Because the sport is run by people who seem to only care about short-term profits, going back to 6 playoff teams is impossible unless there is a huge drop in viewership in a few years, same in the NBA. Getting rid of or returning to the original Play-in, making a conference agnostic 12 or 14 team playoff, and shortening the season are all good yet very unlikely changes.
The most realistic best-case scenario is that they don't mess anything else up.
You're right Marc, but it's important not to get too bogged down by realism when doing an exercise like this, elsewise you are more or less guaranteed to come to the same conclusion you've just come to, that the best possible scenario is the one we're currently living in. This is true for all statistical analysis, not just the NFL.
It's a longshot. The NFL hasn't had one since Pete Rozelle, but all the league needs is a commissioner that actually cares about the popularity of the league again, and all of a sudden the meaning of 'realistic' entirely changes. It's entirely possible the owners will never allow somebody like that in the office ever again, but it's also possible that they make a mistake one of these times, and allow a football fan in there.
What I'm saying is that an analysis like this is important not for the current administration, who does not care if they burn the sport to the ground, in the event that it'd be more profitable that way. It's important for anybody who may want to make a change for the better at some point.
Raw viewership for the NFL continues to go up, but you wonder how much of that is due to the Swifties being all over everything, because pretty much everywhere you see increases, you're looking at the KC Chiefs. For teams like the Eagles, their playoff games are already being watched moderately less than they used to be, and that's probably indicative of the trend. We've already gotten to the point though that the least relevant playoff games, in terms of viewership, cannot compete with the most relevant regular season games. That's the big playoff effect.
As far as your NBA changes, I would rather go the opposite way actually. I would love to see conferences in sports get less and less integrated. I don't see why the conferences need to meet at all, until the finals. This is a mindset left over from the days used to be about teams, instead of about players. The argument these days is that nobody in the NFC would ever get to see Patrick Mahomes in their town, and I get that, but back in the days before anybody cared about that kind of thing, it was all about rivalries between teams, which is something that's being lost in modern sports.
Why are the Chiefs and Bills such rivals? Because they play every year. What if we had a system that ensured they could play every year? This could be done by just abandoning the idea of the AFC playing against the NFC, at all. I like the 1970s MLB model, which is basically the college football model today. We can make each conference into two eight team divisions. You play everybody else in your same division twice (14 games), and then you play teams in the other division based on where you were in the standings last year. If you were first place in what I would call the 'West,' you play 1, 2, 3 from the 'East' from the prior season. If you were second, you play 1, 2, 3. If you're third, you play 2, 3, 4, etc..
This is actually less of an advantage to the bad teams than the actual NFL schedule provides, but I don't care. I like watching actual great teams, not the one charity case that makes the playoffs every year due to an extraordinarily weak schedule, like the NFL does now, because they do go out of their way to give bad teams easy schedules.
I'll give you an example.
For instance, let's just say we clump the AFC South and AFC West together for one division, and AFC East with the AFC North for the other. First place in 2023 in this new 'East' division is the Baltimore Ravens, which means their 2024 schedule would be as follows, in order of 'wow that's great' factor:
2x Buffalo
1x Kansas City (first place in 'West' in 2023)
2x Pittsburgh
2x Cincinnati
1x Houston (second in 'West' in 2023)
2x Miami
This is ten of Baltimore's 17 games in 2024 that I think most fans would legitimately want to see. This is roughly the same number as normal, but it's much more heavily concentrated into meaningful games in their own conference, instead of games against Philadelphia or whoever, which are great to watch, but ultimately quite meaningless. There also is the weak divisional games of course:
2x NYJ
2x New England
1x Jacksonville (third in 'West' in 2023, and yes it was an extremely weak division, because 2023 Jacksonville did not even make a seven team playoff)
2x Cleveland
Now, that's how this scheduling format would work for a team that was good in 2023. What about for a team that was bad? Let's look at the Denver Broncos, who in 2023 finished sixth in the 'West,' meaning they get to play 5, 6, 7 from the 2023 'East.' This is how the Denver 2024 schedule would've looked, in order of cool factor:
2x Kansas City
2x LAC
2x Houston
1x Pittsburgh (5th in 'East' in 2023)
1x Cincinnati (6th in 'East' in 2023)
Notice that this is only eight games that anybody would care to watch. This is actually a good thing though, because the Broncos weren't good in 2023. By NFL logic, we're supposed to be rewarding them with a soft touch schedule, which leaves all the following games.
2x Indianapolis
1x NYJ (seventh in 'East')
2x Jacksonville
2x Tennessee
2x Las Vegas
If this were the scheduling format, look at the gauntlet KC (first in the West in 2024) would have to run next year:
1x Buffalo
1x Baltimore
2x Denver
2x LAC
1x Pittsburgh
2x Houston
2x Indy
2x Jacksonville
2x Tennessee
2x Las Vegas
That's a lot of easy games, but it's also a lot of not easy games, and I think that's the point here. You know me well enough by now Marc to know that I'm obsessed with the idea of the top teams getting to play each other more, and this does that. Will we get to see Detroit and Buffalo play in the regular season anymore? No we won't, but I don't really care about that when we get to see Buffalo and Baltimore play twice as a replacement. What a cool rivalry that could become. There are several cool rivalries that could stem from this. I've always wanted divisions to be bigger. The NFL needs more than three divisional rivalries per team. Also, I like the mild tanking disincentive here. If you're a team in the AFC East, and you suck, you just don't get to play the KC Chiefs, ever. That's a nice little incentive to get better. Same with what would be the NFC 'West.' If you're bad, you just don't get the Dallas game, unless it's an outlier year like this past one where Dallas was bad too, but that never lasts.
In short, conference interconnection is a lot like big playoffs. Fans claim they like it, but when it gets down to the nitty gritty, league popularity figures tend to indicate that fans don't like it. At least the casuals don't. They tend to turn away in droves once the conferences start connecting more with each other, because having to waste four games (in the NFL) or 30 (in the NBA) on out of conference stuff leaves almost no time to form in-conference rivalries. Rivalries against the teams you're actually going to be playing the playoff games against. That's what we want, but for whatever reason, these modern leagues have thrown that all away, based on the vain assumption that fans in Atlanta may get to see Josh Allen play there once every four years or whatever. I'm not a fan of this. I think the NHL made a good move ten years ago when they went back to being more conference and division oriented. I do not think they went far enough, but it was a step in the right direction.
Eight divisions in a 32 team league is too many. I would accept six, but my preferred number would be four, like the MLB used to do, and like the NHL recently went back to doing. I would also like divisional playoffs in the NFL like they have in the NHL. For the exact way that I've proposed it, it could still be the old six team playoff format, if the top three teams in each division (there would be four in total) make the playoffs, the first gets a bye, and the second and third play what would be renamed the first divisional round. Then the teams would meet in the actual divisional round (which is where the name came from originally, although it's horribly misused these days), which I would rename the second divisional round, to crown division champions. The two division champions would meet in the conference championship. Then we play the Super Bowl.
I would also be open to a CFL-style divisional crossover, where if the fourth best team in the East has a better record than the third best team in the West (not tied, strictly better), then that team could cross over to the West as the third seed. For instance, if this were the system, this is how the 2024 playoffs would've happened:
First Divisional Round:
AFC East:
2 Baltimore vs 3 Pittsburgh
AFC West
2 LAC vs 3 Denver
NFC East:
2 Minnesota vs 3 Philadelphia
NFC West:
2 Los Angeles Rams vs 3 Washington (crossover)
If we take the real result where applicable, and say the team with the most expected wins won each game where it isn't, we move to the second divisional round:
AFC East:
1 Buffalo vs 2 Baltimore
AFC West:
1 KC Chiefs vs 3 Denver
NFC East:
1 Detroit vs 3 Philadelphia
NFC West:
1 Tampa Bay vs 3 Washington
If we do the same thing again, we move to the conference championships:
AFC:
1 Buffalo vs 3 Denver
NFC:
1 Detroit vs 3 Washington
Both these games happened in real life, so we get the Super Bowl:
Did Washington get the easier divisional path? Absolutely, but to win the Super Bowl in this framework, they're going to have to win four road playoff games in a row, no different than real life, and the crossover is based on the NFC South + West's third best team, not it's best. If the South and West had even a single great team between them, this would've looked a lot less easy. Sometimes this will happen with divisional playoffs, and the world will not explode. No matter how much everybody thinks it will. It's a lesson that college football is learning right now.
Plus, we actually got to see Minnesota vs Philadelphia. We actually got to see Detroit vs Philadelphia, and the only great game that happened in real life, but didn't happen here was Buffalo vs KC, and if you simply believe KC would beat Denver in the playoff game, that would've happened too.
In short, we're not trying to reward good teams here. I've never been about rewarding great teams with an easy path, or punishing bad teams with a difficult one. I'm trying to create hatred between all the good teams. Hatred that will come out when they actually play each other. That's the benefit of keeping the conferences apart. I've yet to find a benefit in smashing them together, as is done in real life.
All of this couldn't fit in the real article, or even in one comment as it turns out, but I do have things to put in the suggestion jar as far as the NFL playoff format. Not just the complaint jar.
Having less conference integration makes sense, but in non-NFL sports, I'm not sure if conferences are needed. The main reason you have conferences is logistics. You can't play every team on your level within a single season. Creating conferences and prioritizing matchups within them is the best path to engagement.
In the NBA, you don't have the same logistical problems. The question then becomes, will you still get rivals. I will have to look into it more, but I think so. Even if that isn't the case, you will give yourself a better chance of having great semi-finals and finals.
The worst finals have been caused by out-of-their-depth East teams facing elite West teams. In a non-conference world, we would get the 00, 02, and 18 WCF as the Finals and Mavericks v Spurs 2007 finals.
I respect your opinion Marc, but I think it's built on an entirely faulty premise.
The main reason you have conferences is not for logistics. For leagues that are historically poor (like the NBA), conferences are for logistics. For leagues that have always been good on funding (NHL, NFL, MLB) conferences are for the purposes of creating a separation in the league. I don't know if you're a hockey guy, but when the NHL went from the original six to a 12 team league, they made a conference with the original six, and then another conference with the six expansion teams in it. Why do this? To keep the expansion teams apart from the real teams, so that at least some of them can finish over .500.
Why do conferences exist in the NFL? A merger between two coast to coast leagues. Why do they exist in the MLB? A merger between two coast to coast leagues. This is why conferences in these leagues are coast to coast, and not geographical.
The NHL is a horrible league (great sport, bad league), so I wouldn't use them as an example for anything, but they've tried every format. They tried one conference with all the good teams, and another with all the bad ones. They tried no conferences at all again in the late 70s. Then they went to four entirely separate divisional entities through the 80s. Then they went to two conferences with all the overlap in the world, NBA style, in the 1990s and 2000s. Then in 2014 they went back to keeping the conferences more separate from each other, and remain there to this day.
In short, in the big four leagues, there are four different philosophies as to what conferences are worth. In the MLB, there is still virtually no overlap between them. In the NFL, I believe it's four games of a 17 game schedule you play against the other conference. In the NHL, conferences are more separated than they are in the NBA, but pretty integrated, and in the NBA there may as well be no conferences at all.
As a result of this framework, can you name me a rivalry between two teams in the NBA? A real one, where the players truly dislike each other? I can't think of one currently ongoing. The only time you can get lucky and find one is if teams are able to play three times or more in playoff series within a short enough period, like LA vs Sacramento in the 2000s.
The NHL goes out of their way to make sure this can happen by using divisional playoffs, ensuring that teams play in the playoffs more often, and rivalries form between them. Dallas vs Colorado, Toronto vs Boston, the Florida teams are always playing against each other, etc.. The conferences are too integrated to create rivalries with just regular season games, but they're trying.
In the NFL, the conferences are still separate enough that you can still create rivalries without playing in the playoffs. In my memory, the Steelers and the Ravens have played in the playoffs three times ever. I don't know if Pittsburgh has played Cleveland in the playoffs since the 1970s. Nevertheless, these teams still hate each other. Same with Green Bay and Chicago, and Dallas and Philadelphia, and etc.. These teams basically never play each other in playoff games, but these are rivalry games that mean something anyway. This is the benefit of keeping conferences quite separate.
Of course, we then get to the MLB, where teams like New York and Boston were hated rivals, despite not playing in the playoffs ever until I believe 1999. I know personally how heated Toronto and Detroit were before the MLB split us into different divisions, and to this day I don't believe the Blue Jays have ever played in the playoffs against the Tigers.
As you can see, I believe there to be a direct correlation between lack of integration between conferences and number of very fun regular season games. You would think teams playing each other over and over would get repetitive, but it doesn't. Sports fans just don't dislike rematches in general. Think of something like Buffalo vs KC. Nobody seems to mind the rematch.
This is why I want to create bigger divisions. I think the NFL needs more rematches. Every sport needs more rematches. Familiarity breeds contempt, and we all need contempt in our sports. If we could do this, I think we could even get rid of conferences. Let's use the NBA as an example. Let's say we get two expansion teams, just for argument in SEA and in LV. Then we could split the league into four.
There'd be the West, with LAL, LAC, GS, Seattle, Las Vegas, Portland, and Phoenix. Then there'd be the Central, with Utah, Denver, OKC, DAL, HOU, SAS, NOP, and Minnesota. The Non-Coastal (we'll come up with a better name later), featuring Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, Toronto, Memphis, Indiana, Cleveland, and Atlanta. Finally, there would be the Coastal, with Miami, Orlando, Charlotte, Washington, Philadelphia, Boston, and both New York squads.
I would say you play every team in your division six times each (42 games), and for the other games we can do some kind of pod thing where we play every team in two of the divisions twice (32 games), and from the other division just once (eight games). I would love to make the playoffs the top four from these four divisions, but if the NBA still wants four play-in games, you can do 4 vs 5 in each of them before the first round.
Assuming the four beats the five in all those games (or we don't do play-in at all), the first round of these theoretical playoffs is LAL vs SAC, LAC vs GS, OKC vs MIN, HOU vs DEN, CLE vs MEM, IND vs MIL, BOS vs MIA, NYK vs ORL.
It's roughly the same squads, but under my system it'd be squads that know each other inside and out from playing so much in the regular season, which I think is a good thing, and crucially, most of these series would've been able to be advertised for months in advance, which we've talked about before how important to viewership that is. Playoff viewership would be much higher in my opinion with a lot of the series set in stone for a while before the season ended.
Imagine a first round series, where both teams had played six times already. That sounds fantastic. The question Marc is what do we lose by creating such close connection between a few franchises? My way of doing things reduces travel, allows teams to play each other more (which may bring a more tailored-to-opponent style of basketball to emerge in the regular season), and still at least allows every team to play every other team, most of them both home and away. Also, this is a cheeky way to ensure there will be at least some small market contending going on every year. The Non-Coastal only has a couple big markets in it (Chicago, Toronto, and maybe Atlanta). The Central is not exactly loaded with big market teams either, mostly the Texas duo of Dallas and Houston.
What do you think of my format Marc? Would you like teams to be tied closer together, like they were in the old days? Or do you like this league that kind of has conferences, as it exists tofay?
When I made that point, I had college sports in mind and didn't know the history of the MLB and NHL league configurations. I was also using a broader definition of logistics, which includes figuring out who you are going to play. If you have more teams than games you can play, you need a way to distribute the games.
I think your system is better than the old division system, where if you won your division, you got a top 2 (and later 3) seed regardless of the record of the 2nd-best team in another division. However, I'm skeptical that regular-season rivalries can develop in the NBA. I think the regular season can enhance pre-existed rivalries, but it isn't the breeding ground for them. They are more the icing on top due to the lack of stakes in the regular season.
This is where playoff size comes back into the equation. If teams were either fighting for playoff incentives or fewer spots, I think you could have regular-season-based rivalries. The NFL has division rivals because winning the division means an automatic playoff birth. Brady vs Manning was a thing in part because they were fighting for byes. Both were also fighting for home-field but seeding doesn't matter in the NBA. Home court advantage doesn't exist unless you're Denver, and there have been enough good 5-8 teams recently that getting a higher seed rarely gives you a better matchup (well, at least in the West)
You're right about the regular season rivalries thing. The NBA has been so stubbornly antagonistic to the idea of the regular season meaning anything for so long that you can't unring the bell. Quite frankly, I'm not sure why this is. The NHL plays 82 games also, and they have not intentionally prostituted their regular season in the way the NBA has, so I don't think number of games is the issue. It's a number of playoff spots thing, and it's a culture of the league thing. I'm not sure how or why the NBA got themselves into this mess, but I feel like the sport would be so much more popular if things were different, and the regular season were more important.
I'm going for divisional playoffs as a last gasp to create any hatred at all in the NBA. Like I said before, the only way you get a rivalry between two teams these days is to meet in the playoffs three times or more in a short enough span. Sometimes, if the series both go six or seven you can get away with twice, but most of the time the number is three playoff series against each other, and that's just hard to do. You don't naturally do that very often. That's why I would try to manipulate the playoff format to have it happen more using divisional playoffs.
What do you think about first round byes in basketball? You know better than me. Do long breaks help in basketball, or is it like baseball, where first round byes are a disadvantage? Would they actually be an advantage that a team would want? The reason I ask is for the purpose of analysing whether a drop to 12 playoff teams would be feasible, or whether the NBA playoffs would have to drop all the way to eight teams in order to decrease in size.
You could do eight teams and still have four rounds if you use a double chance system, so the problem is only the bye thing. The NBA sucks at scheduling, so a lot of playoff series take way too long. That would have to change, but if I were commissioner, I could do it. The only problem would be that if a team plays no basketball for a week and a half, would they come out of that break facing a significant disadvantage? If the answer is yes, that makes alternative playoff formats significantly harder to design.
The short answer is that it could go either way. The NBA had 12 playoff teams from 77 to 83, but it was so long ago that I'm not sure valuable information can be gleaned. The closest thing we have to byes now is avoiding the Play-in and the All-Star break, but that is for one week, and almost everyone has the same amount of rest.
Really appreciate the integrity that you show in giving credence to the seven team/conference format, despite your own personal inclinations. You wrote an entire article extolling a four team/conference format, yet you’re willing to concede that the way you analyzed the data provided support for a six or seven team format. Granted, the starting point of that 2023 AFC article was about what we would expect to see in the playoffs with fewer teams, while this analysis is focused on the regular season.
I do think this has well convinced me that an expansion to 8 teams/conference would be over the tipping point: in addition to the lost relevance of regular season games, we would also be increasingly less likely to see the best teams in the championship games. But seven appears to be a reasonable compromise between expanding opportunities to more teams while keeping regular season games meaningful.
Absolutely my friend. If I'm going to do the data analysis, I have to actually do the data analysis. I don't think I've been shy in stating my preference for the smaller playoff formats to win, and I was extremely happy to see that there was at least one season best served by a five team per conference format, but when the smallest possible format did not win, I can't just bend the data to make it look like it did.
I think this all comes from accepting what my perspective actually is. I completely admit that I'm far more of an 'NFL in general' fan than most people, because the Jaguars are generally out of things early, whether the format is six teams, seven teams, or even ten or 12 teams a lot of the time. Therefore, I want to see good teams playing meaningful games a lot of the time. I don't want to see ten win Baltimore against ten win Pittsburgh in a game that's entirely meaningless. I want the game to mean something.
However, it's also to the case that if that game were to mean something, the game happening at the same time between nine win Denver and eight win Cincinnati would have to mean nothing. That's a worthwhile trade off to me, a fan whose team was out of it six weeks ago, but it's not a worthy trade off to the fans in either Denver or Cincinnati, and that's really the crux of the disconnect inherent in big playoff formats. Small playoff formats promote fans to be more 'NFL in general' types. Big playoff formats promote focusing a lot more exclusively on one's own team, which at its heart is the reason why the choice of optimal playoff format comes down to a preference parameter.
Where small playoff formats really begin to shine though is if I were to add a third tier of relevance. In the real article I showcased the dichotomy between formats that make games relevant for teams better than .500, and juxtaposed it with relevant games for teams .500 or worse. If you add a third tier, for games that are relevant to teams with a .625 winning percentage or better, smaller playoff formats really begin to come into their own. I cut this from the original article, because there's only so many graphs one can show, but I may publish a small addendum just to show that interaction.
The 2023 AFC article was basically all about that concept. The relevant games being played by really good teams, instead of merely by good teams. I like this personally, because I like to see great teams playing great football, but I'm able to understand that mediocrity has more fans than greatness, simply because there is more mediocrity than greatness. These are fans that deserve to be served by the format too, even if I don't necessarily care below about the top four in each conference, because none of them are going to win the championship anyways.
As far as the eight team thing, you're absolutely right. It's a twofold loss. It makes the regular season less relevant, while also making you less likely to see good playoff games. This is actually the same problem the NBA has, although that sport is so skill based that the worse team basically never wins, so the decrease in likelihood within the playoffs is negligible. The same would not be true for the NFL, where even if the best team plays the worst every week, they would likely still win only 85% of the time. The goal should be to remove hurdles from in front of the great teams, so we can watch them play each other. The goal should not be to put more hurdles out there.
Because the sport is run by people who seem to only care about short-term profits, going back to 6 playoff teams is impossible unless there is a huge drop in viewership in a few years, same in the NBA. Getting rid of or returning to the original Play-in, making a conference agnostic 12 or 14 team playoff, and shortening the season are all good yet very unlikely changes.
The most realistic best-case scenario is that they don't mess anything else up.
You're right Marc, but it's important not to get too bogged down by realism when doing an exercise like this, elsewise you are more or less guaranteed to come to the same conclusion you've just come to, that the best possible scenario is the one we're currently living in. This is true for all statistical analysis, not just the NFL.
It's a longshot. The NFL hasn't had one since Pete Rozelle, but all the league needs is a commissioner that actually cares about the popularity of the league again, and all of a sudden the meaning of 'realistic' entirely changes. It's entirely possible the owners will never allow somebody like that in the office ever again, but it's also possible that they make a mistake one of these times, and allow a football fan in there.
What I'm saying is that an analysis like this is important not for the current administration, who does not care if they burn the sport to the ground, in the event that it'd be more profitable that way. It's important for anybody who may want to make a change for the better at some point.
Raw viewership for the NFL continues to go up, but you wonder how much of that is due to the Swifties being all over everything, because pretty much everywhere you see increases, you're looking at the KC Chiefs. For teams like the Eagles, their playoff games are already being watched moderately less than they used to be, and that's probably indicative of the trend. We've already gotten to the point though that the least relevant playoff games, in terms of viewership, cannot compete with the most relevant regular season games. That's the big playoff effect.
As far as your NBA changes, I would rather go the opposite way actually. I would love to see conferences in sports get less and less integrated. I don't see why the conferences need to meet at all, until the finals. This is a mindset left over from the days used to be about teams, instead of about players. The argument these days is that nobody in the NFC would ever get to see Patrick Mahomes in their town, and I get that, but back in the days before anybody cared about that kind of thing, it was all about rivalries between teams, which is something that's being lost in modern sports.
Why are the Chiefs and Bills such rivals? Because they play every year. What if we had a system that ensured they could play every year? This could be done by just abandoning the idea of the AFC playing against the NFC, at all. I like the 1970s MLB model, which is basically the college football model today. We can make each conference into two eight team divisions. You play everybody else in your same division twice (14 games), and then you play teams in the other division based on where you were in the standings last year. If you were first place in what I would call the 'West,' you play 1, 2, 3 from the 'East' from the prior season. If you were second, you play 1, 2, 3. If you're third, you play 2, 3, 4, etc..
This is actually less of an advantage to the bad teams than the actual NFL schedule provides, but I don't care. I like watching actual great teams, not the one charity case that makes the playoffs every year due to an extraordinarily weak schedule, like the NFL does now, because they do go out of their way to give bad teams easy schedules.
I'll give you an example.
For instance, let's just say we clump the AFC South and AFC West together for one division, and AFC East with the AFC North for the other. First place in 2023 in this new 'East' division is the Baltimore Ravens, which means their 2024 schedule would be as follows, in order of 'wow that's great' factor:
2x Buffalo
1x Kansas City (first place in 'West' in 2023)
2x Pittsburgh
2x Cincinnati
1x Houston (second in 'West' in 2023)
2x Miami
This is ten of Baltimore's 17 games in 2024 that I think most fans would legitimately want to see. This is roughly the same number as normal, but it's much more heavily concentrated into meaningful games in their own conference, instead of games against Philadelphia or whoever, which are great to watch, but ultimately quite meaningless. There also is the weak divisional games of course:
2x NYJ
2x New England
1x Jacksonville (third in 'West' in 2023, and yes it was an extremely weak division, because 2023 Jacksonville did not even make a seven team playoff)
2x Cleveland
Now, that's how this scheduling format would work for a team that was good in 2023. What about for a team that was bad? Let's look at the Denver Broncos, who in 2023 finished sixth in the 'West,' meaning they get to play 5, 6, 7 from the 2023 'East.' This is how the Denver 2024 schedule would've looked, in order of cool factor:
2x Kansas City
2x LAC
2x Houston
1x Pittsburgh (5th in 'East' in 2023)
1x Cincinnati (6th in 'East' in 2023)
Notice that this is only eight games that anybody would care to watch. This is actually a good thing though, because the Broncos weren't good in 2023. By NFL logic, we're supposed to be rewarding them with a soft touch schedule, which leaves all the following games.
2x Indianapolis
1x NYJ (seventh in 'East')
2x Jacksonville
2x Tennessee
2x Las Vegas
If this were the scheduling format, look at the gauntlet KC (first in the West in 2024) would have to run next year:
1x Buffalo
1x Baltimore
2x Denver
2x LAC
1x Pittsburgh
2x Houston
2x Indy
2x Jacksonville
2x Tennessee
2x Las Vegas
That's a lot of easy games, but it's also a lot of not easy games, and I think that's the point here. You know me well enough by now Marc to know that I'm obsessed with the idea of the top teams getting to play each other more, and this does that. Will we get to see Detroit and Buffalo play in the regular season anymore? No we won't, but I don't really care about that when we get to see Buffalo and Baltimore play twice as a replacement. What a cool rivalry that could become. There are several cool rivalries that could stem from this. I've always wanted divisions to be bigger. The NFL needs more than three divisional rivalries per team. Also, I like the mild tanking disincentive here. If you're a team in the AFC East, and you suck, you just don't get to play the KC Chiefs, ever. That's a nice little incentive to get better. Same with what would be the NFC 'West.' If you're bad, you just don't get the Dallas game, unless it's an outlier year like this past one where Dallas was bad too, but that never lasts.
In short, conference interconnection is a lot like big playoffs. Fans claim they like it, but when it gets down to the nitty gritty, league popularity figures tend to indicate that fans don't like it. At least the casuals don't. They tend to turn away in droves once the conferences start connecting more with each other, because having to waste four games (in the NFL) or 30 (in the NBA) on out of conference stuff leaves almost no time to form in-conference rivalries. Rivalries against the teams you're actually going to be playing the playoff games against. That's what we want, but for whatever reason, these modern leagues have thrown that all away, based on the vain assumption that fans in Atlanta may get to see Josh Allen play there once every four years or whatever. I'm not a fan of this. I think the NHL made a good move ten years ago when they went back to being more conference and division oriented. I do not think they went far enough, but it was a step in the right direction.
Eight divisions in a 32 team league is too many. I would accept six, but my preferred number would be four, like the MLB used to do, and like the NHL recently went back to doing. I would also like divisional playoffs in the NFL like they have in the NHL. For the exact way that I've proposed it, it could still be the old six team playoff format, if the top three teams in each division (there would be four in total) make the playoffs, the first gets a bye, and the second and third play what would be renamed the first divisional round. Then the teams would meet in the actual divisional round (which is where the name came from originally, although it's horribly misused these days), which I would rename the second divisional round, to crown division champions. The two division champions would meet in the conference championship. Then we play the Super Bowl.
I would also be open to a CFL-style divisional crossover, where if the fourth best team in the East has a better record than the third best team in the West (not tied, strictly better), then that team could cross over to the West as the third seed. For instance, if this were the system, this is how the 2024 playoffs would've happened:
First Divisional Round:
AFC East:
2 Baltimore vs 3 Pittsburgh
AFC West
2 LAC vs 3 Denver
NFC East:
2 Minnesota vs 3 Philadelphia
NFC West:
2 Los Angeles Rams vs 3 Washington (crossover)
If we take the real result where applicable, and say the team with the most expected wins won each game where it isn't, we move to the second divisional round:
AFC East:
1 Buffalo vs 2 Baltimore
AFC West:
1 KC Chiefs vs 3 Denver
NFC East:
1 Detroit vs 3 Philadelphia
NFC West:
1 Tampa Bay vs 3 Washington
If we do the same thing again, we move to the conference championships:
AFC:
1 Buffalo vs 3 Denver
NFC:
1 Detroit vs 3 Washington
Both these games happened in real life, so we get the Super Bowl:
1 Buffalo vs 3 Washington
Did Washington get the easier divisional path? Absolutely, but to win the Super Bowl in this framework, they're going to have to win four road playoff games in a row, no different than real life, and the crossover is based on the NFC South + West's third best team, not it's best. If the South and West had even a single great team between them, this would've looked a lot less easy. Sometimes this will happen with divisional playoffs, and the world will not explode. No matter how much everybody thinks it will. It's a lesson that college football is learning right now.
Plus, we actually got to see Minnesota vs Philadelphia. We actually got to see Detroit vs Philadelphia, and the only great game that happened in real life, but didn't happen here was Buffalo vs KC, and if you simply believe KC would beat Denver in the playoff game, that would've happened too.
In short, we're not trying to reward good teams here. I've never been about rewarding great teams with an easy path, or punishing bad teams with a difficult one. I'm trying to create hatred between all the good teams. Hatred that will come out when they actually play each other. That's the benefit of keeping the conferences apart. I've yet to find a benefit in smashing them together, as is done in real life.
All of this couldn't fit in the real article, or even in one comment as it turns out, but I do have things to put in the suggestion jar as far as the NFL playoff format. Not just the complaint jar.
Having less conference integration makes sense, but in non-NFL sports, I'm not sure if conferences are needed. The main reason you have conferences is logistics. You can't play every team on your level within a single season. Creating conferences and prioritizing matchups within them is the best path to engagement.
In the NBA, you don't have the same logistical problems. The question then becomes, will you still get rivals. I will have to look into it more, but I think so. Even if that isn't the case, you will give yourself a better chance of having great semi-finals and finals.
The worst finals have been caused by out-of-their-depth East teams facing elite West teams. In a non-conference world, we would get the 00, 02, and 18 WCF as the Finals and Mavericks v Spurs 2007 finals.
I respect your opinion Marc, but I think it's built on an entirely faulty premise.
The main reason you have conferences is not for logistics. For leagues that are historically poor (like the NBA), conferences are for logistics. For leagues that have always been good on funding (NHL, NFL, MLB) conferences are for the purposes of creating a separation in the league. I don't know if you're a hockey guy, but when the NHL went from the original six to a 12 team league, they made a conference with the original six, and then another conference with the six expansion teams in it. Why do this? To keep the expansion teams apart from the real teams, so that at least some of them can finish over .500.
Why do conferences exist in the NFL? A merger between two coast to coast leagues. Why do they exist in the MLB? A merger between two coast to coast leagues. This is why conferences in these leagues are coast to coast, and not geographical.
The NHL is a horrible league (great sport, bad league), so I wouldn't use them as an example for anything, but they've tried every format. They tried one conference with all the good teams, and another with all the bad ones. They tried no conferences at all again in the late 70s. Then they went to four entirely separate divisional entities through the 80s. Then they went to two conferences with all the overlap in the world, NBA style, in the 1990s and 2000s. Then in 2014 they went back to keeping the conferences more separate from each other, and remain there to this day.
In short, in the big four leagues, there are four different philosophies as to what conferences are worth. In the MLB, there is still virtually no overlap between them. In the NFL, I believe it's four games of a 17 game schedule you play against the other conference. In the NHL, conferences are more separated than they are in the NBA, but pretty integrated, and in the NBA there may as well be no conferences at all.
As a result of this framework, can you name me a rivalry between two teams in the NBA? A real one, where the players truly dislike each other? I can't think of one currently ongoing. The only time you can get lucky and find one is if teams are able to play three times or more in playoff series within a short enough period, like LA vs Sacramento in the 2000s.
The NHL goes out of their way to make sure this can happen by using divisional playoffs, ensuring that teams play in the playoffs more often, and rivalries form between them. Dallas vs Colorado, Toronto vs Boston, the Florida teams are always playing against each other, etc.. The conferences are too integrated to create rivalries with just regular season games, but they're trying.
In the NFL, the conferences are still separate enough that you can still create rivalries without playing in the playoffs. In my memory, the Steelers and the Ravens have played in the playoffs three times ever. I don't know if Pittsburgh has played Cleveland in the playoffs since the 1970s. Nevertheless, these teams still hate each other. Same with Green Bay and Chicago, and Dallas and Philadelphia, and etc.. These teams basically never play each other in playoff games, but these are rivalry games that mean something anyway. This is the benefit of keeping conferences quite separate.
Of course, we then get to the MLB, where teams like New York and Boston were hated rivals, despite not playing in the playoffs ever until I believe 1999. I know personally how heated Toronto and Detroit were before the MLB split us into different divisions, and to this day I don't believe the Blue Jays have ever played in the playoffs against the Tigers.
As you can see, I believe there to be a direct correlation between lack of integration between conferences and number of very fun regular season games. You would think teams playing each other over and over would get repetitive, but it doesn't. Sports fans just don't dislike rematches in general. Think of something like Buffalo vs KC. Nobody seems to mind the rematch.
This is why I want to create bigger divisions. I think the NFL needs more rematches. Every sport needs more rematches. Familiarity breeds contempt, and we all need contempt in our sports. If we could do this, I think we could even get rid of conferences. Let's use the NBA as an example. Let's say we get two expansion teams, just for argument in SEA and in LV. Then we could split the league into four.
There'd be the West, with LAL, LAC, GS, Seattle, Las Vegas, Portland, and Phoenix. Then there'd be the Central, with Utah, Denver, OKC, DAL, HOU, SAS, NOP, and Minnesota. The Non-Coastal (we'll come up with a better name later), featuring Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, Toronto, Memphis, Indiana, Cleveland, and Atlanta. Finally, there would be the Coastal, with Miami, Orlando, Charlotte, Washington, Philadelphia, Boston, and both New York squads.
I would say you play every team in your division six times each (42 games), and for the other games we can do some kind of pod thing where we play every team in two of the divisions twice (32 games), and from the other division just once (eight games). I would love to make the playoffs the top four from these four divisions, but if the NBA still wants four play-in games, you can do 4 vs 5 in each of them before the first round.
Assuming the four beats the five in all those games (or we don't do play-in at all), the first round of these theoretical playoffs is LAL vs SAC, LAC vs GS, OKC vs MIN, HOU vs DEN, CLE vs MEM, IND vs MIL, BOS vs MIA, NYK vs ORL.
It's roughly the same squads, but under my system it'd be squads that know each other inside and out from playing so much in the regular season, which I think is a good thing, and crucially, most of these series would've been able to be advertised for months in advance, which we've talked about before how important to viewership that is. Playoff viewership would be much higher in my opinion with a lot of the series set in stone for a while before the season ended.
Imagine a first round series, where both teams had played six times already. That sounds fantastic. The question Marc is what do we lose by creating such close connection between a few franchises? My way of doing things reduces travel, allows teams to play each other more (which may bring a more tailored-to-opponent style of basketball to emerge in the regular season), and still at least allows every team to play every other team, most of them both home and away. Also, this is a cheeky way to ensure there will be at least some small market contending going on every year. The Non-Coastal only has a couple big markets in it (Chicago, Toronto, and maybe Atlanta). The Central is not exactly loaded with big market teams either, mostly the Texas duo of Dallas and Houston.
What do you think of my format Marc? Would you like teams to be tied closer together, like they were in the old days? Or do you like this league that kind of has conferences, as it exists tofay?
When I made that point, I had college sports in mind and didn't know the history of the MLB and NHL league configurations. I was also using a broader definition of logistics, which includes figuring out who you are going to play. If you have more teams than games you can play, you need a way to distribute the games.
I think your system is better than the old division system, where if you won your division, you got a top 2 (and later 3) seed regardless of the record of the 2nd-best team in another division. However, I'm skeptical that regular-season rivalries can develop in the NBA. I think the regular season can enhance pre-existed rivalries, but it isn't the breeding ground for them. They are more the icing on top due to the lack of stakes in the regular season.
This is where playoff size comes back into the equation. If teams were either fighting for playoff incentives or fewer spots, I think you could have regular-season-based rivalries. The NFL has division rivals because winning the division means an automatic playoff birth. Brady vs Manning was a thing in part because they were fighting for byes. Both were also fighting for home-field but seeding doesn't matter in the NBA. Home court advantage doesn't exist unless you're Denver, and there have been enough good 5-8 teams recently that getting a higher seed rarely gives you a better matchup (well, at least in the West)
You're right about the regular season rivalries thing. The NBA has been so stubbornly antagonistic to the idea of the regular season meaning anything for so long that you can't unring the bell. Quite frankly, I'm not sure why this is. The NHL plays 82 games also, and they have not intentionally prostituted their regular season in the way the NBA has, so I don't think number of games is the issue. It's a number of playoff spots thing, and it's a culture of the league thing. I'm not sure how or why the NBA got themselves into this mess, but I feel like the sport would be so much more popular if things were different, and the regular season were more important.
I'm going for divisional playoffs as a last gasp to create any hatred at all in the NBA. Like I said before, the only way you get a rivalry between two teams these days is to meet in the playoffs three times or more in a short enough span. Sometimes, if the series both go six or seven you can get away with twice, but most of the time the number is three playoff series against each other, and that's just hard to do. You don't naturally do that very often. That's why I would try to manipulate the playoff format to have it happen more using divisional playoffs.
What do you think about first round byes in basketball? You know better than me. Do long breaks help in basketball, or is it like baseball, where first round byes are a disadvantage? Would they actually be an advantage that a team would want? The reason I ask is for the purpose of analysing whether a drop to 12 playoff teams would be feasible, or whether the NBA playoffs would have to drop all the way to eight teams in order to decrease in size.
You could do eight teams and still have four rounds if you use a double chance system, so the problem is only the bye thing. The NBA sucks at scheduling, so a lot of playoff series take way too long. That would have to change, but if I were commissioner, I could do it. The only problem would be that if a team plays no basketball for a week and a half, would they come out of that break facing a significant disadvantage? If the answer is yes, that makes alternative playoff formats significantly harder to design.
The short answer is that it could go either way. The NBA had 12 playoff teams from 77 to 83, but it was so long ago that I'm not sure valuable information can be gleaned. The closest thing we have to byes now is avoiding the Play-in and the All-Star break, but that is for one week, and almost everyone has the same amount of rest.
Really appreciate the integrity that you show in giving credence to the seven team/conference format, despite your own personal inclinations. You wrote an entire article extolling a four team/conference format, yet you’re willing to concede that the way you analyzed the data provided support for a six or seven team format. Granted, the starting point of that 2023 AFC article was about what we would expect to see in the playoffs with fewer teams, while this analysis is focused on the regular season.
I do think this has well convinced me that an expansion to 8 teams/conference would be over the tipping point: in addition to the lost relevance of regular season games, we would also be increasingly less likely to see the best teams in the championship games. But seven appears to be a reasonable compromise between expanding opportunities to more teams while keeping regular season games meaningful.
Absolutely my friend. If I'm going to do the data analysis, I have to actually do the data analysis. I don't think I've been shy in stating my preference for the smaller playoff formats to win, and I was extremely happy to see that there was at least one season best served by a five team per conference format, but when the smallest possible format did not win, I can't just bend the data to make it look like it did.
I think this all comes from accepting what my perspective actually is. I completely admit that I'm far more of an 'NFL in general' fan than most people, because the Jaguars are generally out of things early, whether the format is six teams, seven teams, or even ten or 12 teams a lot of the time. Therefore, I want to see good teams playing meaningful games a lot of the time. I don't want to see ten win Baltimore against ten win Pittsburgh in a game that's entirely meaningless. I want the game to mean something.
However, it's also to the case that if that game were to mean something, the game happening at the same time between nine win Denver and eight win Cincinnati would have to mean nothing. That's a worthwhile trade off to me, a fan whose team was out of it six weeks ago, but it's not a worthy trade off to the fans in either Denver or Cincinnati, and that's really the crux of the disconnect inherent in big playoff formats. Small playoff formats promote fans to be more 'NFL in general' types. Big playoff formats promote focusing a lot more exclusively on one's own team, which at its heart is the reason why the choice of optimal playoff format comes down to a preference parameter.
Where small playoff formats really begin to shine though is if I were to add a third tier of relevance. In the real article I showcased the dichotomy between formats that make games relevant for teams better than .500, and juxtaposed it with relevant games for teams .500 or worse. If you add a third tier, for games that are relevant to teams with a .625 winning percentage or better, smaller playoff formats really begin to come into their own. I cut this from the original article, because there's only so many graphs one can show, but I may publish a small addendum just to show that interaction.
The 2023 AFC article was basically all about that concept. The relevant games being played by really good teams, instead of merely by good teams. I like this personally, because I like to see great teams playing great football, but I'm able to understand that mediocrity has more fans than greatness, simply because there is more mediocrity than greatness. These are fans that deserve to be served by the format too, even if I don't necessarily care below about the top four in each conference, because none of them are going to win the championship anyways.
As far as the eight team thing, you're absolutely right. It's a twofold loss. It makes the regular season less relevant, while also making you less likely to see good playoff games. This is actually the same problem the NBA has, although that sport is so skill based that the worse team basically never wins, so the decrease in likelihood within the playoffs is negligible. The same would not be true for the NFL, where even if the best team plays the worst every week, they would likely still win only 85% of the time. The goal should be to remove hurdles from in front of the great teams, so we can watch them play each other. The goal should not be to put more hurdles out there.