There will be no wild cards. To do anything else would be unethical, and in practical terms quite the punishment to teams playing in the AL East or NL West, but should we crown divisional champions in the regular season, or with a playoff series at the end of the season?

The problem with having a second playoff team in a division is that it makes the games the first place team is playing meaningless a lot of the time, but the problem with having only one is that it makes the games the second place team is playing meaningless a lot of the time.

If we use 2024 as the measuring stick, it does not really matter either way, with the final playoff spot in the AL East coming down to a three way fight between New York, Cleveland, and Baltimore, regardless of whether there are one or two spots. The AL West is the same way, with Minnesota either choking the one playoff spot to the Royals in the final week, or choking both of the AL West playoff spots to the Royals and the Mariners in the final week. The narrative does not really change in either AL division depending on whether there is one playoff spot or two.

However, I get the feeling that this is a feature of modern, big playoff, mediocre roster baseball, and would not continue into a format where there are actually only one or two playoff teams. As I look through the seasons in the four division era (1969-1993), it seems as if the divisions are roughly split half and half. Half of the time there was no battle for first, but would’ve been a vociferous battle for second, and the other half of the the time, if you let both teams battling for first into the playoffs, there would’ve been no battle to make the playoffs at all.

As such, I’m going to go with my gut, and say big playoffs are a bad thing for such a regular season sport. I want one playoff team per division, and for the entire last two months of the season to feel like playoffs for a team in the race, just like they did in the old days.

In 2024, this would’ve left us with an ALCS of Yankees vs Royals, an NLCS of Phillies vs Dodgers, and in all likelihood still a Yankees vs Dodgers World Series. To pick a random season, my RNG spit out 2015, where we would’ve had an ALCS of Toronto vs Kansas City, just like in real life, but an NLCS between the New York Mets and St Louis Cardinals, which is a very different thing than an NLCS between the Mets and the Cubs, which New York won in four straight.

I think the small playoffs will force teams to compete, both in a baseball sense and a financial sense, especially against teams in their own divisions, against whom they play the majority of the games. These battles would rage on the field, in the office, in international scouting, everywhere, just like they used to. I would love to see baseball throw it back to this. I’m certain the game would be a mountain more popular if they did. Two months’ worth of playoff games is a lot more than one week’s worth.

This moves us onto ice hockey, where in all honesty I like the NHL’s playoff format. 16 teams, made up of the top three per division, plus two wild cards, per conference. They crown divisional champions, and those divisional champions face off in the final four, which is currently ongoing as I write this piece. I think they’ve got the style of the tournament spot on. My only gripe would perhaps be with the wild cards, but remember, I floated two scheduling possibilities. One involved cutting out inter-conference play altogether, to create a schedule of seven games per divisional opponent, and four games per conference non-divisional opponent.

If this were the schedule, it’s fairly balanced, and therefore I don’t mind wild cards. It is always awkward to see a team from the Atlantic division cross over and be crowned the champion of the Metropolitan division, but in the end these are just words. I’ll get over it. However, if we end up switching to the schedule of spreading the 33 non-divisional games over the whole rest of the league, I am not in favour of wild cards, because that is very far from a balanced schedule.

If this were the case, I would favour a playoff format of just the best four teams per division, like the NHL did in real life when they actually used this scheduling formula in the 1980s, when they went with the second approach of using the non-divisional games on the whole league.

The one argument we can have is whether sixteen teams is too many, but hockey is such a random game that going all the way down to eight (because first round byes don’t work in this game either) feels like an extreme cut. Some of the best Expected Win teams in the league would often not make an eight team playoff, with a good modern example being the Florida Panthers this year. Hockey does not play 162 games like baseball does to work all the randomness out. The simple matter is that 82 is not enough to determine the best team in a game as random as ice hockey. This creates a circumstance where a big playoff is necessary for the possibility of all the best teams playing each other, and not the other way around, like it is in other sports.

Therefore, I will stand pat at 16 playoff teams, and pat the NHL on the back for being a league with a structure conducive to rising in popularity. There are several other things about the NHL that are not so conducive (the requirement for ice, the owners’ refusal to negotiate in good faith with the players, causing constant lockouts, the insistence on changing the rules in the playoffs, the league being the worst of all, at least in Canada, in terms of promoting gambling to children, and etc.), but the design of the league is solid. I like it. The NHL gets the fewest complaints of any league from me.

Moving onto basketball, which is a place where the playoff format, in my opinion, does not matter very much. Sample sizes in basketball are so high, even in a small sample of games like a playoff series, that you are going to determine the best team over a two week period 90% of the time. The best team in a basketball playoff series will virtually never lose it, even if it’s an instance like the Indiana Pacers in 2025, where they are the best only temporarily.

As such, you can let the whole league into the playoffs if you want to. I don’t really care. In my view, any number of playoff teams between eight and 30 will not change the eventual champion. Because I’ve made the schedule into a divisional schedule, I have to make the playoff format divisional also, so here’s what we’ll do. We’ll just keep everything the same as it is. If the NBA still wants four play-in games, we’ll do the fourth seed vs the fifth in every division, and if the team with the better record wins the play-in game (which they virtually always do), these would’ve been the first round matchups in each division in 2025:

West Coast:

1 Lakers vs 4 Kings

2 Clippers vs 3 Warriors

Central:

1 Thunder vs 4 Timberwolves (which is now a first round series)

2 Rockets vs 3 Nuggets

Midwest:

1 Cavaliers vs 4 Grizzlies

2 Pacers vs 3 Bucks

East Coast:

1 Celtics vs 4 Heat

2 Knicks vs 3 Magic

Do you like these matchups better than the ones we actually got in the first round? Whether you do or you don’t, I think I can say with certainty that it’s not worse. We lose very fun first round series in GS vs Houston and Denver vs the Clippers, but their replacements of GS vs Clippers and Nuggets vs Rockets have the potential to be just as fun, with the added bonus that these teams will have played each other over and over and over again in my scheduling format by the time we get to the playoffs. The testiness will be off the charts, and I’m here for that in a playoff environment. I’m all in on teams and players hating each other.

Like I said before, any playoff format you use in an NBA scenario is somewhat meaningless. It will not change the eventual champion, so you can design any kind of format you want with my divisions. I don’t really care. The point is to create teams that really, really, really dislike each other, and if the Nuggets and Rockets go six or seven games in that theoretical first round series, that’s 12 or 13 games played against each other in the whole of the season.

That’s Jokic and Sengun squaring off 12 or 13 times, and could you imagine having to play Dillon Brooks 12 or 13 times in one single season? There’s no way there wouldn’t be a punch thrown. These would be two teams that substantially dislike each other moving forward, with the realistic possibility that they have to play each other 12 or 13 times next season too. Does that not sound awesome to you?

With the seven playoff games, Golden State and Houston played each other double digit numbers of games this season, but there’s no sustained dislike, because they did not view each other as threats in the regular season, and it’s almost impossible that these two teams are going to meet in the playoffs again. If playoffs were divisional, the possibility of these two teams meeting again would be probable, especially if neither of them can be a better regular season team than divisional rival OKC moving forward, rather than almost impossible. Denver and Houston could be a rivalry remembered for years into the future, and instead of that we got what? A nifty first round series between GS and Houston?

That’s cool I guess.

It would take a few years to build, but the playoffs are where divisions would gain their own flavour in basketball too. If you’re the Nuggets, there is no way back to the NBA Finals without going through the Thunder, Rockets, and Timberwolves moving forward. You have to build your team accordingly. Look at a two team division like the East Coast. You don’t think we’d get a fantastic Knicks vs Celtics rivalry out of that? If you’re the Golden State Warriors in this offseason with the way I designed the league, the main question you would be asking is just how you’re going to get through LeBron and Luka?

Now that things are closer in the NBA, teams these days don’t build their teams to beat specific opponents anymore. They build to beat the homogenous West/Eastern Conference. It’s a slight but important difference. I want teams scheming to beat specific opponents. I want players laying in bed at night thinking of the next time they get to play those specific opponents. You don’t get that out of a GS vs Houston first round series. You do get it out of a Denver vs Houston first round series. That’s the change my league redesign is intended to make.

Last but not least, we move onto the NFL, a league now featuring 14 divisional games per team. This also means the playoffs must be divisional. To pretend that schedules are at all balanced enough to have wild cards would be ridiculous. There is one caveat that I will get to later, but for now, let’s stick to the format. In my article I made last month discussing the best NFL playoff format, I came out of it with the answer being either 14 teams or 12, depending on some preference parameters. In this circumstance, we’re going to have to ignore preference parameters, because 14 is not divisible by four divisions, meanwhile 12 is.

This gives us a playoff format of three teams per division, with the first seed in each getting a first round bye, while the second and third play each other in wild card weekend, but this is where I get to the caveat I was mentioning before.

In special circumstances, I do support the idea of one CFL-style crossover into the other division’s playoffs, should the fourth placed team in one division be clear of the third placed team in the other division in their conference by two games. Not tied with them. There will be no tie breaks, and not even one game ahead, but for a team well clear of a fellow conference team that would be a playoff qualifier, we’ll make an exception.

This makes sense in this context because if a team is in fourth place in a division with such a fantastic record, that means their division was mightily difficult, and they’re still better than the third placed team in the other division by a ton, meaning it must’ve been mightily weak. Therefore, I don’t mind splitting the available playoff positions in a conference four to two. Like I said, the tie break in this circumstance will always go to the team that does not have to cross divisions, but if you have 11 wins as a fourth placed team, and the third team in the other division has nine, you can join the other division as the third seed, playing exclusively road games, just like is done in the CFL.

This leaves the playoff brackets as follows, using the 2024 standings:

AFC Northeast:

1 Buffalo on bye

2 Baltimore vs 3 Pittsburgh

AFC Elsewhere

1 KC on bye

2 Los Angeles vs 3 Denver

NFC Northeast

1 Detroit on bye

2 Minnesota vs 3 Philadelphia

NFC Elsewhere

1 Tampa Bay on bye

2 Los Angeles vs 3 Washington (crossover)

With twelve wins, Washington actually could’ve jumped the whole line, and been the best team in the NFC Elsewhere, but crossover teams are not eligible to accept first round byes, and are not eligible to play a home playoff game. This is designed to create a disadvantage for teams who swap divisions, both to try to ensure that champions of the NFC Elsewhere are actually in the NFC Elsewhere, and to disincentivize intentional losing to get into a different division, should yours be strong.

If we extend this format infinitely backwards, the Dallas Cowboys would have accepted the crossover into the same flagrantly weak NFC Elsewhere in the 2022 playoffs. The Los Angeles Rams would have accepted it to get out of the NFC Elsewhere and into the NFC Northeast’s 2020 playoff bracket, but those Rams would’ve been the first team to accept it since the Eagles jumped ship into the NFC Elsewhere in 2014, so the crossover in this form would be something fans will see a few times per decade, if we’re lucky.

If not for the absurdly weak NFC Elsewhere (South + West) for most of the last 15 years, we have barely seen the crossover used at all. If we analyse strictly the AFC, the crossover has not been used since the New York Jets would have accepted it to jump out of the AFC Northeast and into the AFC Elsewhere in 2010, meaning that the third best team in the AFC Elsewhere that year (the 2010 San Diego Chargers) do not make the playoffs in this format either.

Yet another stroke of bad luck for that particular team that I elected to implement this crossover rule.

If we throw our hands in the air and say an instance of bad luck happening to the 2010 San Diego Chargers does not count, we have to go back to 2008, where the San Diego Chargers get kicked out of the AFC Elsewhere playoffs via crossover again, and if we throw our hands up in the air and say all instances of bad luck happening to the San Diego Chargers don’t count, no AFC team has used the crossover since multiple teams were eligible to jump from the Northeast into the Elsewhere over the top of the third place 7-9 Tennessee Titans in 2001, but only the Baltimore Ravens ended up winning the tie break in the Northeast to get the invite.

If you want, we could do the divisional playoffs without this crossover rule. The only problem with that is that divisional playoffs occasionally create circumstances where seven win teams make it and ten win teams miss, in the same conference, like 2001 in the AFC in this format and 2014 in the NFC, where it actually happened in real life.

Situations like this are what a crossover rule is made for, but it is not perfect. Perhaps we could stipulate that a team with as many as ten wins (like the 2024 Seattle Seahawks) cannot be crossed over the top of, as kicking a ten win team out of their divisional bracket does not feel fair either, even if Washington has twelve, and would miss the playoffs altogether otherwise.

I am open to suggestions regarding the specifics of the crossover rule, but I like having one in football, and I’m the commissioner here. Baseball has too few playoff spots for a crossover to make any sense. Five playoff teams (including play-in games) per division is enough in basketball, without need for crossovers. I feel no sadness for a 38 win team that missed their play-in game that they could’ve made in another division, and the NHL in effect already has a crossover rule, in the form of the wild card teams, so the only place I needed to invent something like this is the NFL.

It feels a little bush league if I’m telling the truth. My heart is not in this. Perhaps if you give me long enough to think about it, I will go back to just having three playoff teams per division, and telling teams like 12 win Washington in 2024 too bad, and to win more divisional games next time, but for now I’ll stick with it. 12 playoff teams with a divisional crossover rule.

Conclusions

At this, my reign of terror presiding as commissioner over all of North American sports has come to a close. Both MLB and the NFL have effectively gone back to being two distinct leagues, with the NFL beginning to feel a lot like four distinct eight team leagues, which is okay with me. I’ve done the Robbie Marriage special of manipulating the playoff format to benefit the regular season in NBA basketball, where divisional teams having to play each other in the playoffs year after year is sure to make their six divisional games per year much more hate-filled, which in sports is a good thing, and look in the sky for some pigs flying, because this article has contained a lot of praise for the NHL.

The overarching goal that needs to be strived towards in North American sports is to have more teams play each other more often. Schedules these days feature a lot of teams stretched really thin, with the NHL being the worst, stretching their teams so thin that there is basically no difference between some divisional rivals (three games per season) and a non-conference opponent (two games per season).

I think that the primary enemy of the fan that enjoys watching regular season sports games is the idea that everybody needs to play everybody. This idea is singlehandedly ruining the schedule in the NHL, NBA, and MLB, and if we could just find a way to get rid of it, that would leave a lot more room for Maple Leafs vs Canadiens. A lot more room for Thunder vs Nuggets. A lot more Yankees vs Red Sox.

Think about it as a simple trade. Sure it’s great to watch the Yankees play the Mets, but as a baseball fan, would you be willing to trade one Mets series for two more Red Sox series? If you’re a fan of the Colorado Avalanche, it’s cool to see them play the Florida Panthers twice in a year, but would you be willing to trade that for four more games against both the Stars and Jets? Yes or no?

The problem comes in that you cannot simply sign up for a couple non-conference games (which is why college sports do not have this same issue). In professional sports, you must sign up for the whole slate of non-conference games. To use the same analogy from the previous paragraph, it’s cool when the Colorado Avalanche play the Florida Panthers, but how uncool is it when they play the Sabres, the Blue Jackets, the Red Wings, the Philadelphia Flyers?

Non-conference play is like the beautiful woman who already has children. It’s great, when taken individually. If not for all the strings attached, you would absolutely shoot the shot, but you cannot strictly have a relationship with her. You cannot just have Thunder vs Celtics. You also have to have a relationship with her kids, which in this metaphor are games like Thunder vs Wizards, Thunder vs Hornets, Thunder vs Nets, Thunder vs every other Eastern Conference team that nobody cares to watch the OKC Thunder play.

There’s nothing wrong with dating a woman with children from previous relationships. In the 1970s this concept made a lot of sense. It’s only a problem now because your house is now overflowing with your own kids. You have 14 conference opponents these days. 15 in the NHL. You cannot possibly make room for any more. It just doesn’t work.

To me, the idea of everybody playing everybody is a relic from when sports teams used to be 20 teams large. Back then, you could get away with playing everybody, and still having a suitable amount of division games, but as these leagues grew, there became a choice. You either play everybody, or you have the right amount of divisional games. Teams could no longer do both. They universally made the choice to continue playing everybody (continue with the possibility to play everybody in the NFL), and this was the wrong choice in my opinion.

What they should’ve done instead is what baseball had been doing all along, cut some teams off, so that you can play a good amount of divisional games, without having to worry about playing everybody. These days, even baseball is getting it wrong, because at this point I cycle back to the question I asked in the very beginning. What is the purpose of everybody playing everybody?

What do we gain from that? Sure, we get two games of Thunder vs Celtics, but don’t you think those are weighed down by the ten games wasted on the Thunder playing East teams with 30 wins or less? I would rather get rid of all 12 of them, or rather, distribute them back to divisional opponents. Like I said earlier, not every divisional game will be important either, but no less important than a non-conference game.

Sports schedules are simultaneously stretched too thin while also being way too long. It is not realistic to solve the too long issue. Players and owners would never give up their money, but I think the stretched too thin issue is still near enough that we can reach out, grab it, and fix it. All we need to do is fight this idea that everybody ought to play everybody.

Everybody ought not to play everybody, and once we get that understood, we can go back to having meaningful regular season games again.

My formula to fix North American regular seasons is not the only way. Maybe it doesn’t have to be four divisions. Maybe two divisions can work. Nobody has ever tried a scheduling formula putting all 16 teams in a conference (15 in the MLB and NBA) on equal footing. We can also toy with some of the counts seen in this article. Maybe NBA teams can play even more divisional games than six, and we eliminate inter-conference play there.

There are options. I think a lot of them can work, as long as they come with the recognition that familiarity breeds contempt, and we want contempt. It will take some getting used to, but I promise. Once you become accustomed to hating more than one or two teams again, it’s a great feeling to have as a sports fan.

With that said, I am finally done talking about this. I would love to hear some of your ideas though. How would you go about creating contempt between teams in these leagues? I think it comes from not spreading the schedule so thin, but perhaps you think the malaise of the regular season comes from a different source. I would love to hear it.

In any case, I would like to say I appreciate you all for reading my manifesto. Next time we’ll be back to something a little more normal.

Thanks so much for reading.