Best Possible Super Bowl LI Matchups

[The_Admiral]

2 hours ago, Ferdinand Cesarano said:

General comment:  the one thing that this thread proves conclusively is that there are too damn many interconference games.  If it is so easy to find recent examples of every possible matchup, that takes a lot away from the specialness of any matchup that occurs in the Super Bowl.

 

Playing half the league once every four years doesn't sound bad to me. People could be digging back six or seven years for some of these photos.

[mmejia]

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Around the Horn said:

This for sure:

It's funny (and ironic) because in this photo the Raiders player literally looks like a lion getting ready to pounce on a defenseless gazelle or some other prey.

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, mmejia said:

All-Texas Superbowl?  Lowest rated Superbowl, anyone?  (The last one I can think of was 49ers vs. Chargers.)

[mmejia]

All-Texas Super Bowl in Houston, at that.

[Matito]

2 hours ago, the admiral said:

 

Playing half the league once every four years doesn't sound bad to me. People could be digging back six or seven years for some of these photos.

I don't think inter-conference play is that big of a deal. Baseball? Sure. I'm young enough that I started watching right when Interleague Play started in the late 90s, but at least back then it still felt kinda special. Now it's just commonplace to see the Braves in Oakland or the Angels in Cincinnati, but it still feels like it should be an October-only thing. But football? Gimme Seattle at Houston, Cleveland at Green Bay, or Washington at Denver. It's always been that way, at least to me, so I see no issue with it.

[The_Admiral]

I agree. The NFL's scheduling matrix is perfect the way it is. 25% of your schedule represents the other 50% of the league, just not all the teams.

 

The NHL also had it right with roughly 25% of the schedule being against the other conference. Now it's closer to two-fifths, at least for the West.

[Ferdinand Cesarano]

45 minutes ago, Matito said:

I don't think inter-conference play is that big of a deal. Baseball? Sure. I'm young enough that I started watching right when Interleague Play started in the late 90s, but at least back then it still felt kinda special. Now it's just commonplace to see the Braves in Oakland or the Angels in Cincinnati, but it still feels like it should be an October-only thing. But football? Gimme Seattle at Houston, Cleveland at Green Bay, or Washington at Denver. It's always been that way, at least to me, so I see no issue with it.

 

41 minutes ago, the admiral said:

I agree. The NFL's scheduling matrix is perfect the way it is. 25% of your schedule represents the other 50% of the league, just not all the teams

 

I'd love to see a drift towards treating the conferences as separate leagues, especially since they were created out of the NFL's absorption of the AFL.  This would feel historically right.  Also, each conference has a nationwide footprint, and so each one feels a bit like a league in its own right.  It would be so cool to get to the Super Bowl and find, as a matter of course, that the two participating teams haven't met in a very long time, and that there is no one on either team who was around for the last meeting.

A more practical benefit of an all-intra-conference schedule is that it would bring increased fairness to the determination of the wild card spots.  Even under the all-intra-conference plan, teams from different divisions would play different schedules.  But at least all teams in a given conference would be playing the same set of teams.  By contrast, in the current system, teams competing for the same wild card spots have schedules that diverge wildly, as teams from the two conferences' divisions square off on a rotating basis.  This undercuts the legitimacy of the race for those wild card spots.  (Baseball has the same issue with respect to its wild cards.)

Anyway, as I mentioned, I realise that the league's target audience has no problem with the current setup.  Still, it's my nature to offer this sort of unsolicited advice.  (Side note: if I ever start a blog, that's going to be its title: "Unsolicited Advice from Ferdinand Cesarano".)

[The_Admiral]

CBS and Fox probably wouldn't be down with never being able to show opposite-conference teams.

[Matito]

18 minutes ago, Ferdinand Cesarano said:

I'd love to see a drift towards treating the conferences as separate leagues, especially since they were created out of the NFL's absorption of the AFL.  This would feel historically right.  Also, each conference has a nationwide footprint, and so each one feels a bit like a league in its own right.  It would be so cool to get to the Super Bowl and find, as a matter of course, that the two participating teams haven't met in a very long time, and that there is no one on either team who was around for the last meeting.

A more practical benefit of an all-intra-conference schedule is that it would bring increased fairness to the determination of the wild card spots.  Even under the all-intra-conference plan, teams from different divisions would play different schedules.  But at least all teams in a given conference would be playing the same set of teams.  By contrast, in the current system, teams competing for the same wild card spots have schedules that diverge wildly, as teams from the two conferences' divisions square off on a rotating basis.  This undercuts the legitimacy of the race for those wild card spots.  (Baseball has the same issue with respect to its wild cards.)

Anyway, as I mentioned, I realise that the league's target audience has no problem with the current setup.  Still, it's my nature to offer this sort of unsolicited advice.  (Side note: if I ever start a blog, that's going to be its title: "Unsolicited Advice from Ferdinand Cesarano".)

Free agency and the ability to trade players back and forth across conference lines kind of negates the whole "separate leagues" notion though. It would be one thing if Seattle and Kansas City met in the Super Bowl and Russell Wilson had never faced Eric Berry, but the fact that either one could go to any other team and maybe face them three times in one year the following year doesn't really make it that special.

[Jungle Jim]

5 hours ago, Ferdinand Cesarano said:

But, despite the obvious allure from a competitive standpoint of a playoff tournament involving champions exclusively, the league devalues its own competition by unnecessarily including undeserving teams.  

 

I would counter that a second-place team that finishes 12-4 is more deserving than a division winner that finishes 9-7, 8-8, 7-8-1, or 7-9.  There have been division winners with all four of those records.

[Silver_Star]

16 hours ago, the admiral said:

 

EXPLOSIONS AND FOOTBALL

 

That is the superbowl I want to see bigly!

[Ferdinand Cesarano]

1 hour ago, Jungle Jim said:

I would counter that a second-place team that finishes 12-4 is more deserving than a division winner that finishes 9-7, 8-8, 7-8-1, or 7-9.  There have been division winners with all four of those records.

 

If you want to rank teams across the league solely by record, then don't have divisions.  But, if you have divisions, then the champions of those divisions have attained a higher status than teams that didn't win their divisions.  

Also, maybe one division is full of better teams, and those teams beat up on each other; while in another division there is only one good team, which runs the table in its divisional games.  So a team with a given record in one division cannot be said to be presumptively better or worse than a team in another division just on the basis of the teams' records. 

In baseball, in the four-division days, it happened a few times that one division's second-place team had a better record than the winner of the other division.  The first one that comes to mind is 1980, when the second-place Orioles in the AL East had a better record than the AL West Champion Royals.  And in 1984, I think there were four or five AL East teams with better records than the champs of the AL West, who again were the Royals.

There's nothing wrong with this.  Each division is its own race, and should send one representative, its champion, to the playoffs.  This is why the wild card, in which teams' records are compared across divisional lines, is conceptually incompatible with divisional play.  Leagues should get rid of wild cards, and give more weight to divisional champions.  The NFL is already set up to have a playoff field of eight division winners.  And Major League Baseball and the NBA, each currently with 30 teams, could do the same with the addition of two teams a piece, and the realignment into eight 4-team divisions.

We acknowledge that the NFC produces a champion and the AFC produces a champion, and that these teams play in the final match, the Super Bowl.  No one claims that the Super Bowl should be between two NFC teams or that the World Series should be between two American League teams, even if two teams from the same conference/league have the top records.  (I shudder as I write this, because I don't want to give any ideas to those who are perversely hostile to history!)   I'd prefer to see that reasoning applied to divisions, such that we expect each division to produce a champion, which has the exclusive right to advance in the playoffs and to compete for the league title.

[Jungle Jim]

You make excellent points and they're difficult to counter or refute.

 

I assume that divisions were began to provide more games with a set of opponents within a limited geographical area, thus cutting down on travel.  But that is nothing more than an assumption. Whether or not that is still needed in this era of faster and more comfortable travel is another discussion, I guess.  

 

I just see the division winners plus wildcards as a nice balance, providing two paths to the postseason.  Perhaps the success of wildcard teams in the NFL and MLB is evidence that those teams deserved their chance.  Then again, perhaps it only proved that they got hot at the right time, I don't know.  I guess I'd rather take the chance on an "undeserving" team getting in than to take the chance that a really good team got sent home because they happened to be in the wrong division.  To me, it's worth it, but I can understand why some would disagree.

[JTrainGBR83]

To me it makes more sense how college football crowns conference champions, basing it on the actual conference record. You could go 0-6 in division games in the NFL and still be division champs, which seems strange.

 

As far as divisions, you could just have divisions to foster rivalries and not necessarily have it linked to the postseason selection.

[swilson160]

1 hour ago, Ferdinand Cesarano said:

 

 

I'd love to see a drift towards treating the conferences as separate leagues, especially since they were created out of the NFL's absorption of the AFL.  This would feel historically right.  Also, each conference has a nationwide footprint, and so each one feels a bit like a league in its own right.  It would be so cool to get to the Super Bowl and find, as a matter of course, that the two participating teams haven't met in a very long time, and that there is no one on either team who was around for the last meeting.

A more practical benefit of an all-intra-conference schedule is that it would bring increased fairness to the determination of the wild card spots.  Even under the all-intra-conference plan, teams from different divisions would play different schedules.  But at least all teams in a given conference would be playing the same set of teams.  By contrast, in the current system, teams competing for the same wild card spots have schedules that diverge wildly, as teams from the two conferences' divisions square off on a rotating basis.  This undercuts the legitimacy of the race for those wild card spots.  (Baseball has the same issue with respect to its wild cards.)

Anyway, as I mentioned, I realise that the league's target audience has no problem with the current setup.  Still, it's my nature to offer this sort of unsolicited advice.  (Side note: if I ever start a blog, that's going to be its title: "Unsolicited Advice from Ferdinand Cesarano".)

 

Yep, what would make football better is if the more of the best players and teams went years and years without playing each other.  I mean, what 49ers fan doesn't cherish only seeing Tom Brady in SF one time in his 17-year career?  The only thing that could have made that better is never seeing him at all, then they could have had another game against the Rams or something, and who doesn't wish we had more of those matchups to look back on?

 

There are a ton of benefits to separate conferences, mainly logistical, but keeping more teams and players from facing each other isn't one of them, not by a longshot.  Football is best when the best players and the best teams play each other.

[CreamSoda]

 

[daniel75]

No Pats, Pack or Cowgirls please, yuck.

[Ferdinand Cesarano]

1 hour ago, swilson160 said:

 

Yep, what would make football better is if the more of the best players and teams went years and years without playing each other.  I mean, what 49ers fan doesn't cherish only seeing Tom Brady in SF one time in his 17-year career?  The only thing that could have made that better is never seeing him at all, then they could have had another game against the Rams or something, and who doesn't wish we had more of those matchups to look back on?

 

There are a ton of benefits to separate conferences, mainly logistical, but keeping more teams and players from facing each other isn't one of them, not by a longshot.  Football is best when the best players and the best teams play each other.

 

Don Mattingly never played in a National League park.  Ernie Banks never played in an American League park.  This is not an issue.   To argue for a certain type of schedule on the basis of the existence of one star player is not sensible, especially now, when the NFL has twice as many teams as Major League Baseball had when Ernie Banks started.  On top of that, in football they play very few games; so we should not be shocked when a case comes up that a player has visited some given city rarely or not at all.

 

And neither is the notion of "the best players and the best teams play[ing] each other" a valid basis for a schedule.  By that reasoning, you'd have divisions not by geography, but by merit.  You'd have promotion and relegation between two levels of the NFL, or amongst more than two levels.  If someone were to say that this is absurd, then that person would be right; but this is what flows from the idea that "football is best when the best players and the best teams play each other".

It is more important to have a schedule that is sensible than to try to arrange for the visits of every star player to every city.   And, in a league that has four 4-team divisions per conference, and that is threatening to go to an 18-game schedule, the most sensible arrangement is the one with all intra-conference play.  

I hasten to say (again) that I don't expect this to happen, or even to be seriously considered.  But when we take this on as a mental exercise, we shouldn't deny the conclusion that such a scheme would make the playoff qualifications more legitimate and the Super Bowl more interesting. 

[dont care]

um... the league wants to make money is why, when teams play every team fans pay to go to those stadiums. if the leagues were split up every year would feel the same playing the same games every year, its already pretty bad with the current system.