B.C.FAN wrote:This year's experience shows the importance of keeping both divisions.
Sorry but I have to disagree.
Halfway through the season, every team in the league is still in the hunt for first place, let alone a playoff game. Western teams know they have to keep winning to lock up a playoff position. Eastern teams know that no matter how bad things have been, they still have hope.
Halfway through the season, the notion that a team with (a) only a 0.100 winning pct and (b) no mathematical chance of getting above 0.500, still has a realistic crack at FIRST in its division while there's a team from the other division that might not even qualify despite a winning record is
BUSH. Especially when they play essentially the same schedule as I describe below.
The problem is: Why should less deserving Eastern teams who "still have hope", "no matter how bad things have been" do so
at the expense of Western teams who have to "keep winning to lock up a playoff position"? How do you explain THAT to western team fans? Why should Eastern teams never have to "keep winning to lock up a playoff position"? Why shouldn't Western teams ever get to "know that no matter how bad things have been, they still have hope"? Last year around Labour Day there were two teams at 1-8, last in each of their respective divisions. Even though they both eventually missed the playoffs, the prospects of these two teams in terms of playoff berth hopes at said point were quite different. Is this a fair system?
That keeps fan interest piqued across the league. Much of the drama in week to week action would be lost if Western teams knew they could coast into the playoffs and Eastern teams knew they had little hope.
But is there really all that much interest in the East right now that the divisional playoff format is worth saving? Montreal isn't even close right now to selling out their stadium. They expanded from 20,202 to 25,012 capacity to open the 2010 season, and sold out every game that year but not once since, and just barely a week ago had their worst attendance in over 15 years. Toronto is drawing even smaller crowds than Montreal, on average. And you could argue that the divisional-based playoff system is robbing the league of drama because some Eastern teams "[know] they [can] coast into the playoffs" at the expense of an otherwise deserving playoff team in the west that will have NO hope at all merely because of an accident of geography.
Your argument assumes that eastern teams would remain as weak as they are now if we went to a single division playoff format. But they wouldn't. They would become more competitive out of necessity. Right now the status quo means they don't have to, so they don't.
The worst thing that could happen to the league would be that the eastern half of the country, with two-thirds of the population, stopped supporting their teams and watching games on TV. The league can't survive without stable franchises and fan support in the East.
As I said the east doesn't support their teams all that much even right now. Attendances are comparatively weak compared to what smaller western markets are doing. As far as tv ratings, there's an active thread on here keeping track of these — for weekend games, at least. Eastern teams have played in weekend games on 28 occasions though week 9 but only four times has such a game been the league's highest rated for the weekend (and such game has always featured one western team; BC on three occasions and Edm once). For the west, this metric goes 14 times on 33 occasions, a much better conversion rate, which includes 10 purely western games. No purely eastern game, contested by teams from the two provinces with 2/3 of the country's population, has yet this season been the league's weekend ratings champ. So the status quo of divisions hasn't helped much on this score, either attendance-wise or ratings-wise.
I would argue the reverse: the status quo sends eastern teams the message that they simply needn't bother trying to improve their teams when the league hands them playoff berths like candy. They field perennially mediocre teams (on average, compared to the west) and the market responds accordingly. I would also argue your position takes western fan support for granted. It's there right now, yes, but will western fans eventually become disenchanted with year after year of road playoff games and even missed playoffs when eastern teams can get a home playoff berth with a worse record than western teams who miss?
The main problem is a mismatch in the structures of the regular season and the playoffs. In most leagues with division structure, most of your regular season is within your own division and you can put differences in team performance in different divisions down to much different schedules. But this is NOT the case in the CFL. Everyone plays ten games against one pool (west) and eight games against the other pool (east) regardless of which pool they sit in, which makes it pointless to have assigned them to divisions in the first place, because then you set yourself up for silliness like I already explained: the possibility of a team no better than 0.500 finishing first in its division and getting a by to the penultimate playoff game while a team from the other division with a better record might not even qualify. The coupling of a playoff format that is division-based, with a regular season that is not, doesn't necessarily generate the best pool of playoff teams, or seeding thereof.
The current season is bringing the folly of this mismatch to the forefront, and it ought to be abolished. We could reduce the number of the interdivision games, pre-1981 style, to have both a regular season and a playoff that are division-based. But because the league is so small, this would risk fan fatigue from facing the same opponent so many times each season (especially in the east where the bulk of your games would feature only three opponents).
So the favoured alignment option for the regular season and playoff structures is to remove the playoff division structure and just let the top six teams have at 'er in the post-season. This way everyone fights over the same berths and no one fights any more or less than another team to earn a berth. You'd stand a better chance of seeing the best two teams square off in the Grey Cup — which the status quo will NEVER generate as long as one division is more powerful with the regular season not division-based. Moreover, it will force eastern teams to improve their product to remain competitive, which would in turn help build their fan bases.
As an added bonus it will rid us of this ridiculous commentary that's gathering steam in the media right now, of how the crossover berth gives the easier road to the Grey Cup. You want an easy road to the Grey Cup? The only answer to this question should always be: Keep winning. And the playoff format should generally reflect this. Right now it most certainly does NOT.
The CFL's East and West divisions have become artefacts of a bygone era when the sheer size of our country precluded easy travel outside one's division.
This is no longer the case. It's time to dump them.
Sports can be a peculiar thing. When partaking in fiction, like a book or movie, we adopt a "Willing Suspension of Disbelief" for enjoyment's sake. There's a similar force at work in sports: "Willing Suspension of Rationality". If you doubt this, listen to any conversation between rival team fans. You even see it among fans of the same team. Fans argue over who's the better QB or goalie, and selectively cite stats that support their views while ignoring those that don't.
