Fansided

NFL expansion would be a huge mistake

By Phil Watson

The NFL will stage three games this season at London's Wembley Stadium, something that is seen as an extended prelude to the location or relocation of a franchise in the U.K. Mandatory Credit: Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports
The NFL will stage three games this season at London's Wembley Stadium, something that is seen as an extended prelude to the location or relocation of a franchise in the U.K. Mandatory Credit: Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports /
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The Green Bay Packers and Chicago Bears are the NFL’s oldest rivalry, a rivalry that has continued because of the league’s attention to balancing schedules. Mandatory Credit: Dennis Wierzbicki-USA TODAY Sports
The Green Bay Packers and Chicago Bears are the NFL’s oldest rivalry, a rivalry that has continued because of the league’s attention to balancing schedules. Mandatory Credit: Dennis Wierzbicki-USA TODAY Sports /

The Math Just Works

The NFL right now is a thing of mathematical beauty—four teams per division, eight divisions in the league, with 32 teams playing 16 games each.

There is balance. Schedules work. No team or division has a built-in advantage, something the league—to its credit—has always strived to prevent.

When the league adopted its first scheduling matrix in 1978, which set matchups based on where teams finished in their divisions the previous seasons and called for a scheduled rotation of interconference play based on division assignments, the league prevented any potential scheduling mismatches.

Even with each conference having two five-team divisions and one four-team division, the NFL designed the schedules of those fifth-place teams in such a way that every team in the league played the same number of games against those last place teams—two.

But things got messy after the Cleveland Browns came back in 1999. That left the old AFC Central with six teams and a scheduling problem, because it now had to accommodate six teams having to play 10 divisional games, with no way to balance it.

Not coincidentally, at least one wild card in each of the three seasons the league played under that configuration, 1999-2001, came from the AFC Central.

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