As the postseason for Major League Baseball approaches and National Football League analysts begin to project playoff outcomes, it is time for American sports to disband from the structured regions and divisions they currently operate within.
We have seen an increase in parity across the sports world, professional and collegiate.
The near quality on the playing field has led to quality teams missing out on chances to win championships.
In the MLB, this is prevalent in the American League East and the National League Central and East divisions. The NL sees this same problem in the National Football Conference and American Football Conference East divisions and the NFC and AFC North divisions.
This is a crime more heinous than the crooks running the NCAA’s Bowl Championship Series system. Why should a professional team be denied an opportunity at postseason play solely because of its geographic location?
American sports leagues should abolish the league system for the sake of improved competition amongst their teams.
The ideal situation for this would be the systems in operation in the European soccer leagues. Take the top leagues in Europe for instance, England’s Barclays Premiere League and LaLiga in Spain.
Each league has 20 teams and each team plays every other team twice, once at home and once away. While they do not have playoffs, a 38-week season is sufficient for determining a league champion.
With the size of American sports leagues, especially the NFL, this isn’t a plausible system. A 62 game season would be an outlandish attempt at equality, by any means, for the NFL.
The MLB, however, could make this work considering the high volume of games played every season. If every team played every other team in a three-game home series and a three-game away series, the MLB could accomplish this in 174 games per team, which is only 12 more than the current season.
And, it could award the overall best 10 teams playoff spots.
As an added bonus, the elimination of leagues would solve the American League versus National League designated hitter by universally allowing it or not.
When fair scheduling has been a hot topic of debate amongst MLB teams and management, it only seems like the fairest and most appropriate course of action to do so.
For the NFL, a fair solution for this problem is a little less emulative of European soccer leagues and a bit more radical. If the NFL were to keep the current AFC and NFC conferences and have each team play every other team in the conference for a total of 15 regular season games, alternating home and away games season by season, then every team would get seeded and be placed in the playoffs.
The one less game of the regular season could then be turned into an extra round of playoff games.
Americans love tournaments just as much as they love football, so why not give the them both?