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View original postIt's still going to come down to tie-breakers, so you're still not going to have a surefire way of telling who the best team is. And there are going to be people bitching because the NFC has a 14-2 team playing the AFC champion with an 11-5 record, while another NFC team with a 12-4 record watches.

View original postAlso, that way you'd never get some of the regional rivalries, like Giants-Jets, 49ers-Raiders, etc. As it is, there are people who bitch that they only play each other every 4 years.

View original postThe winner-take-all format worked when there were a very limited number of teams, such as in baseball when there were 8 teams in a league, dividing up a 154-game schedule, leaving no doubt who was the league champion. That was the scenario I mentioned with the current NFL, where division rivals play almost identical schedules. The Cardinals and Pirates, in the old days, would play 132 game against the exact same opponents, and 22 games against one another. There was no blather about soft schedules or weak divisions. But once the leagues got too large, they needed to divide into divisions to keep it manageable, and then they needed playoffs. And now baseball can have interleague play and wild cards and stuff like that, because the playoff expansion allows for the schedule inequities that come with more teams.

View original postThe NFL could revert to some schedule like that, although they'd need to expand or contract. Each team has 15 others in the sam conference, so they could play 1 game against each, with maybe a second game against a designated rival, or an expansion team, so each team in the conference gets 16 conference games. Another way would be to break the league into 4 conferences of 8 teams, so they can all play each intra-conference opponent twice in a fourteen game schedule, and the conference champs have a seeded playoff for the Lombardi Trophy. You'd be more certain of the records that way. Because if each team in a 16 team conference played each other once, there would be endless bitching about who had to play at Seattle or at Green Bay, and how Tampa Bay only took the tiebreaker from San Francisco, because they got Chicago in Florida in December while the Niners had to travel to Soldier Field a week later. Or there would be cries of shenanigans when a dome team like Indy or New Orleans lucked out having all home games or games in San Diego or Arizona in December, while Carolina was freezing their asses off in Philadelphia or New York.

View original postAll other things aside, you'll never see those formats, because that's fewer televised games.