[Passacaglia]

So I've been mostly playing FOF9 with historical data, and my goal has been to use it to create a league that's "better" than the way things are now. Mostly that's involved going back to when I was a kid, when there were 28 teams in 6 divisions that frankly made no sense. As I've played around with different schedules, it's occurred to me that when the league is structured this way, it doesn't make for evenness in scheduling. In fact, 32 is a much better number, and thinking about it, there's not much to improve on with the way divisions are set up in the current NFL -- they've moved teams around in a way that's kept everything pretty neat and organized, and the few franchise moves that have happened since that haven't really screwed it up. The only "weird" thing is Dallas being in the NFC East, and I think that's probably preferred for most people. Maybe some weirdness with the AFC North and South, but no one really cares about that.

This is actually frustrating to me, since there are things I'd like to change, but in doing so, the result is worse than the current NFL setup. I've love to move Seattle back to the AFC, but doing so just messes everything up. Seems like the NFL was pretty brilliant moving them to the NFC, since they have so few teams in the West.

So, I'm tearing the whole thing up, and trying to make things as "historically accurate" as possible, with an extremely loose version of "historically accurate" that means "if it's not the way it is now, but is the way it was sometime in the past, it's good." For example, I'm taking out the idea that Baltimore, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh joined the AFC in the merger, and keeping them in the NFL. I'm pretending the Colts never left Baltimore, the Cardinals never left St. Louis, the Rams stayed in LA, the Raiders in Oakland, etc. I'm putting all the teams that have joined since the merger in the AFC to keep the conferences even -- which means the Seahawks get to go there. It also means there's some weirdness with Carolina and Tampa Bay being in the AFC, while we have to get used to Baltimore, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh in the NFC. The Patriots will remain being Boston, not New England -- and this probably won't affect anything, but the stadiums will all be in the city instead of suburbs (I checked and couldn't find any teams that were in the suburbs in 1970, otherwise I would have kept them there). The Rams have the old "blue-and-yellow" that I'm familiar with from the 80s instead of the "blue-and-gold" they have now, but not the "blue-and-white" that they actually wore in 1970. I would have kept Washington as the Redskins since I hate the Commanders name, but I don't want to offend for the sake of some dumb dynasty on a board no one goes to anymore, so I changed it to Senators, since it looks like there was an NFL team with that name for one season in the 20s.