I moved from Texas to St. Louis (AL to an NL town) and I mentioned the Mariners. The guys here were like “who ever thinks about the Mariners” and yes, I agree. I never thought about the Pirates so I understood the thinking.
I would put the Cardinals and the Cubs in the same division. Swap the Braves with the Cards in your thinking and I am with you.
I will admit to sticking pretty strictly to a map when redesigning the MLB divisions. This was perhaps the wrong approach. I'll tell you what. How about we just throw everything back to the way it was in 1993? That means Cardinals in the East, Reds to the West. I hate to throw Cincinnati under the bus like that, but the NL has an imbalance, nine East to seven West, and the Reds were historically the team that had to deal with it, so if not St Louis in the Western division, how about Cincinnati?
I've been pondering this for a couple days, and have some thoughts. First, it's certainly ambitious. You don't think small! It would be interesting to see one of the major sports try this and see if it has the effects you predict. I'm not sure about some of your premise though. Specifically, that increasing division size will improve rivalries. I can see it happening somewhat by eliminating inter-conference games. If your team never plays half the league (except for the championship), then you aren't going to care all that much about those teams. But increasing the number of teams in a division dilutes the really intense rivalries from smaller divisions. You go from having one or two teams you despise and one or two you seriously dislike to seven or so that you have somewhat negative feelings for. You can't care that deeply, positive or negative, about so many teams. Even in the current setup there's usually some division rival that fans just don't get that worked up about. Yeah, the Broncos fans want to beat the Chargers, but it's not as important as beating the Raiders or the Chiefs. Now spread that out to include the AFC South teams and there's only so much passion to go around.
There are still benefits to the larger divisions though. Right now it's possible to have four really weak teams all in one division. It's unlikely to have all eight teams in your larger divisions be below average. And I like what your suggestions would mean for the playoffs.
I'm still not sure how I'd feel about eliminating inter-conference play. Personally, as a long-distance fan, I like that every few years the Broncos will be playing in Charlotte where I can watch in person. I also would worry that never having teams play across conferences would make it more likely that one conference will become significantly stronger than the other. Perhaps there's a compromise position of drastically reducing the number of inter-conference games without eliminating them entirely. Might be harder to do that in football with only 17 games in the schedule, but in the other sports there's more room to work with.
Of course it's ambitious! No reason to think small my friend. If you've got a good idea, follow it. I see no reason to take half steps.
Okay Nick, so from what I can gather, we're in agreement that one big 32 team league is far too much, but your opinion is that even eight team pods is too many. This is the type of disagreement I can get behind, because most of the pushback I've gotten is that my way would leave things too small, a mindset completely out of touch with the casual fan in my opinion. I'll explain why I did what I did relative to your concerns, and then see how things would work specifically in the NFL if we did things with slightly smaller divisions.
It is my opinion that divisions do create rivalries, if you treat them properly. The teams in Minneapolis and Milwaukee (which is basically Green Bay) are not rivals in any sport except football. The reason for this is quite clear. Minnesota and Milwaukee have never shared a division in any league except the NFL, so I firmly believe in the power of divisions, but your disagreement is that big divisions dilute this power a little bit.
My position on this is that it's possible that you're correct. However, fans (even casual ones) are capable of doing this math for themselves. For instance, my New York Islanders. We've been in a big division for years and years and years. Throughout all these years, we've been able to form four very solid divisional rivalries, against the Flyers, Rangers, Capitals, Penguins. With a couple divisional playoff series under our belts, the process is ongoing to form a fifth against the Carolina Hurricanes, should we get a few more divisional playoff series against them in the years ahead. Does this mean that we care about divisional games against Columbus or New Jersey? Not really I must say, but this is still more heat than is even possible in a four team division, and this is only the perspective of one team. Just because we don't hate New Jersey does not mean other teams don't hate New Jersey.
No different than football, the heat of these rivalries runs hotter or colder depending on the divergence in quality between the teams at the time. The wider the cooler, but when the teams get back to similar levels of quality, the fire burns just as hot as ever. I don't have to explain this to you. You know what it feels like.
My position is only a slight amendment to your position. Your claim is that you cannot hate seven different divisional opponents. My claim is that you cannot hate seven different divisional opponents AT ONCE, but if you allow a setup of big divisions and divisional playoffs to go on for long enough, fans will find excuses to hate pretty much everybody, albeit at a controlled burn, which becomes a raging wildfire at which point two teams are similar in quality, preferably fighting each other for either a first or a final playoff position.
It's entirely possible that you're correct, and the old NHL Patrick division is a success that is not replicable in other settings, but I want to give it a try. That's why I'm happy the NHL went back to this setup.
From an NFL perspective, this will ebb and flow. In the AFC Elsewhere, there is the built in hatred already with the old AFC West, but what if theoretically in the coming few years Cam Ward is great, and the Tennessee Titans take the final playoff spot from the Broncos in 2027, and beat them in the divisional playoffs in 2028? You don't think you'd begin to grow a little bit of hatred for the Tennessee Titans? I think you would. This is a process that takes years to happen. The AFC West has pretty much been going strong since 1962, so it won't be instant, but the Steelers and Ravens built up a healthy hatred for each other within just a few years of the Ravens coming into existence, so there is no guarantee that it has to take forever either.
What I think will happen is that the NFL would begin to look a lot like the NHL. There would be a divisional slate of at least six divisional games every year that have real energy, that you know your team has to win. I say 'at least' because it's entirely possible there would be more. Look at the NFC Northeast last year. The only difference between this and what the NFL does now is that it won't necessarily be the same teams every year that you HAVE to beat. The cast will rotate a little bit, and after several years of hopefully every team in a division being a part of this rotating cast, there will begin to be contempt between the sides.
These are at least six games every year to replace the six divisional games per year we have now, plus some other games that have more potential in my opinion to be contempt-filled than random in or out of conference games do today. Even if you recast the extra eight divisional games as the eight conference non-divisional games that teams already play now, without must heat to them, I at least struggle to see how my idea could be worse than the way the NFL currently does it. At worst it would be the same.
It is also technically true what you said about eliminating the weak auto bid that seems to happen in at least one of the eight divisions every year these days, but as you see in the 2024 NFC Elsewhere (and a lot of the history of the NFC Elsewhere. If we extend this framework infinitely backwards, this has always been the weak division) it is still entirely possible to have seven below average teams in one eight team division.
However, as for your final paragraph, I think I perhaps have a solution that might work for all parties. We could rectify all of our problems with one change. Here's how it would read:
Divisions are hard to design in the NFL, as there are several package deals (Broncos-Raiders-Chiefs, Atlanta-New Orleans, Pittsburgh-Baltimore, etc.), but here's how I would do it, in an attempt to alleviate both the concerns about inter-conference play and divisions that might be a tad too big. I would split the NFL into six divisions, that would look like this:
West Coast (five teams): Seattle Seahawks, SF 49ers, LA Chargers, LA Rams, Arizona Cardinals
Generally South-Central (six teams): LV Raiders, Denver Broncos, KC Chiefs, Houston Texans, Atlanta Falcons, New Orleans Saints
The Old AFC Central (six teams): Pittsburgh Steelers, Cleveland Browns, Baltimore Ravens, Cincinnati Bengals, Tennessee Titans, Jacksonville Jaguars
NFC East Revision (five teams): New York Giants, Dallas Cowboys, Washington Commanders, Philadelphia Eagles, Carolina Panthers
AFC East Revision (five teams): New England Patriots, New York Jets, Buffalo Bills, Miami Dolphins, Tampa Bay Buccaneers
NFC North Revision (five teams): Minnesota Vikings, Green Bay Packers, Detroit Lions, Chicago Bears, Indianapolis Colts.
I've completely torn apart both the NFC and AFC South, because trust me. There are no divisional rivalries here, other than Atlanta-New Orleans, who I've kept together. There are also no conference affiliations anymore, because in my setup there would be no need for them.
With this setup, every team would play their allotment of divisional games. This is ten in the old AFC Central, and in the Generally South-Central, and eight for everybody else. From there, each division would be matched against one other division, in full, just like the NFL does now. This would rotate every year, with the possible caveat that the six team divisions cannot be matched against each other. We'd have to see.
This leaves the six team division teams with 15 games scheduled, the five team divisions matched up with six team divisions with 14 games scheduled, and the five team divisions matched against each other with 13 games scheduled. This guarantees every team is going to be in every stadium over a period of ten years (the guarantee is only eight in real life), and from here, I would let the NFL and the TV partners have their money games.
I call them 'money games.' I believe the NFL calls them competitive balance games. The three games on the real schedule now that are outside the rotation. These are the games that the NFL uses to slip Chiefs vs Bills onto the schedule through the back door every year. Basically, there's a matrix of possible matchups, with every first seed in every division matched up against every other first seed, every second seed matched up against every second seed, etc.. Obviously, not all of these games can be played, so the NFL in conjunction with the TV partners pick through these matrices, based in my opinion on which games would make good primetime games, until every team has 17 games scheduled.
It's competitive balance (because the good play the good, the bad play the bad), but it's also a throw of a bone to the TV partners to get these marquee one seed vs one seed games on the schedule. The term 'money games' often brings a bad connotation, but it's actually a very well designed setup, and if we have to do everybody has the potential to play everybody, I quite like how this is implemented in practice. Teams like the Jacksonville Jaguars often get left out in the cold with games nobody wants to see, such as scheduling us in a money game against the Cleveland Browns last year, but this is also the same system that gave us games like KC vs San Francisco last year.
This is a lot of competitive balance, as some teams would have up to four money games on their schedule, but I think we could either expand to 36 to make everything even, or everybody could in time just get used to the fact that the Central and the South-Central are somewhat separated from everybody else.
The result of all this is that every team gets a relatively balanced schedule, which would make me comfortable having wild cards again, and if we're doing inter-conference, let's throw our backs into it, and set it up like a college football playoff. No conferences. None of that. We take the six divisional champions, and the best six at larges, with the four best divisional champions getting first round byes, with the other two divisional champions getting home games, but not preferential seeds.Here's how this would look based on 2024 standings (noting that some tie breaks change when ties are more ways than two):
1: NFC North Revision Champion Detroit Lions
2: South-Central Champion KC Chiefs
3: NFC East Revision Champion Philadelphia Eagles
4: AFC East Revision Champion Buffalo Bills
First round:
5 Minnesota Vikings (NFC North Revision) vs 12 Houston Texans (South-Central)
6 AFC Central Champion Baltimore Ravens vs 11 Tampa Bay Buccaneers (AFC East Revision)
7 Washington Commanders (NFC East Revision) vs 10 Denver Broncos (South-Central)
8 West Coast Champion Los Angeles Chargers vs 9 Green Bay Packers (NFC North Revision)
You can change the format to 14, if you want to let the Steelers and Rams into the playoffs, but I don't. There is also no bracket. I hate brackets, so if we assume the team that would be favoured by me wins each game, this is the second round:
1 Detroit Lions vs 10 Denver Broncos
2 KC Chiefs vs 9 Green Bay Packers (What a soft matchup for GB!)
3 Philadelphia Eagles vs 6 Baltimore Ravens
4 Buffalo Bills vs 5 Minnesota Vikings
Repeat to get to the final four:
1 Detroit Lions vs 9 Green Bay Packers
4 Buffalo Bills vs 6 Baltimore Ravens
Repeat to the Super Bowl:
1 Detroit Lions vs 6 Baltimore Ravens
In this alternate scenario, here would be a sample Broncos' schedule for 2025, if matched up against the NFC North Revision, with the money games filled in based on their second place finish in the South-Central in 2024. I put games in order of my subjective coolness of them.
2x vs Kansas City
1x vs Detroit
1x vs Tampa Bay
1x vs Washington
1x vs Green Bay
2x vs Houston
2x vs Las Vegas
1x vs Pittsburgh
1x vs Minnesota
2x vs Atlanta
1x vs Chicago
2x vs New Orleans
This is actually dramatically more inter-conference play, but in this scenario, I'm truly giving the idea of a 32 team league a chance, abolishing conferences entirely, so all of them count, instead of the glorified exhibitions that inter-conference games are today. Nevertheless, the only way to a first round bye is winning the division, for which all tie breakers are divisional, so divisional games (which make up ten games for the Broncos now) are crucial. BTW, this is also a nightmare schedule, so, sorry about that LOL. Pray not to get matched up against the NFC North revision I suppose.
What do you think of this proposed format Nick? Would it do anything to assuage your concerns? There would be no conferences, so the idea of an inter-conference game would cease to exist. In this circumstance, we'd be throwing our weight completely the opposite way, integrating the NFL in the way it has never been integrated before, while still managing to increase the number of divisional games played, which to me will always be a plus.
Would this make you more or less comfortable than a four division setup?
Wow, now that would be a drastic change in the other direction! I don't hate it. I'd have to wrap my mind around it a bit before I decide which would be better. Totally shaking things up like this - the more I think about it the more I like it. Every team gets a chance, even if it's infrequent, to play every other team. The playoffs would be more balanced, and the divisions are small enough to have a firm set of rivalries. All that said, this is probably way more change than fans would be comfortable with. It's not impossible to imagine your original plan getting implemented. This one? No way. For one, he owners won't want the revenue sharing diluted by four potential expansions. But it's a LOT of fun to consider how it would go!
As you can see, I'm a bit of a logical extremist. I like to chase ideas all the way to the end, instead of the pervasive half measuring that a lot of sports are stuck with right now.
The NFL is a 32 team league, without any of the perks that come with being a 32 team league. They still do divisional auto bids and arbitrary conferences and all this other nonsense that I would be a fan of, should the league get much less integrated, but that I hate in the way the league exists now. It's all a half measure.
Why would fans be uncomfortable with a change like this? Just because it's different? We could also go without the expansions. The NFL did exactly that in real life in the days where some divisions were six teams and others were five, before they went to the eight division setup (which I will never accept is a good thing). The teams in the six team divisions were just slightly more sequestered from the rest of the league. It was a reality everybody was fine with back then. I don't see how it would change now, so expansion can be done without.
I agree that this is complete pie in the sky. It will never happen, but should it be that way? I don't think so. I've always thought we need a bit more idealism in our sports. There's too much pessimism to go around. Why can't we implement something like this to make the league better?
This was a fun and thought-provoking exercise. As someone who knows nothing but the current league layouts, it is interesting to think about how leagues used to be. For the sports leagues I watch regularly, College Football, NBA, and NFL, I have always been in favor of 8 playoff teams. For the NBA specifically, I would like the regular season to mean more than it does because it is so long. We have some of that because of teams wanting to avoid play-in games, but outside of the 21 Warriors (once Wiseman got injured), there haven't been any good teams left out of the postseason.
This is where it can tough to do an exercise like this, because I'm coming from an angle of trying to things casuals would like, but I'm doing it in a sports landscape that's catering more and more strictly to hardcore fans and nobody else. To the sports industry's credit, they are not the only ones doing this. Every entertainment business these days except the Masters is flipping off the casuals in order to cater more specifically to the hardcores.
Big playoffs are for hardcore fans, because in most sports, first round playoff games are watched less than the good regular season games, if you go by TV numbers. For instance, Denver vs Buffalo last year. It would've been a kind of meh SNF regular season game by viewership. The simple fact of the matter is that the word 'playoffs' is a draw, but not a draw big enough to make Denver vs Buffalo to draw anything more than meh SNF game viewership. This is a not even a great example. I only bring it up because it's recent.
In big playoff scenarios, casual fans do not care about the first round. It really is that simple. Perhaps it's a chance for owners to goose ticket prices, and that's why they exist. It's certainly not for the good of the game. Any game. This is especially true for baseball, where I remain convinced that big playoffs were an orchestrated plot by the owners to ruin their own sport (anything for a drop in leaguewide payrolls), but it's true for every league. In the NBA, nobody watches the play-in games. Nobody cares. I don't have these numbers like I do for football, but I suspect it's exactly the same. By nationally televised game standards, the play-in games are probably meh, but possibly worse than average in terms of viewership. To put all that in plain English, nobody cares about the play-in games.
It's true for most first round series as well. The NFL and NBA are a lot alike in this regard. There's about one game (series) in the first round that pops a number, and gets better viewership than a regular season game could've done, and the rest of the games perform like high-end regular season matchups, with some of the wider ones (Denver vs Buffalo, Cleveland vs Miami) not even doing that well, performing like median nationally televised regular season games.
I'm not sure about the NBA, but in the NFL, this stops in the second round, where games begin to universally pop numbers bigger than any regular season game could do. Conveniently, this is also the point at which the playoffs are down to eight teams. I would interpret this as evidence that casuals still think eight teams is the right number. If they thought 14 was the right number, audience numbers would stop acting like it's the regular season in the round of 14, but they don't. Not until the round of eight.
Nobody cares about playoffs. To the sports fan who has too little time to debate how good Jim Everett was (meaning not us, obviously), playoffs are nothing but a word. The draw is getting down to the nitty gritty, and seeing all the best teams going against each other, to see who really is the best.
I didn't want to make this article into a playoff contraction piece. It was more about divisions and schedules and stuff, but I also think eight is a good number, with baseball being a possible exception, for the reasons I laid out within the article. I like four there. I would be a little bit touch and go about going to eight in ice hockey as well, but I would be willing to grit my teeth and bear it. As far as the NBA and NFL go, I like eight.
Look at the division championship series in the NBA if we just used eight:
West Coast: LA vs LA
Central: OKC vs Houston
Midwest: Indiana vs Cleveland
East Coast: Knicks vs Celtics
That sounds fantastic. It just gets to the meat of the matter, and for teams like the Denver Nuggets that miss the playoffs this way, it still would've been great, because they would've been playing playoff games for the last two months of the season, at least two of which in this system would've been divisional games against Houston. We'd just have to re-normalise the old school idea that missing the playoffs does not make you a joke. This used to be common thought, but with big playoffs is dead now. 'Respectable team' and 'playoff team' used to have different meanings, but with a playoff as big as 14 or 16 teams, there is basically no difference.
There's this stigma against missing the playoffs that exists these days. It'd take time to re-adjust to a world where 50 win teams miss the playoffs. 11 win teams miss the playoffs in the NFL, but it could be done. It used to happen all the time. Teams used to win the Super Bowl, miss the playoffs, and then win the Super Bowl again. Look at the Cowboys in the 70s. There's a playoff miss in there, because that's just what happened back then. It meant a different thing to be a playoff team, and it was seen as unacceptable in a 'the Dallas Cowboys need to be better' kind of way, not in a 'this format does not work' kind of way.
These days, holding the Denver Nuggets out of the playoffs would lead to widespread hatred of the format, because a) the NBA is overrun with hardcores, who put much more weight on playoffs than casuals do, and b) the meaning of being a playoff team is so skewed now. People feel like if you're a good team, you ought to be entitled to a playoff position. I don't like that at all. College football is walking down the primrose path towards ruination of their sport based upon the same logic. Let's let everybody in, and watch and wonder as the casual fans disappear, pretending we couldn't have seen this coming.
This is another thing that is killing North American sports in my opinion. The opinion that if you're good, you ought to be entitled to a chance to win the championship, pretty much regardless of how many games you lost as long as you didn't lose more than half of them. I say if you're the 2025 Denver Nuggets, too darn bad. At the All-Star break, you were ahead of the Rockets, and in you guys' two month long playoff series against each other to get into the end-of-season tournament, they beat you. Come back next year, and perhaps next time, win more than three games in the three weeks following the AS game. That would rectify your 'missing the playoffs' problem.
You see what I'm getting at here, and I don't think you even needed it explained. The first round is cool and all, but we're getting two weeks of playoff series in April, in exchange for the two months from mid-February to mid-April, which could've seen epic battles between everybody. LAC, LAL, GSW for the final spot in the West Coast. HOU and DEN for the Central. A comeback for the ages to see Indiana steal the second spot in the Midwest away from Memphis, but no. Instead of all that, we can have two weeks in April.
Familiarity is definitely needed. As a fan of a college football team that just recently completed an independence exodus (BYU), playing the same opponents year in and year out really is great for sports fandom. You get to actively root for your team and against the other teams, which increases your overall investment. When BYU was independent, I still wanted them to do well, but there wasn't as much interest in beating any particular opponent outside of the few (Boise State, for example) that we were able to more consistently schedule. I don't know that the complete elimination of interconference play is quite the right move, but I haven't been able to form a concrete objection to it, yet, so maybe it is.
I think you're absolutely right about that. I don't think I would like to be a fan of any independent for just that reason. You have a team to root for, but nobody to root against, and nobody truly rooting against you to make it that much sweeter when you win.
As far as inter-conference play, I respect your opinion a lot David. I would like to hear your thoughts on it. It's obvious that I don't find there to be any place for it, but if there's a benefit you can think of that I cannot, I would like to hear it.
I think it helps to bring some cohesiveness to a league to have teams play each other. Other than MLB, the other leagues were always really a single unit; the NFL-AFL and NBA-ABA distinctions weren't sought to be maintained like the AL-NL differences were. If you only ever play outside of your conference in the championship, it doesn't really feel like you're part of the same league. Now, maybe you think that's ultimately a good thing as it would allow for larger-scale differences to occur, but I think being part of something larger is good too. It doesn't have to be playing every team in the league to bring that sense of cohesiveness.
To bring it back to collegiate sports, having some nonconference games is a lot of fun. It's especially important there, as it gives more of an opportunity to evaluate how well you do outside your little domain--are you just the top dog in your little corner of the world, or can you actually hang with the best the rest has to offer? European soccer has some of this too, what with the FA cup for English Football, and the UEFA Champions League for European soccer more generally. Both of those use a tournament-style format, so perhaps that's a key for improving inter-conference play, but I think both provide an opportunity for meaningful competition outside of the more familiar "conferences" (I get they are leagues, but they are analogous to conferences for purposes of this discussion). Limiting it to just a single championship game/series loses you some of that sense of the conferences actually being part of a single league.
I think that's where the basic disagreement lies between myself and everybody else on this. Why would we want league cohesiveness?
The most popular sport in North American history by relative popularity is Major League Baseball, at the time when their two leagues were in essence openly warring with each other. It was so bad at one time that trades between leagues were banned. I wouldn't go so far as to ban trading players between the NFC and AFC or anything like that. That seems like a bridge too far to me, because we are one league here, except in the case of baseball, where I would take the legal steps to reinstate the 1997 status quo, where these were two leagues in union, instead of one league with two conferences, which it had to become to implement inter-league play (*eye roll*).
I don't mean to challenge you here David, but I respect you, so in a way I do mean to challenge you. If you could put a value on being part of a 30-2 team league, instead of a 15-6 team self-contained conference, what is that value? You're already crossing lines to play a championship at the end of the season. Is that not enough? We must also keep in mind that in this modern era of player movement, people are going to be jumping divisional and conference boundaries all the time, which will also help to make the league feel more whole, without having to play meaningless games.
There will still be the same rumours of George Pickens going from Pittsburgh to Dallas or Kevin Durant going from Phoenix to Brooklyn that there are now. That won't change. There would likely be an extra emphasis actually to move a guy out of conference now that I'm making performance against one's own conference more important. Both conferences are also participating the same draft. There will be the same revenue sharing. All of the merchandise will have the same league logo on it. I think we could have enough league cohesion to get by with it.
Plus, in the earliest days of sport, when these leagues were separated, this is the purpose that the exhibition games used to serve. Have you ever wondered why exhibition games before the season actually exist? Nobody cares about them these days. Well, they were the opportunity for NL and AL teams to play against each other. As such, these preseason exhibition games would draw regular season crowds, because it's the only time NL vs AL would ever happen.
This is where the idea came from that there ought to be exhibition games before the season, and while these were the days where owners could coerce the players into actually playing in the regular season games, so we may not be able to replace this, it goes to show there are mechanisms for doing things to boost league cohesion without wasting crucial regular season time.
I'm not saying my change will cause people to care just the same as they did before. If you're a fan of the Buffalo Bills now, how much you care about the SF 49ers dramatically goes down once I announce these rule changes. There's just no reason to care about them anymore. However, the idea is that the league is compensated by the Bills' fans caring dramatically more about their four new divisional rivals (Steelers, Ravens, Browns, Bengals) than they ever used to. Perhaps enough to create incentive to watch a game your Buffalo Bills are not playing in, which is really my true goal here, because fans who focus on just the one team has become another big problem in North American sports. That's not the way it was designed to be, but that's the way it is now, because you can't even attempt to keep up with everything else. There's just too much.
I find college sports to be different, and fundamentally outside the purview of this conversation, for two reasons: 1) Teams can change leagues whenever they want to; 2) You can win the championship without winning your conference. In the Big Four, winning the championship without so much as winning your own conference is an impossibility. In college sports though, it's common. It's been common in basketball ever since they killed their sport with their ludicrously big tournament, and it's becoming common in football now that they're trying to kill their sport with a ludicrously big tournament.
Quite frankly, if winning a championship does not require winning your conference, I don't think much of what I've said here applies. College is just too much of a different context. I'm not a soccer guy, but I believe the Champions League is the same thing. Correct? You don't have to win your league to win that either.
Imagine if the Baltimore Ravens won the AFC but the KC Chiefs won the Super Bowl. You can see how my logic for how a league ought to operate would break down in that case. That's basically what American college sports is. The most recent (and probably last ever) split football National Championship between Alabama and UCF in 2017 is because Alabama did not even qualify for their league championship game. They were not even second place in the SEC, but won the overall championship. This farce is what forced them to split it with a G5 team, because it's a structural flaw in a sport that a team can finish third in their own league but win the championship, and some voters went off the board to voice their protest with that.
In any of the North American Big Four, this is not possible. You must finish first place in your conference to win the championship. There are no other options. We can (and have, a lot) quibbled about how these conferences crown their champions, but the fact remains that you must win your conference to win the overall championship. In college sports, it is not this way. In European football, it is not this way, so I say those environments deserve an article of their own.
This brings us back to the cohesion discussion, where again I pass the buck to you. What are the pros and cons of the AFC and NFC being perceived as two fundamentally different things? Two conferences in union, but much more separate than they are now. What I'm trying to do is go 1910s baseball (or 2000s college football) and create fans of leagues on this. I want AFC fans and NFC fans, constantly griping that their league is better. I want you to hate your conference rivals, try as hard as you can to beat them, but still cheer for them when the championship game/series comes around.
At the same time, player movement can remain just as it is now. This is not the AL vs NL or AFL vs NFL, where trades between leagues were banned. Trades between leagues would be perfectly okay in my setup, but beyond that, they're fairly separate, and as long as there is no line crossing, we could even do things like both conferences being on different rules, if they wanted. Not so different as to be incompatible, but sort of like college football now. Minor rules differences.
This is spitting in the face of the concept of a 32 team league, and that is wholly the point of this manifesto I've written here. It is my opinion that nobody wants a 32 team league, and if people had to worry about just about their 16 team half, and more particularly their eight team quarter, I think the game would prosper from that.
I appreciate the pushback, Robbie. I started out saying that I didn’t have any fully formed objections, so it makes sense that what I’m providing isn’t a complete enough answer.
To my mind, if the conferences never played each other except during the championship, that interconference championship loses a lot of its importance. It basically becomes just an exhibition game. Maybe the interconference bragging rights from that one exhibition are enough—although the decrease in importance of all-star games belies that, I think. (Teasing out cause and effect here is tricky—perhaps the all-star games have lost importance precisely because there’s already so much interconference play).
I’m probably a tricky fan to ask these questions about as, outside of the NBA, I’ve never really had a team that I’m loyal to in these leagues. I’m perfectly content to consume them from a league-wide perspective. But I recognize that’s probably not the median viewer and doesn’t make a recipe for sustained success.
I do think there’s one other thing you miss with separated leagues: the inability for a former player to return on another team. I think that’s a pretty sublime moment for a sports fan, whether it was an amicable send off that allows them to return and be shown gratitude or the bridges were burned and there’s an extra bit of hatred from the betrayal. As you mentioned, with eliminating interconference play, the incentives are all about moving your guys to the other conference so you don’t have to play against them, so it becomes a rarer occurrence (though potentially offset as something like the Eagles getting Barkley away from the Giants becomes even more juicy).
Well how much importance does a championship have now? Can you tell me who won the 2021 World Series? Maybe you can, but I cannot tell you. However, when you go back to the old days, I can rhyme off 1985 KC, 1986 NYM, 1987 MIN, 1988 LAD, 1989 OAK, 1990 CIN, 1991 MIN, 1992 TOR, 1993 TOR off the top of my head like it's nothing.
That may be a big playoff problem, as opposed to a splitting the leagues problem, but nobody can kid themselves that the baseball championship means as much as it used to. The NBA championship is exactly the same way. That's why NBA Finals viewership has basically uniformly gone down since 2017, once we take the pandemic funkiness out of it.
I was talking about this with Marc yesterday. Playoffs are for hardcore fans. The more and more you prostitute your sport for the end of season tournament, the more and more you're catering exclusively to hardcore fans, because casuals like the regular season. It sounds counterintuitive, but the data has proven this hypothesis over and over again. We cannot simply ignore it. NCAA basketball is the perfect example. They ruined their whole sport in order to have this big end of season tournament, and how many casual fans do they have now? It seems like a stretch to say literally none, but it's only one step above that, and no. People who watch the tournament do not count as casual fans. If you watch college basketball once or twice every year, you do not count as a fan at all to me.
I don't mean to come off sounding age discriminatory here David, but your position on the championship reeks of this modern opinion that championships are not especially meaningful. Rob Manfred and the 'piece of metal' and all that. We're modern fans, so it's not a crime to represent the modern position, but I'm the throwback guy, so I have to represent the throwback position that I want championships to mean what they used to mean.
In technical terms, the World Series has never been anything but an exhibition. It's still written on the books that way. All the playoffs in every sport are just exhibitions. That's why the players don't get paid for them. What difference does that make? People still used to care. A smaller segment of fans still do care. What I want to do is make more people care, by presenting the championship round as one league vs another, instead of merely one team vs another. It's a slight but fundamental difference. Players will (and always have) play, exhibition or not, because they want to win the championship. It's the fans we need to manicure here.
BTW, people on the internet saying Michael Jordan is better than LeBron James because of ring count is not emphasizing the importance of the championship. That's just people unwilling or unable to make a real argument. The way you emphasize the importance of a championship is by watching the games, and caring about the games, which a lot more people used to do than do now.
I think championships are in need of a drastic shot in the arm, because they're beginning to be treated like exhibitions these days. Rob Manfred calling his own league trophy a mere 'piece of metal,' and you name it. People just don't care. People used to care about these things. I'm trying to give them that shot in the arm with my reframe. I think the unnecessarily big tournaments are what is screwing this up, but a change in league structure could not hurt either.
On another note, you're absolutely right about All-Star games. They're pointless when all the All-Stars play against each other every night. They were invented for the same reason as preseason exhibition games were invented, to see guys who never play against each other go at it. I should've mentioned this in the original piece, but if I were the commissioner, All-Star games are cancelled until until further notice. You already see all these guys play against each other every night. It's pointless. More intentional time wasting. A few years after we've eliminated inter-conference play, I'll fold them back in. They can go back to serving their original purpose again.
If you're a leaguewide fan David, I thought we'd be on the same side here. With my two distinct conference, four division setups, instead of one homogenous bowl of soup that the league gives you now, I'm giving you two different dishes, with your own choice of garnish on each of them, or you can just order all four variants if you can take it, for no increase in price.
Modern sports leagues basically give you one giant bowl of soup, the size of four of my dishes that I'm offering here. In my restaurant setup, you can still order all four of them, but they're different, not one dish 4x the size, and I'm also offering the unique feature that you do not HAVE to order all four of them. In modern sports, it's basically all four dishes mixed together, or nothing. I'm trying to alter the selection a little bit. Different flavours. They don't all have to be mixed, and a smaller portion size is also on offer, should you want that.
You can absolutely follow a whole league if the NFC and AFC do not play each other. I would. I would probably keep my Jaguars and find some team in the NFC to root for. My family used to have a vacation place in Phoenix. It'd probably be them, but why would this harm my ability to be a fan from a leaguewide perspective? I don't think I understand what you mean by this, unless you're saying that everybody everywhere playing the same kind of football is a good thing, but I don't quite think that's what you meant.
What you said about the former players returning is juicy. I hadn't really thought about it. It's another thing that used to be common, but isn't anymore. It used to be that the Mariners would trade Ken Griffey Jr, and not be able to show the tribute video until five years afterwards. It just didn't feel out of the ordinary back then. These days, when a player leaves as a free agent, fans feel entitled to be able to boo him within six months.
Quite honestly, I'm not sure this is a sports tradition I would like to keep. Does it generally serve any positive purpose? There's a lot of booing that goes on, and hatred of individual players, but I don't want hatred towards individual players. I want hatred towards other teams, that will persist long after the retirement of any player.
There are some good things too sometimes, tribute videos and stuff, but on balance, is a former player returning to his old team a good thing? I'd need further thought on this, but my initial opinion is that this is a sports tradition I wouldn't mind snuffing out in service of the greater good. They'll return there anyways eventually. Everybody always goes back, during or after their career. I don't necessarily know if it's a must that they do it as an active player.
Don’t have the time to address this right now, but I have thoughts.
The reason why I can’t dedicate time to this is because this clearly thought out, and there’s an internal logic here. I might respond long-form sometime this summer.
Perfect my friend. I would like to hear your thoughts on this. I know we've talked about a similar subject just a bit in the past, so I would like to hear you expand on your thought process.
I love the tease you've left me with by the way. Very 'writer' of you.
I moved from Texas to St. Louis (AL to an NL town) and I mentioned the Mariners. The guys here were like “who ever thinks about the Mariners” and yes, I agree. I never thought about the Pirates so I understood the thinking.
I would put the Cardinals and the Cubs in the same division. Swap the Braves with the Cards in your thinking and I am with you.
Okay. That seems like a reasonable revision.
I will admit to sticking pretty strictly to a map when redesigning the MLB divisions. This was perhaps the wrong approach. I'll tell you what. How about we just throw everything back to the way it was in 1993? That means Cardinals in the East, Reds to the West. I hate to throw Cincinnati under the bus like that, but the NL has an imbalance, nine East to seven West, and the Reds were historically the team that had to deal with it, so if not St Louis in the Western division, how about Cincinnati?
Yes, the Cardinals absolutely have to be in the same division as the Cubs.
I've been pondering this for a couple days, and have some thoughts. First, it's certainly ambitious. You don't think small! It would be interesting to see one of the major sports try this and see if it has the effects you predict. I'm not sure about some of your premise though. Specifically, that increasing division size will improve rivalries. I can see it happening somewhat by eliminating inter-conference games. If your team never plays half the league (except for the championship), then you aren't going to care all that much about those teams. But increasing the number of teams in a division dilutes the really intense rivalries from smaller divisions. You go from having one or two teams you despise and one or two you seriously dislike to seven or so that you have somewhat negative feelings for. You can't care that deeply, positive or negative, about so many teams. Even in the current setup there's usually some division rival that fans just don't get that worked up about. Yeah, the Broncos fans want to beat the Chargers, but it's not as important as beating the Raiders or the Chiefs. Now spread that out to include the AFC South teams and there's only so much passion to go around.
There are still benefits to the larger divisions though. Right now it's possible to have four really weak teams all in one division. It's unlikely to have all eight teams in your larger divisions be below average. And I like what your suggestions would mean for the playoffs.
I'm still not sure how I'd feel about eliminating inter-conference play. Personally, as a long-distance fan, I like that every few years the Broncos will be playing in Charlotte where I can watch in person. I also would worry that never having teams play across conferences would make it more likely that one conference will become significantly stronger than the other. Perhaps there's a compromise position of drastically reducing the number of inter-conference games without eliminating them entirely. Might be harder to do that in football with only 17 games in the schedule, but in the other sports there's more room to work with.
Of course it's ambitious! No reason to think small my friend. If you've got a good idea, follow it. I see no reason to take half steps.
Okay Nick, so from what I can gather, we're in agreement that one big 32 team league is far too much, but your opinion is that even eight team pods is too many. This is the type of disagreement I can get behind, because most of the pushback I've gotten is that my way would leave things too small, a mindset completely out of touch with the casual fan in my opinion. I'll explain why I did what I did relative to your concerns, and then see how things would work specifically in the NFL if we did things with slightly smaller divisions.
It is my opinion that divisions do create rivalries, if you treat them properly. The teams in Minneapolis and Milwaukee (which is basically Green Bay) are not rivals in any sport except football. The reason for this is quite clear. Minnesota and Milwaukee have never shared a division in any league except the NFL, so I firmly believe in the power of divisions, but your disagreement is that big divisions dilute this power a little bit.
My position on this is that it's possible that you're correct. However, fans (even casual ones) are capable of doing this math for themselves. For instance, my New York Islanders. We've been in a big division for years and years and years. Throughout all these years, we've been able to form four very solid divisional rivalries, against the Flyers, Rangers, Capitals, Penguins. With a couple divisional playoff series under our belts, the process is ongoing to form a fifth against the Carolina Hurricanes, should we get a few more divisional playoff series against them in the years ahead. Does this mean that we care about divisional games against Columbus or New Jersey? Not really I must say, but this is still more heat than is even possible in a four team division, and this is only the perspective of one team. Just because we don't hate New Jersey does not mean other teams don't hate New Jersey.
No different than football, the heat of these rivalries runs hotter or colder depending on the divergence in quality between the teams at the time. The wider the cooler, but when the teams get back to similar levels of quality, the fire burns just as hot as ever. I don't have to explain this to you. You know what it feels like.
My position is only a slight amendment to your position. Your claim is that you cannot hate seven different divisional opponents. My claim is that you cannot hate seven different divisional opponents AT ONCE, but if you allow a setup of big divisions and divisional playoffs to go on for long enough, fans will find excuses to hate pretty much everybody, albeit at a controlled burn, which becomes a raging wildfire at which point two teams are similar in quality, preferably fighting each other for either a first or a final playoff position.
It's entirely possible that you're correct, and the old NHL Patrick division is a success that is not replicable in other settings, but I want to give it a try. That's why I'm happy the NHL went back to this setup.
From an NFL perspective, this will ebb and flow. In the AFC Elsewhere, there is the built in hatred already with the old AFC West, but what if theoretically in the coming few years Cam Ward is great, and the Tennessee Titans take the final playoff spot from the Broncos in 2027, and beat them in the divisional playoffs in 2028? You don't think you'd begin to grow a little bit of hatred for the Tennessee Titans? I think you would. This is a process that takes years to happen. The AFC West has pretty much been going strong since 1962, so it won't be instant, but the Steelers and Ravens built up a healthy hatred for each other within just a few years of the Ravens coming into existence, so there is no guarantee that it has to take forever either.
What I think will happen is that the NFL would begin to look a lot like the NHL. There would be a divisional slate of at least six divisional games every year that have real energy, that you know your team has to win. I say 'at least' because it's entirely possible there would be more. Look at the NFC Northeast last year. The only difference between this and what the NFL does now is that it won't necessarily be the same teams every year that you HAVE to beat. The cast will rotate a little bit, and after several years of hopefully every team in a division being a part of this rotating cast, there will begin to be contempt between the sides.
These are at least six games every year to replace the six divisional games per year we have now, plus some other games that have more potential in my opinion to be contempt-filled than random in or out of conference games do today. Even if you recast the extra eight divisional games as the eight conference non-divisional games that teams already play now, without must heat to them, I at least struggle to see how my idea could be worse than the way the NFL currently does it. At worst it would be the same.
It is also technically true what you said about eliminating the weak auto bid that seems to happen in at least one of the eight divisions every year these days, but as you see in the 2024 NFC Elsewhere (and a lot of the history of the NFC Elsewhere. If we extend this framework infinitely backwards, this has always been the weak division) it is still entirely possible to have seven below average teams in one eight team division.
However, as for your final paragraph, I think I perhaps have a solution that might work for all parties. We could rectify all of our problems with one change. Here's how it would read:
Divisions are hard to design in the NFL, as there are several package deals (Broncos-Raiders-Chiefs, Atlanta-New Orleans, Pittsburgh-Baltimore, etc.), but here's how I would do it, in an attempt to alleviate both the concerns about inter-conference play and divisions that might be a tad too big. I would split the NFL into six divisions, that would look like this:
West Coast (five teams): Seattle Seahawks, SF 49ers, LA Chargers, LA Rams, Arizona Cardinals
Generally South-Central (six teams): LV Raiders, Denver Broncos, KC Chiefs, Houston Texans, Atlanta Falcons, New Orleans Saints
The Old AFC Central (six teams): Pittsburgh Steelers, Cleveland Browns, Baltimore Ravens, Cincinnati Bengals, Tennessee Titans, Jacksonville Jaguars
NFC East Revision (five teams): New York Giants, Dallas Cowboys, Washington Commanders, Philadelphia Eagles, Carolina Panthers
AFC East Revision (five teams): New England Patriots, New York Jets, Buffalo Bills, Miami Dolphins, Tampa Bay Buccaneers
NFC North Revision (five teams): Minnesota Vikings, Green Bay Packers, Detroit Lions, Chicago Bears, Indianapolis Colts.
I've completely torn apart both the NFC and AFC South, because trust me. There are no divisional rivalries here, other than Atlanta-New Orleans, who I've kept together. There are also no conference affiliations anymore, because in my setup there would be no need for them.
With this setup, every team would play their allotment of divisional games. This is ten in the old AFC Central, and in the Generally South-Central, and eight for everybody else. From there, each division would be matched against one other division, in full, just like the NFL does now. This would rotate every year, with the possible caveat that the six team divisions cannot be matched against each other. We'd have to see.
This leaves the six team division teams with 15 games scheduled, the five team divisions matched up with six team divisions with 14 games scheduled, and the five team divisions matched against each other with 13 games scheduled. This guarantees every team is going to be in every stadium over a period of ten years (the guarantee is only eight in real life), and from here, I would let the NFL and the TV partners have their money games.
I call them 'money games.' I believe the NFL calls them competitive balance games. The three games on the real schedule now that are outside the rotation. These are the games that the NFL uses to slip Chiefs vs Bills onto the schedule through the back door every year. Basically, there's a matrix of possible matchups, with every first seed in every division matched up against every other first seed, every second seed matched up against every second seed, etc.. Obviously, not all of these games can be played, so the NFL in conjunction with the TV partners pick through these matrices, based in my opinion on which games would make good primetime games, until every team has 17 games scheduled.
It's competitive balance (because the good play the good, the bad play the bad), but it's also a throw of a bone to the TV partners to get these marquee one seed vs one seed games on the schedule. The term 'money games' often brings a bad connotation, but it's actually a very well designed setup, and if we have to do everybody has the potential to play everybody, I quite like how this is implemented in practice. Teams like the Jacksonville Jaguars often get left out in the cold with games nobody wants to see, such as scheduling us in a money game against the Cleveland Browns last year, but this is also the same system that gave us games like KC vs San Francisco last year.
This is a lot of competitive balance, as some teams would have up to four money games on their schedule, but I think we could either expand to 36 to make everything even, or everybody could in time just get used to the fact that the Central and the South-Central are somewhat separated from everybody else.
The result of all this is that every team gets a relatively balanced schedule, which would make me comfortable having wild cards again, and if we're doing inter-conference, let's throw our backs into it, and set it up like a college football playoff. No conferences. None of that. We take the six divisional champions, and the best six at larges, with the four best divisional champions getting first round byes, with the other two divisional champions getting home games, but not preferential seeds.Here's how this would look based on 2024 standings (noting that some tie breaks change when ties are more ways than two):
1: NFC North Revision Champion Detroit Lions
2: South-Central Champion KC Chiefs
3: NFC East Revision Champion Philadelphia Eagles
4: AFC East Revision Champion Buffalo Bills
First round:
5 Minnesota Vikings (NFC North Revision) vs 12 Houston Texans (South-Central)
6 AFC Central Champion Baltimore Ravens vs 11 Tampa Bay Buccaneers (AFC East Revision)
7 Washington Commanders (NFC East Revision) vs 10 Denver Broncos (South-Central)
8 West Coast Champion Los Angeles Chargers vs 9 Green Bay Packers (NFC North Revision)
You can change the format to 14, if you want to let the Steelers and Rams into the playoffs, but I don't. There is also no bracket. I hate brackets, so if we assume the team that would be favoured by me wins each game, this is the second round:
1 Detroit Lions vs 10 Denver Broncos
2 KC Chiefs vs 9 Green Bay Packers (What a soft matchup for GB!)
3 Philadelphia Eagles vs 6 Baltimore Ravens
4 Buffalo Bills vs 5 Minnesota Vikings
Repeat to get to the final four:
1 Detroit Lions vs 9 Green Bay Packers
4 Buffalo Bills vs 6 Baltimore Ravens
Repeat to the Super Bowl:
1 Detroit Lions vs 6 Baltimore Ravens
In this alternate scenario, here would be a sample Broncos' schedule for 2025, if matched up against the NFC North Revision, with the money games filled in based on their second place finish in the South-Central in 2024. I put games in order of my subjective coolness of them.
2x vs Kansas City
1x vs Detroit
1x vs Tampa Bay
1x vs Washington
1x vs Green Bay
2x vs Houston
2x vs Las Vegas
1x vs Pittsburgh
1x vs Minnesota
2x vs Atlanta
1x vs Chicago
2x vs New Orleans
This is actually dramatically more inter-conference play, but in this scenario, I'm truly giving the idea of a 32 team league a chance, abolishing conferences entirely, so all of them count, instead of the glorified exhibitions that inter-conference games are today. Nevertheless, the only way to a first round bye is winning the division, for which all tie breakers are divisional, so divisional games (which make up ten games for the Broncos now) are crucial. BTW, this is also a nightmare schedule, so, sorry about that LOL. Pray not to get matched up against the NFC North revision I suppose.
What do you think of this proposed format Nick? Would it do anything to assuage your concerns? There would be no conferences, so the idea of an inter-conference game would cease to exist. In this circumstance, we'd be throwing our weight completely the opposite way, integrating the NFL in the way it has never been integrated before, while still managing to increase the number of divisional games played, which to me will always be a plus.
Would this make you more or less comfortable than a four division setup?
Wow, now that would be a drastic change in the other direction! I don't hate it. I'd have to wrap my mind around it a bit before I decide which would be better. Totally shaking things up like this - the more I think about it the more I like it. Every team gets a chance, even if it's infrequent, to play every other team. The playoffs would be more balanced, and the divisions are small enough to have a firm set of rivalries. All that said, this is probably way more change than fans would be comfortable with. It's not impossible to imagine your original plan getting implemented. This one? No way. For one, he owners won't want the revenue sharing diluted by four potential expansions. But it's a LOT of fun to consider how it would go!
As you can see, I'm a bit of a logical extremist. I like to chase ideas all the way to the end, instead of the pervasive half measuring that a lot of sports are stuck with right now.
The NFL is a 32 team league, without any of the perks that come with being a 32 team league. They still do divisional auto bids and arbitrary conferences and all this other nonsense that I would be a fan of, should the league get much less integrated, but that I hate in the way the league exists now. It's all a half measure.
Why would fans be uncomfortable with a change like this? Just because it's different? We could also go without the expansions. The NFL did exactly that in real life in the days where some divisions were six teams and others were five, before they went to the eight division setup (which I will never accept is a good thing). The teams in the six team divisions were just slightly more sequestered from the rest of the league. It was a reality everybody was fine with back then. I don't see how it would change now, so expansion can be done without.
I agree that this is complete pie in the sky. It will never happen, but should it be that way? I don't think so. I've always thought we need a bit more idealism in our sports. There's too much pessimism to go around. Why can't we implement something like this to make the league better?
This was a fun and thought-provoking exercise. As someone who knows nothing but the current league layouts, it is interesting to think about how leagues used to be. For the sports leagues I watch regularly, College Football, NBA, and NFL, I have always been in favor of 8 playoff teams. For the NBA specifically, I would like the regular season to mean more than it does because it is so long. We have some of that because of teams wanting to avoid play-in games, but outside of the 21 Warriors (once Wiseman got injured), there haven't been any good teams left out of the postseason.
This is where it can tough to do an exercise like this, because I'm coming from an angle of trying to things casuals would like, but I'm doing it in a sports landscape that's catering more and more strictly to hardcore fans and nobody else. To the sports industry's credit, they are not the only ones doing this. Every entertainment business these days except the Masters is flipping off the casuals in order to cater more specifically to the hardcores.
Big playoffs are for hardcore fans, because in most sports, first round playoff games are watched less than the good regular season games, if you go by TV numbers. For instance, Denver vs Buffalo last year. It would've been a kind of meh SNF regular season game by viewership. The simple fact of the matter is that the word 'playoffs' is a draw, but not a draw big enough to make Denver vs Buffalo to draw anything more than meh SNF game viewership. This is a not even a great example. I only bring it up because it's recent.
In big playoff scenarios, casual fans do not care about the first round. It really is that simple. Perhaps it's a chance for owners to goose ticket prices, and that's why they exist. It's certainly not for the good of the game. Any game. This is especially true for baseball, where I remain convinced that big playoffs were an orchestrated plot by the owners to ruin their own sport (anything for a drop in leaguewide payrolls), but it's true for every league. In the NBA, nobody watches the play-in games. Nobody cares. I don't have these numbers like I do for football, but I suspect it's exactly the same. By nationally televised game standards, the play-in games are probably meh, but possibly worse than average in terms of viewership. To put all that in plain English, nobody cares about the play-in games.
It's true for most first round series as well. The NFL and NBA are a lot alike in this regard. There's about one game (series) in the first round that pops a number, and gets better viewership than a regular season game could've done, and the rest of the games perform like high-end regular season matchups, with some of the wider ones (Denver vs Buffalo, Cleveland vs Miami) not even doing that well, performing like median nationally televised regular season games.
I'm not sure about the NBA, but in the NFL, this stops in the second round, where games begin to universally pop numbers bigger than any regular season game could do. Conveniently, this is also the point at which the playoffs are down to eight teams. I would interpret this as evidence that casuals still think eight teams is the right number. If they thought 14 was the right number, audience numbers would stop acting like it's the regular season in the round of 14, but they don't. Not until the round of eight.
Nobody cares about playoffs. To the sports fan who has too little time to debate how good Jim Everett was (meaning not us, obviously), playoffs are nothing but a word. The draw is getting down to the nitty gritty, and seeing all the best teams going against each other, to see who really is the best.
I didn't want to make this article into a playoff contraction piece. It was more about divisions and schedules and stuff, but I also think eight is a good number, with baseball being a possible exception, for the reasons I laid out within the article. I like four there. I would be a little bit touch and go about going to eight in ice hockey as well, but I would be willing to grit my teeth and bear it. As far as the NBA and NFL go, I like eight.
Look at the division championship series in the NBA if we just used eight:
West Coast: LA vs LA
Central: OKC vs Houston
Midwest: Indiana vs Cleveland
East Coast: Knicks vs Celtics
That sounds fantastic. It just gets to the meat of the matter, and for teams like the Denver Nuggets that miss the playoffs this way, it still would've been great, because they would've been playing playoff games for the last two months of the season, at least two of which in this system would've been divisional games against Houston. We'd just have to re-normalise the old school idea that missing the playoffs does not make you a joke. This used to be common thought, but with big playoffs is dead now. 'Respectable team' and 'playoff team' used to have different meanings, but with a playoff as big as 14 or 16 teams, there is basically no difference.
There's this stigma against missing the playoffs that exists these days. It'd take time to re-adjust to a world where 50 win teams miss the playoffs. 11 win teams miss the playoffs in the NFL, but it could be done. It used to happen all the time. Teams used to win the Super Bowl, miss the playoffs, and then win the Super Bowl again. Look at the Cowboys in the 70s. There's a playoff miss in there, because that's just what happened back then. It meant a different thing to be a playoff team, and it was seen as unacceptable in a 'the Dallas Cowboys need to be better' kind of way, not in a 'this format does not work' kind of way.
These days, holding the Denver Nuggets out of the playoffs would lead to widespread hatred of the format, because a) the NBA is overrun with hardcores, who put much more weight on playoffs than casuals do, and b) the meaning of being a playoff team is so skewed now. People feel like if you're a good team, you ought to be entitled to a playoff position. I don't like that at all. College football is walking down the primrose path towards ruination of their sport based upon the same logic. Let's let everybody in, and watch and wonder as the casual fans disappear, pretending we couldn't have seen this coming.
This is another thing that is killing North American sports in my opinion. The opinion that if you're good, you ought to be entitled to a chance to win the championship, pretty much regardless of how many games you lost as long as you didn't lose more than half of them. I say if you're the 2025 Denver Nuggets, too darn bad. At the All-Star break, you were ahead of the Rockets, and in you guys' two month long playoff series against each other to get into the end-of-season tournament, they beat you. Come back next year, and perhaps next time, win more than three games in the three weeks following the AS game. That would rectify your 'missing the playoffs' problem.
You see what I'm getting at here, and I don't think you even needed it explained. The first round is cool and all, but we're getting two weeks of playoff series in April, in exchange for the two months from mid-February to mid-April, which could've seen epic battles between everybody. LAC, LAL, GSW for the final spot in the West Coast. HOU and DEN for the Central. A comeback for the ages to see Indiana steal the second spot in the Midwest away from Memphis, but no. Instead of all that, we can have two weeks in April.
Yippee.
Familiarity is definitely needed. As a fan of a college football team that just recently completed an independence exodus (BYU), playing the same opponents year in and year out really is great for sports fandom. You get to actively root for your team and against the other teams, which increases your overall investment. When BYU was independent, I still wanted them to do well, but there wasn't as much interest in beating any particular opponent outside of the few (Boise State, for example) that we were able to more consistently schedule. I don't know that the complete elimination of interconference play is quite the right move, but I haven't been able to form a concrete objection to it, yet, so maybe it is.
I think you're absolutely right about that. I don't think I would like to be a fan of any independent for just that reason. You have a team to root for, but nobody to root against, and nobody truly rooting against you to make it that much sweeter when you win.
As far as inter-conference play, I respect your opinion a lot David. I would like to hear your thoughts on it. It's obvious that I don't find there to be any place for it, but if there's a benefit you can think of that I cannot, I would like to hear it.
I think it helps to bring some cohesiveness to a league to have teams play each other. Other than MLB, the other leagues were always really a single unit; the NFL-AFL and NBA-ABA distinctions weren't sought to be maintained like the AL-NL differences were. If you only ever play outside of your conference in the championship, it doesn't really feel like you're part of the same league. Now, maybe you think that's ultimately a good thing as it would allow for larger-scale differences to occur, but I think being part of something larger is good too. It doesn't have to be playing every team in the league to bring that sense of cohesiveness.
To bring it back to collegiate sports, having some nonconference games is a lot of fun. It's especially important there, as it gives more of an opportunity to evaluate how well you do outside your little domain--are you just the top dog in your little corner of the world, or can you actually hang with the best the rest has to offer? European soccer has some of this too, what with the FA cup for English Football, and the UEFA Champions League for European soccer more generally. Both of those use a tournament-style format, so perhaps that's a key for improving inter-conference play, but I think both provide an opportunity for meaningful competition outside of the more familiar "conferences" (I get they are leagues, but they are analogous to conferences for purposes of this discussion). Limiting it to just a single championship game/series loses you some of that sense of the conferences actually being part of a single league.
I think that's where the basic disagreement lies between myself and everybody else on this. Why would we want league cohesiveness?
The most popular sport in North American history by relative popularity is Major League Baseball, at the time when their two leagues were in essence openly warring with each other. It was so bad at one time that trades between leagues were banned. I wouldn't go so far as to ban trading players between the NFC and AFC or anything like that. That seems like a bridge too far to me, because we are one league here, except in the case of baseball, where I would take the legal steps to reinstate the 1997 status quo, where these were two leagues in union, instead of one league with two conferences, which it had to become to implement inter-league play (*eye roll*).
I don't mean to challenge you here David, but I respect you, so in a way I do mean to challenge you. If you could put a value on being part of a 30-2 team league, instead of a 15-6 team self-contained conference, what is that value? You're already crossing lines to play a championship at the end of the season. Is that not enough? We must also keep in mind that in this modern era of player movement, people are going to be jumping divisional and conference boundaries all the time, which will also help to make the league feel more whole, without having to play meaningless games.
There will still be the same rumours of George Pickens going from Pittsburgh to Dallas or Kevin Durant going from Phoenix to Brooklyn that there are now. That won't change. There would likely be an extra emphasis actually to move a guy out of conference now that I'm making performance against one's own conference more important. Both conferences are also participating the same draft. There will be the same revenue sharing. All of the merchandise will have the same league logo on it. I think we could have enough league cohesion to get by with it.
Plus, in the earliest days of sport, when these leagues were separated, this is the purpose that the exhibition games used to serve. Have you ever wondered why exhibition games before the season actually exist? Nobody cares about them these days. Well, they were the opportunity for NL and AL teams to play against each other. As such, these preseason exhibition games would draw regular season crowds, because it's the only time NL vs AL would ever happen.
This is where the idea came from that there ought to be exhibition games before the season, and while these were the days where owners could coerce the players into actually playing in the regular season games, so we may not be able to replace this, it goes to show there are mechanisms for doing things to boost league cohesion without wasting crucial regular season time.
I'm not saying my change will cause people to care just the same as they did before. If you're a fan of the Buffalo Bills now, how much you care about the SF 49ers dramatically goes down once I announce these rule changes. There's just no reason to care about them anymore. However, the idea is that the league is compensated by the Bills' fans caring dramatically more about their four new divisional rivals (Steelers, Ravens, Browns, Bengals) than they ever used to. Perhaps enough to create incentive to watch a game your Buffalo Bills are not playing in, which is really my true goal here, because fans who focus on just the one team has become another big problem in North American sports. That's not the way it was designed to be, but that's the way it is now, because you can't even attempt to keep up with everything else. There's just too much.
I find college sports to be different, and fundamentally outside the purview of this conversation, for two reasons: 1) Teams can change leagues whenever they want to; 2) You can win the championship without winning your conference. In the Big Four, winning the championship without so much as winning your own conference is an impossibility. In college sports though, it's common. It's been common in basketball ever since they killed their sport with their ludicrously big tournament, and it's becoming common in football now that they're trying to kill their sport with a ludicrously big tournament.
Quite frankly, if winning a championship does not require winning your conference, I don't think much of what I've said here applies. College is just too much of a different context. I'm not a soccer guy, but I believe the Champions League is the same thing. Correct? You don't have to win your league to win that either.
Imagine if the Baltimore Ravens won the AFC but the KC Chiefs won the Super Bowl. You can see how my logic for how a league ought to operate would break down in that case. That's basically what American college sports is. The most recent (and probably last ever) split football National Championship between Alabama and UCF in 2017 is because Alabama did not even qualify for their league championship game. They were not even second place in the SEC, but won the overall championship. This farce is what forced them to split it with a G5 team, because it's a structural flaw in a sport that a team can finish third in their own league but win the championship, and some voters went off the board to voice their protest with that.
In any of the North American Big Four, this is not possible. You must finish first place in your conference to win the championship. There are no other options. We can (and have, a lot) quibbled about how these conferences crown their champions, but the fact remains that you must win your conference to win the overall championship. In college sports, it is not this way. In European football, it is not this way, so I say those environments deserve an article of their own.
This brings us back to the cohesion discussion, where again I pass the buck to you. What are the pros and cons of the AFC and NFC being perceived as two fundamentally different things? Two conferences in union, but much more separate than they are now. What I'm trying to do is go 1910s baseball (or 2000s college football) and create fans of leagues on this. I want AFC fans and NFC fans, constantly griping that their league is better. I want you to hate your conference rivals, try as hard as you can to beat them, but still cheer for them when the championship game/series comes around.
At the same time, player movement can remain just as it is now. This is not the AL vs NL or AFL vs NFL, where trades between leagues were banned. Trades between leagues would be perfectly okay in my setup, but beyond that, they're fairly separate, and as long as there is no line crossing, we could even do things like both conferences being on different rules, if they wanted. Not so different as to be incompatible, but sort of like college football now. Minor rules differences.
This is spitting in the face of the concept of a 32 team league, and that is wholly the point of this manifesto I've written here. It is my opinion that nobody wants a 32 team league, and if people had to worry about just about their 16 team half, and more particularly their eight team quarter, I think the game would prosper from that.
I appreciate the pushback, Robbie. I started out saying that I didn’t have any fully formed objections, so it makes sense that what I’m providing isn’t a complete enough answer.
To my mind, if the conferences never played each other except during the championship, that interconference championship loses a lot of its importance. It basically becomes just an exhibition game. Maybe the interconference bragging rights from that one exhibition are enough—although the decrease in importance of all-star games belies that, I think. (Teasing out cause and effect here is tricky—perhaps the all-star games have lost importance precisely because there’s already so much interconference play).
I’m probably a tricky fan to ask these questions about as, outside of the NBA, I’ve never really had a team that I’m loyal to in these leagues. I’m perfectly content to consume them from a league-wide perspective. But I recognize that’s probably not the median viewer and doesn’t make a recipe for sustained success.
I do think there’s one other thing you miss with separated leagues: the inability for a former player to return on another team. I think that’s a pretty sublime moment for a sports fan, whether it was an amicable send off that allows them to return and be shown gratitude or the bridges were burned and there’s an extra bit of hatred from the betrayal. As you mentioned, with eliminating interconference play, the incentives are all about moving your guys to the other conference so you don’t have to play against them, so it becomes a rarer occurrence (though potentially offset as something like the Eagles getting Barkley away from the Giants becomes even more juicy).
Well how much importance does a championship have now? Can you tell me who won the 2021 World Series? Maybe you can, but I cannot tell you. However, when you go back to the old days, I can rhyme off 1985 KC, 1986 NYM, 1987 MIN, 1988 LAD, 1989 OAK, 1990 CIN, 1991 MIN, 1992 TOR, 1993 TOR off the top of my head like it's nothing.
That may be a big playoff problem, as opposed to a splitting the leagues problem, but nobody can kid themselves that the baseball championship means as much as it used to. The NBA championship is exactly the same way. That's why NBA Finals viewership has basically uniformly gone down since 2017, once we take the pandemic funkiness out of it.
I was talking about this with Marc yesterday. Playoffs are for hardcore fans. The more and more you prostitute your sport for the end of season tournament, the more and more you're catering exclusively to hardcore fans, because casuals like the regular season. It sounds counterintuitive, but the data has proven this hypothesis over and over again. We cannot simply ignore it. NCAA basketball is the perfect example. They ruined their whole sport in order to have this big end of season tournament, and how many casual fans do they have now? It seems like a stretch to say literally none, but it's only one step above that, and no. People who watch the tournament do not count as casual fans. If you watch college basketball once or twice every year, you do not count as a fan at all to me.
I don't mean to come off sounding age discriminatory here David, but your position on the championship reeks of this modern opinion that championships are not especially meaningful. Rob Manfred and the 'piece of metal' and all that. We're modern fans, so it's not a crime to represent the modern position, but I'm the throwback guy, so I have to represent the throwback position that I want championships to mean what they used to mean.
In technical terms, the World Series has never been anything but an exhibition. It's still written on the books that way. All the playoffs in every sport are just exhibitions. That's why the players don't get paid for them. What difference does that make? People still used to care. A smaller segment of fans still do care. What I want to do is make more people care, by presenting the championship round as one league vs another, instead of merely one team vs another. It's a slight but fundamental difference. Players will (and always have) play, exhibition or not, because they want to win the championship. It's the fans we need to manicure here.
BTW, people on the internet saying Michael Jordan is better than LeBron James because of ring count is not emphasizing the importance of the championship. That's just people unwilling or unable to make a real argument. The way you emphasize the importance of a championship is by watching the games, and caring about the games, which a lot more people used to do than do now.
I think championships are in need of a drastic shot in the arm, because they're beginning to be treated like exhibitions these days. Rob Manfred calling his own league trophy a mere 'piece of metal,' and you name it. People just don't care. People used to care about these things. I'm trying to give them that shot in the arm with my reframe. I think the unnecessarily big tournaments are what is screwing this up, but a change in league structure could not hurt either.
On another note, you're absolutely right about All-Star games. They're pointless when all the All-Stars play against each other every night. They were invented for the same reason as preseason exhibition games were invented, to see guys who never play against each other go at it. I should've mentioned this in the original piece, but if I were the commissioner, All-Star games are cancelled until until further notice. You already see all these guys play against each other every night. It's pointless. More intentional time wasting. A few years after we've eliminated inter-conference play, I'll fold them back in. They can go back to serving their original purpose again.
If you're a leaguewide fan David, I thought we'd be on the same side here. With my two distinct conference, four division setups, instead of one homogenous bowl of soup that the league gives you now, I'm giving you two different dishes, with your own choice of garnish on each of them, or you can just order all four variants if you can take it, for no increase in price.
Modern sports leagues basically give you one giant bowl of soup, the size of four of my dishes that I'm offering here. In my restaurant setup, you can still order all four of them, but they're different, not one dish 4x the size, and I'm also offering the unique feature that you do not HAVE to order all four of them. In modern sports, it's basically all four dishes mixed together, or nothing. I'm trying to alter the selection a little bit. Different flavours. They don't all have to be mixed, and a smaller portion size is also on offer, should you want that.
You can absolutely follow a whole league if the NFC and AFC do not play each other. I would. I would probably keep my Jaguars and find some team in the NFC to root for. My family used to have a vacation place in Phoenix. It'd probably be them, but why would this harm my ability to be a fan from a leaguewide perspective? I don't think I understand what you mean by this, unless you're saying that everybody everywhere playing the same kind of football is a good thing, but I don't quite think that's what you meant.
What you said about the former players returning is juicy. I hadn't really thought about it. It's another thing that used to be common, but isn't anymore. It used to be that the Mariners would trade Ken Griffey Jr, and not be able to show the tribute video until five years afterwards. It just didn't feel out of the ordinary back then. These days, when a player leaves as a free agent, fans feel entitled to be able to boo him within six months.
Quite honestly, I'm not sure this is a sports tradition I would like to keep. Does it generally serve any positive purpose? There's a lot of booing that goes on, and hatred of individual players, but I don't want hatred towards individual players. I want hatred towards other teams, that will persist long after the retirement of any player.
There are some good things too sometimes, tribute videos and stuff, but on balance, is a former player returning to his old team a good thing? I'd need further thought on this, but my initial opinion is that this is a sports tradition I wouldn't mind snuffing out in service of the greater good. They'll return there anyways eventually. Everybody always goes back, during or after their career. I don't necessarily know if it's a must that they do it as an active player.
Don’t have the time to address this right now, but I have thoughts.
The reason why I can’t dedicate time to this is because this clearly thought out, and there’s an internal logic here. I might respond long-form sometime this summer.
Perfect my friend. I would like to hear your thoughts on this. I know we've talked about a similar subject just a bit in the past, so I would like to hear you expand on your thought process.
I love the tease you've left me with by the way. Very 'writer' of you.