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Soccer Style Relegation in the NFL?

Interesting...the only issue that I see is the constant turnover of teams. If the best teams in the league are playing each other, then good teams could have average or poor records compared to the bad teams having a good record playing **** teams.
 
I think it would make the league more competitive as a whole. Maybe the Pats wouldn't walk to the division title every damn year.
 
I say make it so.
 
How do you determine the playoff teams? More teams from the higher division and only the champion from the lowest division?

I've long had a problem with the NFL structure of eight four team divisions. Too many mediocre division champs in the playoffs.
 
Troglodyte said:
How do you determine the playoff teams? More teams from the higher division and only the champion from the lowest division?

I've long had a problem with the NFL structure of eight four team divisions. Too many mediocre division champs in the playoffs.
Click to expand...

no one from the lower division would go to playoffs, they get promoted to the top league for the following season taking the spot of the worst team in the top league.

That's how it works.
It could be two teams going down directly and the best two taking their spots or
the worst team going down directly while the 2nd worst plays an elimination game with the 2nd best of the lower league where the winner goes to the top league.
or 2 directly down while the 3rd goes to the elimination game. etc, etc
 
Litos said:
no one from the lower division would go to playoffs, they get promoted to the top league for the following season taking the spot of the worst team in the top league.

That's how it works.
It could be two teams going down directly and the best two taking their spots or
the worst team going down directly while the 2nd worst plays an elimination game with the 2nd best of the lower league where the winner goes to the top league.
or 2 directly down while the 3rd goes to the elimination game. etc, etc
Click to expand...

If no one from the lowest division can make the playoffs, then the entire regular season for that division would be strictly exhibition from the get-go. I think letting the champ in would help keep those fans stay interested and make for possible Cinderella teams.
 
This is a stupid ******* idea. The 99 Rams are one of the greatest stories in the history of the NFL. Taking away the ability to go from worst to first would kill off much of what makes the NFL so compelling. Unless you are a fan of the Jags, Lions or Brows, you can convince yourself that you have some kind of shot every year.

It would be idiotic to take that away from fans.
 
Troglodyte said:
If no one from the lowest division can make the playoffs, then the entire regular season for that division would be strictly exhibition from the get-go. I think letting the champ in would help keep those fans stay interested and make for possible Cinderella teams.
Click to expand...

the significance of winning the lower league is the chance to be in the top league. That' how you won't find a team like the colts giving games away to the rest of his division counterparts to secure the first pick
 
Don't like the idea either. If I was a fan of one of the lower tier teams, I'd have no interest in watching the NFL at all if I knew before the season started that we're not making the playoffs/Super Bowl/whatever.

Currently, the fans of the teams at the top of the proposed lower division have at least SOME hope. That hope would be lost in the new format.
 
I guess you could build an ABC division based upon last year so that every game in A is a three star matchup and every c game is competitive. But this is America and Soccer sucks - Kenny Powers.
 
I would do away with playing teams in the division twice.

And then lotto random the rest of the schedule.

But every team would have a chance for the ultimate prize provided they win enough.
 
Troglodyte said:
If no one from the lowest division can make the playoffs, then the entire regular season for that division would be strictly exhibition from the get-go. I think letting the champ in would help keep those fans stay interested and make for possible Cinderella teams.
Click to expand...

Being in the top tier making top tier pay would be the motivation to play hard.

24 in the NFL 8 playoff teams
8 in the relagation league.
Now get creative...
Relagation league plays a 7 weeks schedule from week after SB
That would end last week of March.
Bottom 4 out: top 4 in.

Boom.
Combine-Schedule-Draft.
Shorter off season. Hey while we are at it... the relegation teams (first the old then the new) get the first 8 picks. Followed by the new four NFL teams, then the rest by order of finish


Sent from my iPhone using Steeler Nation mobile app
 
So the Steelers suffer some tough injuries, get demoted, get their guys healthy and go 13-2 and tear through the scrubs on the NFL but don't have a chance at the title? No thanks.
 
As my NFL obsession has waned over the past 3-4 seasons (actually started before Vick, but that year gave it a big push), I have been very into world soccer. It is a very compelling sport and their method of academies, youth development, free agency/team building, relegation and championship formats are very different from anything we are used to in the United States.

I mean it is literally an entirely different structure of "sport franchises" than what we are used to.

So I say this with the utmost respect to both their system (which I am growing to really enjoy watching and following) and our system: The two are not compatible. And I've thought about it a LOT. Written draft blog articles about it. How to create a minor league/development football league. How relegation might work in baseball (which is the sport it would actually apply to best in my opinion).

There are many reasons the "soccer system" works internationally that prohibits it from really working in any U.S. professional sport.

The first thing America would have to get rid of is parity. International soccer (from the German Bundesliga, to the Premier League to the French Ligue 1 to Italian Serie A to Spanish La Liga) does not have parity. Each country's soccer league have top dogs that are light years ahead financially than even the #10 or #12 teams in those leagues. Some leagues might have 5-6 "rich teams", others might only have 2-3. But each, without exception, has them.

Even with some forms of even distribution of revenue it still creates huge discrepancies in team building.

But all that said, soccer is a unique sport where the greatest 11 players can be played very defensively, get a few bad bounces and lose 1-0 or 2-1 to a vastly inferior team. So the "any given Saturday" effect in soccer is very real. In football, that is not true. The best 22 players (and it's really now the best 28-30) will mostly dominate lower level competition. The worst NFL team will likely destroy any college football team (as much as some want to argue otherwise). The way the game is played is too physical that the MOST physical, the STRONGEST, the BEST quarterbacks wouldn't rule the day. It would look a lot like the best college programs facing off against the pansies on their schedules.

The way soccer evolved in Europe from a very "club level", community pub "team" is just different from how our professional NFL franchises evolved (again, baseball's a bit different and might be worth discussion if baseball was played and loved in every community like soccer is in Europe),

I mean just in the little country of England there are something like TEN levels of soccer leagues which equates to something like 200 soccer teams. At the lowest level it literally is a "club sport" of local guys getting paid peanuts to play almost pick-up level soccer games every weekend in 2500 seat arenas (fields). The only way it economically works for these smaller, lesser teams is because England is so small (travel expenses are minimal), soccer is a cheap sport to play (all you need is a decent field and ball and minimal equipment), and there are SO many people that play it world wide that the pool of talent is there not just for England's many teams but all the teams in every other European country (and South American countries and Middle Eastern countries and Asian countries).

Even if you tried to build a 2-league system in America, adding 16 new franchises and playing two 24-team leagues, the new revenue created might not pay for the expense of all those teams. And then you'd have to allow different tiers of salary caps or salary allowances. The division 2 teams wouldn't be able to keep talent vs. division 1 teams and "haves and have-nots" would be created, thus relegating many teams into division 2 status for a generation. Sure, you can hope your team gets a Saudi prince to buy a team, spend millions (or billions) of his own money to buy his way into Division 1 play (this happens in soccer all over the world), but I'm not sure that's what Americans want from their pro sports teams.

The tier system also works in soccer because of the way talent is developed, retained and bought/sold on the open market. One of the most interesting aspects of international soccer is their ability to sign talent at a very early age, something Americans (maybe rightly) sketchy about. Once signed there is very little "freedom of movement" between teams. The most often way a transaction happens is when a team buys a player from another team. This money can be a boon of profit for a small mid-tier franchise in soccer. I mean millions of dollars for one 18 or 19 year old you develope. That type of "transfer money" is what really makes the soccer leagues tick and acts as a distribution of wealth from the rich teams to the mid-level to the poor teams in kind of a trickle-down economy.

With our love of collegiate athletics and the "draft system", I'm not sure any type of relegation system would work. Who gets the first pick of college talent and why would they want to play in division 2 coming out of college and not primetime division 1?

In world-wide soccer there is no draft. Talent scouts sign players as young as 8 years old. Move entire families to their cities and place their precocious children in special soccer/academic schools. Some teams have multiple squads of "under 17" and "under 23" talent that they face off against each other for practice. There a few franchises that have teams in league 1 and also another team in lower tiers that is allowed to advance (relegation wise) only so high. I think Barcelona has its main team and a "B" team that plays in Spain's tier 2 division.

The relegation idea is great in principle but is very hard in practice. And how it evolved in the soccer world is very different from American sports and will (in all likelihood) never really work. Might be fun to think about but the logistics of it, the financial size of American sports, the physical size of the United States in general (and the cost associated with travel) just make the world soccer model unfeasible.
 
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I don't like this idea. In the NFL some teams go from good to terrible or vice versa in a year. Also injuries are huge. Look at the colts w/o luck or us if Ben goes down. I don't mind the division games they help build up rivalries. Also the way it is, each team in a division is giving a more or less fair chance because you play similar teams. With a total random schedule some teams would get totally hosed while maybe some mediocre teams could coast into the playoffs.
 
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