Most of the time, observers simply look at the combined winning percentage of every team's opponents in calculating and ranking every team's strength of schedule for an upcoming season.
Another — and more superior — variation is comparative strength of schedule, to determine whether each team's schedule is more difficult or less difficult in an upcoming season from what they had played in the previous season.
But what about taking travel mileage into account?
The aggregate, round-robin travel mileage among the four teams in the NFC North is 1,829 miles — but for the four teams in the NFC East it is 4,271 miles.
Clearly, this places the NFC East at a severe disadvantage vis-a-vis the NFC North.
But if the Cowboys are replaced by the Ravens in the NFC East, the latter's aggregate intra-divisional travel mileage falls all way down to 692 — making things a lot fairer (true, the AFC teams are spread further apart than the NFC teams — but there is not much that can be done about that).
A chain-reaction realignment can be done — moving the Cowboys from the NFC East to the NFC West, the Seahawks from the NFC West to the AFC West (in which they played from 1977 through 2001), the Chiefs from the AFC West to the AFC South (remember that Missouri was a slave state until 1865, and a Jim Crow state until 1964), the Colts from the AFC South to the AFC North, and the Ravens from the AFC North to the NFC East (Jack Kent Cooke and Edward Bennett Williams were the two most hated men in Baltimore for marooning the Colts in the pre-merger NFL's Western Conference from 1953 through 1969, forcing them to play the Rams, 49ers, Bears, Lions, Packers, and [from 1961 onward] Vikings twice every year).
Besides, since San Francisco is the most "woke" city that has an NFL team, while Dallas is the least "woke" city that has an NFL team, this will be an endless source of exquisite tension twice a year if they are playing in the same division (what good does it do anybody if Dallas plays six games against teams on the East Coast?) And back in 1967, when the Saints entered the NFL as an expansion team, they could have gone into the Western Conference's Coastal Division along with the Cowboys, Rams, and 49ers, Baltimore going into the Eastern Conference's Capitol Division with the Giants, Philadelphia, and Washington, with the Century Division consisting of the Falcons, Browns, Steelers, and Cardinals.
In the summer of 1974, the National Hockey League bravely faced the same challenge when it broke up the New York Rangers and the Boston Bruins, a rivalry that was so brutal that had the TV rating format existed at that time, all of the games between them would have been rated TV-MA — but Rangers fans reacted by immediately turning on the New York Islanders, whose visits to Madison Square Garden became like the very bottom circle of Dante's Inferno.
Of course which divisions play each other, both within and outside the conference, plays a role in how many miles a team must travel every year — but again, not much can be done about that.
But tight geographical circles can be placed around teams in the same division — and should.
Otherwise, just do what the UK's Premier League does; after all, none of our sports had divisions as we know it until fairly recently.
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