New Football Format

Seattle's foray into the playoffs is utterly frustrating. They finished the regular season at 7-9. They would have to make the Super Bowl just to clinch a .500 record and they'd have to win it to finish with a winning record. Meanwhile, you have 2 10-6 teams sitting at home watching. It's not fair. Shouldn't sports be as fair as possible?

The argument for including Seattle is that they won their division. But each team only plays 6 of their 16 games against their division. You play a majority of your games against teams outside of your division. If you were in a historically great division and everyone beat each other up and ended with 3-3 division records, wouldn't they cruise against other weaker divisions? If not, then the division isn't that good. So any division winner with a poor overall record necessarily won a weak division.

Seattle went 4-2 in the division and 3-7 outside of it. The NFC West finished with a 13-27 record against teams in other divisions. All 4 teams had losing records outside of the division. So winning the NFC West isn't much of an accomplishment. It isn't worthy of a playoff spot.

So here's my change:

Let's have 2 super divisions in each conference. In the NFC, we'll put the East and South together and the North and West together for geographic reasons. In the AFC, we'll put the East with the North and the South with the West. We'll also create sub-divisions, which are simply the divisions that we have now. You play everyone in your sub-division twice (6 games). You play the other teams in your division once (4 games). That way you're playing a majority of your games in the division. You keep the best part of the current set up (the rivalries- and even adding new ones) and getting rid of the worst part of the current set up (7-9 teams winning divisions).

For now, you'd lose the Patriots-Colts game (or would we? Wait for it), but you'd get a Pats-Steelers game every year, a Pats-Ravens game every year, a Jets-Ravens game every year, and they'd all be division games! You'd also get the Colts-Chargers every year. Plus, the likelihood of one team running away from the other 7 in the division is much less likely than it is now. So those painful final weeks won’t be so painful.

As for the other 6 games, you'd play a new sub-division in the other conference every year like they do now (4 games). Then you'd play 2 games against the other division in your conference. If the NFL moves to 18 games, then you play half of the division in your conference. You can either play a schedule based on where everyone finishes the previous year or rotate from year to year (and there’s your Pats-Colts game, at least every 2 years).

As for the playoffs, the division winners all get byes. Then, you can either guarantee each second place team a home game in the Wildcard round or just have it so the next 4 teams in each conference are ranked according to record (I like the latter).

So, basically, this new format keeps all of the good things about the way it is now, but adds more rivalries, makes sure only teams with good records make the playoffs, and gives real meaning to winning a division. The NFL would either be stubborn or stupid not to do it!