4381

In a year where everybody goes 9-7, it’s a wash. But in a year like this year, it’s vastly better. If the best argument you can muster in favor of the current system is “in the season where everybody had the same record, the alternative would produce the same result,” you might want to rethink where you stand.

4382

It’s the fairest way to do it when you can’t play ever other team in the league at least once. That’s why its done that way. People actually thought about the system before they implemented it.

4383

Then schedule by divisions and determine playoffs by record alone.

4384

Schedule by divisions or conferences? If you had two 17 team conferences, you could play everyone once and go based on record alone. You’d have a tiny bit of unfairness due to home/away issues, but it wouldn’t be too bad. You’d need to add two more teams for that to work, though. And people are used to playing their division rivals twice a year so there’s that.

4385

The day Lovie Smith was introduced as the Bears coach, he said his number one goal was to beat the Packers. Not win the Super Bowl. Beat the Packers. It made for an entertaining day of sports radio, as the one sane sports radio host on earth excoriated him for it while a bunch of morons called in to say that beating the Packers really is the most important thing for the Bears to do. So, by all means, keep them happy by having the Bears and Packers play twice a year. Let’s not have divisions mean anything more than that.

4386

Whatever you feel is the most fair way to schedule the games is fine by me.

4387

No, you lose control of the one thing you have total control over – whether you win your division. That is ENTIRELY up to a team and totally unreliant on how other teams are faring in other divisions. It’s not just about winning the most games, it’s also about having some games matter more than others.

It’s more fair than the current system. Personally, I would be fine with ditching the conferences and just going to a straight-up seeded tournament, but, you know, baby steps.

Oh God, really? Every just sort the teams from top to bottom and do an even distribution so everyone has an equal chance of playing against the same teams. Actually, to be totally fair, every team should play every other team, so you’d have 31 regular season games right?

It’s the Harrison Bergeron Football League!!

You’re robbing superior teams of their chance to do that in order to preserve the divisions because…why, exactly?

Fan interest, the element of this which you just don’t get. Fans end up caring about rivalries and other players. It’s fun to hate/fear Ray Lewis when you’re a Browns fan. You develop an understanding of what opposing teams in your division are good at.

Another, less mentioned, aspect of this is the workload on the coaches. Playing 4 teams twice each means much less work on already overworked coaching staffs because at some point they know how certain players play on opposing teams they’ve played 10 times over the past five years.

It can’t be that the system ensures fairness, optimal playoff matchups, or makes the regular season more meaningful.

It’s that – wait for it – it makes division games more meaningful. If you don’t like that, that’s fine, but your suggestions/priorities just trade one set of issues for another in search of this thing that doesn’t exist (fairness in the NFL).

4388

There is no way to schedule games a year in advance so that all 32 teams have a relatively similar strength of schedule. That’s the whole point.

4389

Which method keeps more teams in the playoff race for longer (note that I don’t know the answer)? I’d think that keeping fans interested as long as possible and attendance consistently as high as possible would rank up there with fairness to the owners and NFL. From a business standpoint, the NFL loves parity.

Also, the conference rivalries and ability to easily travel to regional games was personally a big factor for me when I was in D.C. and would drive up to PA and NY to watch games in person. With the proposed method of all division teams playing each other, I would have only gotten to watch the Redskins vs Cowboys live once every other year (assuming you get one game home, then away the following year).

4390

Except this is the first season where something like this has happened, and I’d bet that nearly every season there would be at least 7 teams vying for the 6 slots in your proposed solution and in some bad seasons more than that.

A quick perusal:

2004 - three 8-8 teams in NFC vying for two spots
2005 - two 10-6 teams in NFC vying for last spot
2006 - two 9-7 teams in AFC vying for last spot; FOUR 8-8 teams in NFC vying for last spot
2007 - three 10-6 teams in AFC vying for two spots
2008 - four 9-7 teams in NFC vying for two spots
2009 - four 9-7 teams in AFC vying for two spots
2010 - four 10-6 teams in NFC vying for three spots

Yeah, not sure how that’s better than just winning the division.

4391

How, exactly, do you control that? Baltimore and Pittsburgh beat each other. Baltimore cannot control in any way how Pittsburgh does against other teams in their division. Kansas City sucked in their division but still won it. They had no ability to control how the Raiders did except for the two games they played against each other, and KC lost them both. Way to control your division, guys.

I’m not sure what you’re getting at. I’m talking about having the playoffs as a seeded tournament.

So keep scheduling by divisions. No skin off my back.

More meaningful than what? There are only 16 games; each one is critically important to making the playoffs. Furthermore, it tends to make non-division games less meaningful, but there are more of them, and it has a tendency to make late-season games less meaningful. Wouldn’t it be nice to enter the playoffs on a crescendo, where the last few games are important to every team, and each week every team is going all out? Instead, on Sunday, once the Falcons start cruising, the Bears and Saints have absolutely nothing to play for. Philadephia had nothing to play for. But, boy howdy, that Rams-Seahawks game was a thing to behold!

4392

sinfony

You’re complaining of fairness…Ok, so after we move it so conferences and divisions don’t matter, what next? I mean, the Pats have Belicheck. That can’t be fair. Should we give them a one game penalty because they have so many wins over the past years?

Your argument boils down to this from what I can tell… teams with better records aren’t making the playoffs and aren’t getting homefield advantage and that’s not fair. I’m not sure what you think fair means. I kind of thought it meant, everyone followed the same rules and because of that (salary cap, rules, etc), Any Given Sunday is a truth. If the Bucs wanted to go the playoffs, they need to beat the Saints or the Falcons one more time. That’s fair. Not “your division was hard, so we’ll ignore that and let you get in!”.

Did you have a team that didn’t make it? Because I’m betting they knew the rules at the beginning of the season, just like all of the other teams…

Oh, and the Colts have Manning, and the Pats have Brady. Some of the best QBs to ever play the game. That should be at least half a game handicap or maybe we should give the opposing teams a free TD at the start of the game. We are aiming for fair!

4393

Vikings make Frazier official head coach.

(i.e. can we please quit arguing about the stupid scheduling/playoff issue. There’s no way the NFL is going to scrap divisions, which means that occasionally you’ll get a situation like this year. Pointless argument, especially given how heated some are becoming over it).

Let’s all beat up on the Patriots instead!

4394

How is that any worse than how it’s already played out? A look at those seasons and what actually happened.

2004 - Three NFC teams went 8-8 and only two got to go to the playoffs
2006 - Two AFC teams went 9-7, only one goes to the playoffs; four NFC teams went 8-8 and only one went through to playoffs
2007 - Three AFC teams went 10-6, only two went to the playoffs
2008 - Three AFC teams go 11-5, only two go to the playoffs; the 8-8 Chargers go to the playoffs and the 11-5 Patriots stay home.
2009 - Three AFC teams go 9-7, only two go to playoffs
2010 - Four NFC teams go 10-6, only two go to the playoffs; the 7-9 Seahawks go to the playoffs and the 10-6 Giants and 10-6 Buccaneers stay home.

Seeing a pattern? Almost every year, the last playoff slots come down to tiebreakers. That probably won’t change if we go to my preferred system. What will change is that no team will stay home in January to watch a team with an inferior record play in the playoffs, and no superior team will be forced to go on the road to an inferior team in the first round. Basing the playoffs purely on record, within conference, is never more of a tiebreaker mess than the division system already is, but it averts ludicrous situations like we have this year, and like we had in 2008.

4395

This is just silly.

So because the outcome is within the rules, it’s fair? So a rule can never be unfair?

I’m a Bills fan. As always, we didn’t make the playoffs by virtue of being shitty.

You’re very funny.

4396

? Baltimore played the same exact schedule as Pittsburgh except they played Houston instead of Tennessee. They control their division by beating more teams on that schedule than Pittsburgh. The current system gives more weight to divisional games and Baltimore lost to Cinci. If you want to change the tie-breaking system I’d be okay with that, but most people seem to like divisional games being more important.

4397

They beat the same number of teams on that schedule as Pittsburgh did.

4398

Good god, would you drop it already?

4399

I am funny, thank you.

The point being, that there isn’t a better alternative that doesn’t end up losing part of what makes the NFL good now. Rivalries. Your solution throws those out the door. And your solution isn’t actually solution. It’ll fix up this year, but another year, we’ll have to get into strength of schedule bullshit more than we do now. Lets not BCS this shit up. Really.

4400

Pardon me for responding to the people who replied to me.

Matt, if you would kindly read my posts, you would see that what I’m saying will not “BCS this shit up.”