The Australian Footy League plays a 22-game season, with an 18-team league. That means you play 17 teams, and five of those teams, you play twice. Currently the AFL has a system of weighting where you take the final order from last year, and you divide it into three tiers of six (teams #1-6, #7-12, and #13-18). For those five duplicate games, each team plays three teams within its OWN tier, and one team each from the other two tiers, the idea being to keep the schedule as competitive as possible (and it has the additional advantage/disadvantage of giving teams which finish lower on the ladder a slightly easier schedule than those higher up). The duplicate games under this system always allowed for a second matchup of intra-city games (Brisbane/Gold Coast, Adelaide/Port Adelaide, etc.), and other rivalry games (Carlton/Collingwood, etc.), which may or may not help with equalization but kept fan interest high.
Well, there's now a move to change that system, and it's a change that I simply can't imagine American football putting up with (for reasons you'll see in a moment):
During the first seventeen games, each team would play every other team once, a pure round-robin. After seventeen games, the top six would be set. So would the middle six, and the bottom six. Then, the last five games would be a round robin within the groups of six. So, the top six would play for positioning within the first six finals spots, the middle six would fight for finals' spots seven and eight, and the bottom six would slug it out for draft positioning. Every game would connect two teams of relatively equal strength. This is being called the "17-5" model, for obvious reasons, and it seems fairly straightforward. BUT, you wouldn't know in advance what games you were going to get those last five rounds of the season - can you imagine U.S. television networks and football franchises going nuts over that? They scream about the "flex game" on Sunday nights - imagine if you didn't even know which weeks you had HOME games? (Although, I suppose that might be fixable...I can think of some unfixable problems, though...)
Another possibility is simply going to divisions or conference setups - maybe you start with three conferences, and they play each other twice and everyone else once, and you know ahead of time who your five duplicate opponents are. For ex., put the four western clubs from Perth and Adelaide in with, say, Western and Geelong? Then, take your four eastern clubs in Sydney and greater Brisbane, and add in, say, St. Kilda and Richmond? Finally, you leave the other six Melbourne clubs together, probably the ones with the most tradition together - Collingwood, Carlton, Essendon, Melbourne, North Melbourne, and Hawthorn. If you don't like my combinations, change them. I'm just making an example.
Personally, I like the conference idea better, but I would still place them in one large, eighteen team ladder. I'm very intrigued by the "17-5" model, but it feels a tad...I was going to say "unfair", but it probably isn't. "Weird"? Unusual, certainly, as I don't know of any other league who's ever done this. Nothing against trying something unusual, right? The AFL has tinkered with its playoff system so many times it's unfathomable - in fact, it's hard to believe they've kept this top 4-biased set-up for twenty years now! Why couldn't they try this next year?
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