[Alberta's Child]

Despite the NFLs efforts at providing easier schedules for worse teams, the Bills always have to play the Patriots twice, but the Patriots get to play the Bills instead.

The NFL really shoots themselves in the foot sometimes. For one thing, there's no good reason why a team should be rewarded with an "easy" schedule just because they sucked the prior year. That's how you end up with 13-3 teams losing in their first playoff game and 9-7 teams winning Super Bowls.

Secondly, that whole plan makes no sense in an era of salary caps and free agency, when a team can't even maintain its roster consistently from one year to the next. As a result, you see teams going from Super Bowl champions to basement-dwellers very quickly these days (and vice versa), which makes any strategy of basing a schedule one year on the prior year's performance completely pointless.

[Dr. Sivana]

The NFL really shoots themselves in the foot sometimes.

Its goal, making money, is not necessary the same as our goal, seeing great football. The whole real free agency and salary cap was pretty much imposed on them, so they changed the product to keep more fans engaged.

[dfwgator]

I like promotion/relegation like in soccer.