In 1933, George Preston Marshall (owner of the Boston, then Washington, Redskins from the club's founding in 1932 until his death in 1969 at the age of 72) and Joe Carr (the league's first president, serving in that capacity from 1921 until his death in 1939 at the age of 59) each punched one-way tickets to Canton for themselves by proposing a unique concept — the splitting up of the NFL into two divisions, the winners therefrom meeting in a league championship game at the end of the season (a one-game "World Series of Football," as it were).
But the NFL had so few teams in those days, largely due to the Great Depression (10 in 1933 and 1934 and only nine in 1935 and 1936), that some division rivals played each other three times in some years — especially in the Western Division, which had only four teams in 1935 and 1936 (the Eastern Division had five teams throughout this period). In 1935, for example, the Packers and the Lions had three meetings, and so did the Packers and the Cardinals (now the Arizona Cardinals). Both 1934 and 1936 also saw the Packers and Cardinals play one another three times (the third meeting in 1936, in the season finale, ended in a scoreless tie).
Meanwhile, north of the border, up Canada way, three meetings between some division rivals has been a fixture in the CFL schedule — mainly because that league has had only nine teams playing an 18-game schedule since 1986 (except for 2020, where COVID caused the cancellation of the entire season, and 2021, where the season was cut to 14 games). Teams in the four-team East play two of their three division rivals three times and the other one twice; in the five-team West, it's three meetings vs. two of the four division rivals and two vs. the other two.
And speaking of the 18-game schedule, that holds the key to the NFL increasing the number of same-division games — since with it, all division rivals can have three meetings, along with playing all four teams from a division of their own conference (the divisional assignments rotating every three years), plus all four teams from a division of the other conference (the divisional assignments rotating every four years). The 18th game would be intra-conference games between teams that finished in the same place in their respective divisions the season before — first place vs. first place, second vs. second, and so on, with all four teams playing their "18th game" against a team from the same division, these assignments also rotating in successive years.
Due to the fact that teams would end up playing nine of their 18 games within their own division instead of only six (thus making "overlaps" like the one we saw in the NFC last season that much less likely), division finish would need to be given greater emphasis in determining both playoff seeds and the playoff berths themselves; e.g., if two teams tie for a wild card berth and one of them finished second in their division while the other team finished third in theirs, the second-place team should get in. After all, if a tie for a playoff seed should go to a first-place team over a second-place team (as the Lions are proposing), then shouldn't a tie for a playoff berth go to a second-place team over a third-place team?
It should be made more difficult for one division to send three of its teams to the playoffs. A team that finishes in the bottom half of their division, or the "second division" as they used to say in baseball, has no business being in the playoffs — unless they finish with an outright better record than a team that finished higher in another division.
More same-division games would also make it less likely for a team to win a division with a losing record — something that has happened four times in the last 15 years (by Seattle in 2010, Carolina in 2014, Washington in 2020, and Tampa Bay in 2022).
This is why the owners need to think twice before throwing the baby that is the NFL playoff format out with the bathwater — a "bathwater" that is caused by having too few games between teams in the same division.
Make division rivalries meaningful again.
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