MAKING THE NFL DIVISIONS WORSE
If you have spent time on NFL internet circles you will have invariably witnessed at least one of these. The NFL divisions aren’t perfect and people like to try and clean them up by focusing on geographic proximity. It’s a pretty common offseason thought experiment when football fans get bored. Well, I’m bored too. But I’m not interested in any of that “sensible” bullshit. These cowards all take the easy way out and draw circles around the 4 closest logos on a map. Anyone can do that. Simpleton shit. It takes a visionary to make things worse.
I had two goals. Make every team travel as much as possible, and strip away as many rivalries as possible so that every division is a bunch of teams that rarely see each other under the current alignment and have no real history with each other. This genuinely was harder than you might think. You can’t just immediately grab the 4 farthest points for one division, because every subsequent division would shrink. You have to strike the right balance of finding 4 distant enough points each time. My strategy was to look for the biggest cluster of teams (the northeast corridor area) and make that entire cluster the starting point of each division, and then slowly expand outward accordingly.
So here we go. The worst NFL Divisions! Geographically bullshit, with no teams that are already division rivals.
PATRIOTS – JAGUARS – BROWNS – SEAHAWKS.
The worst travelling division by far with a team in several extreme geographical points. The Patriots would continue to have a Florida Achilles heel team, and the Jaguars having to go north into shitty cold weather stadiums in December would suck.
BEARS – COMMIES – SAINTS – CARDINALS
The holiest of all divisions. Two teams in humid swamps, one in an arid desert, one in frigid windy hell. This is a division with a lot of forgotten losers in it, teams who have never had a moment to shine or only had a few glory years a while ago.
PACKERS – TEXANS – PANTHERS – JETS
Two newbie southern losers versus two old money cold weather teams that wear green. Everyone in this division would hate the Packers more than the others. This is also probably the geographically “smallest” division.
CHIEFS – FALCONS – STEELERS – 49ERS
The division with most rotten vibes? 3 teams with a dynasty in their history, lots of entitled old fandom jerks and new fandom snobs, and then the poor Falcons getting mercilessly bullied in the middle. This division might also be the victor for most brutally competitive under current team levels.
COWBOYS – RAMS – LIONS – RAVENS
Hey look, the two Thanksgiving stalwarts in the same division! They could just make it a division game between Dallas/Detroit every year. Baltimore fans would complain how Dallas and LA get all the attention. Lions fans just want to experience joy.
VIKINGS – BILLS – CHARGERS – TITANS
The Loser Vibes division. No champions and a lot of fans that like to whine about being unappreciated. Two 4-time Super Bowl losers with fans constantly trying to out-victimize the other. Also the glorious animosity that would exist between Buffalo and the Titans due to the Music City Miracle and subsequent 2-decade drought.
GIANTS – BENGALS – BRONCOS – BUCS
Maybe I should have swapped the Bills for the Giants so it could be the Killer B’s division, but alas. I don’t think there is any sort of relationship between any of these teams at all outside maybe the Giants/Broncos Super Bowl connection from the 80’s.
DOLPHINS – EAGLES – COLTS – RAIDERS
The current Eagles would steamroll these other losers. Other than that, this division doesn’t have much vibe other than mediocrity.
I spent 20 minutes trying to come up with names for each division and I straight up couldn’t do it. I was too successful in making them so unrelated that no name could really tie them together. If you have ideas go for it. We could call the Bears/Saints/Cardinals/Commies the Holy Division, but even then you have the Commies in that den of sin Washington DC. Maybe they can be the representative of hell.
If your team was in this new division, who would you hate the most of your rivals? I’d probably hate the Bucs the most. Says a lot because I don’t have strong feelings towards the Bucs either way.
The funny part is that this project has clearly shown to me the current NFL divisions are actually very well aligned overall with the notable exception of the Cowboys being in the NFC East, which was only preserved for historical rivalry reasons. If you just swapped the Cowboys and like, the Panthers, everything would be pretty much fine.
Just for funsies, let’s check out the complete map:
49ers and Falcons were both in the NFC West from 1967-2001. I know a lot of old heads that still hate the 49ers. It would be pretty easy to rekindle that hate.
That’s true. The Falcons had some pretty good teams back in the late 70’s early 80’s, but the Niners were always better.
Great idea!
How about taking the first two letters of each team (Broncos=br, Vikings=vi, 49ers=fo, etc.).
Then you also get kind of two conferences:
4 syllables
eacorado
casacobe
jepatepa
raracoli
less syllables
chtivibi
japasebr
bugibebr
fastfoch
…and some stupid words.
All hail the Boogie Biebers!
There are too many teams in the East. This should include relocating some of them to the middle of nowhere. Move the Jets to Montana, the Falcons to Alaska, the Commanders to Hawaii!!!
The Lions can have a rivalry with the Rams over the Stafford trade and the fallout of that.
They can beef with the Cowboys over Thanksgiving and the fact they’re the cowboys. Actually The NFL would love to put Det/Dal every year, leaving 2 open spots, including a free prime time slot for whatever games they want.
City Pride between Detroit and Baltimore can probably work up a rivalry for them.
Plus the Lions didn’t get stuck in the Loser Vibes division, so it all works out.
The Lions are also still bitter about the game between them two years ago in December and that why they made a point to rub it in when they played this year.
As a Broncos fan I guess I would hate the Bucs the most? Much like you I don’t really have strong feelings towards the Bucs now that Brady is gone.
You poor man! SOMEONE GET THIS MAN SOME UFL GAMES, STAT!
CFL preseason started today
Bizarrely, my first thought about Bills/Vikes being together wasn’t the four-lost-Super-Bowls partnership; it was their crazy 2022 game immortalized by Dave here: https://www.thedrawplay.com/comic/the-best-new-catch/
Each division I scrolled past filled me with an ever more uncomfortable feeling. Each of them feels very wrong, and very substanceless. So, well done, I guess? You’ve created something that’s too benign to be monstrous, but otherwise has all the hallmarks. I hate it.
I too felt vaguely unsettled through the whole thing.
The other somewhat strange thing about the current divisions is the dolphins being in the east and the colts being in the south. Makes no geographical sense. Swap them and you’re good.
Could go one step further and move the Ravens to the east, Dolphins to the south, and Colts to the north, if you want to get _really_ geographically tight, but that’s unnecessary.
I once redivisioned the NFL with the goal of the worst names possible. I broke them up into 8 horizontal divisions, named, from north to south:
North North North
South North North
North South North
South South North
North North South
South North South
North South South
South South South
You now remember the 49ers used to be in a division with the Atlanta Falcons. Plus the New Orleans Saints and Carolina Panthers. Called the NFC West, no less.
If you wanted nostalgia/ living in the past I would do bears, Steelers, pats, cowboys. Although the Steelers fan base is mainly just a unanimous hatred for Tomlin
It’s pretty weird to say that a main qualification for the divisions is to avoid any rivalries or existing bad blood and then have the next sentence be “OK, Seahawks and Patriots are together.”
What possible reason do the Patriots have to hate the Seahawks? Even as a Seahawks fan, I don’t really hate the Patriots more than the level of hate everyone else has for them, all the pain of that Super Bowl is directed inward at the decision not to run.
Patriots guy here. The Seahawks can eat a dick.
You are the second fan to make it seem like there is bad blood between Sea/NE and I don’t know why, what reason is there for hate? Especially from the Patriots side, you won that super bowl a decade ago. You don’t play each other often at all. What’s up?
The Seahawks had a big regular season win against the Pats when Seattle/LOB were ascending but that’s the only time I remember them being a problem.
The AFC teams that contended for seeding during the dynasty were the rivals I cared about.
Now the rivals are the other teams contending for draft order 🙂 but I’m hoping I can worry about playoff seeding again soon.
Wilson rubbed me the wrong way. And before that all of the screen time given to Pete Carroll chewing his cud drove me nuts. On top of that, for some reason for a while the Seahawks seemed to be THE primetime team and I was just sick of seeing them. I know that one reason for that was the AWS connection a few years ago, but even without that they had overexposure.
I’m sorry, but I can’t help but laugh at the idea of a PATRIOTS fan being sick of seeing another team get a boost from the media. That’s like a multibillionaire being jealous of a guy who won the lottery.
So I guess you aren’t sick of the Chiefs, huh?
Seeing a Pats fan complain about another team getting some primetime attention for a few years is extremely funny
Didn’t the Pats fans get all up in arms when Richard Sherman got up in Brady’s face after a game? He like hunted him down on the field to float. Personally, I thought it was hilarious, but I had to go through weeeeks of hearing how barbarous the Seahawks were.
*gloat. Rackin’ frackin’ fat thumbs.
I personally have no issues with the Seahawks, but if I had to take a guess, it’s probably because Seattle has very lowkey had New England’s number as of late? The Patriots won the game that mattered the most, but the Seahawks have won the last four regular season matchups between the two teams, with all of them being extremely close, hotly contested games. Even then, I don’t think it’s justified at all. All of the major players in what would have been a cross-conference rivalry are long gone at this point and they don’t play often enough to leave any sort of lasting impression.
I tried reorganizing the divisions a couple years ago and gave up after the NFCAFL-CIO (Lions, Browns, Steelers, Bills) and the AFC Swamp-Ass (Texans, Saints, Bucs, Dolphins). So I admire your tenacity.
I want to regenerate the divisions randomly each year before the schedule is released.
Then the schedule release would be genuinely interesting.
As a Packer fan, the new division feels kind of familiar. There’s the team who can’t develop a QB to save their lives and also had their only Super Bowl win back when the USSR was still a thing. There’s the blue/silver cat team that suffers annually. And then there’s the team with horns.
I can’t bring myself to hate any of them currently because they’re mostly just sad historically, but I think I would grow to despise the Texans if we had to play them twice a year. Stroud and Love have some parallels, and the teams are both seemingly on a similar trajectory of “try really hard but cap at the Divisional Round”.
Vikings fan born and raised in Wyoming here, I fully support the Loser Vibes division. The only way being a fan of this team could be more difficult is if I had to root against Josh Allen, Super King Big Nuts of Wyoming, twice a year. It would give me so much more ammo to whine every year.
VIKINGS – BILLS – CHARGERS – TITANS: The “No Supe for You!” Division
All I got so far. Sorry…
I think losing to a team consistently in the playoffs warrants a bit of rivalry, especially a close Superbowl. KC-SF, NYG-Buffalo, TB-Raiders should all have dislike small time rivalry.
fuck it, let’s re-create west-central-east divisions
There is some history with the Florida teams
Hurricane Charlie canceled a Bengals @ Bucs preseason game in 2004
Dolphins-Raiders had the Sea of Hands in 1974
2 of the Jags 3 AFC championship losses came against New England, as did their 1st home playoff win (1998 wild-card).