I’m all for innovation and moving forward if the reasoning is solid, but it would appear there’s a lot of people looking at the conference systems in US sport who think that model could work well for the NRL, without understanding why they have conferences to begin with.
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If the NFL was beginning today, do you imagine they’d decide to put half of the teams in New York City, make that one conference and have the rest of the teams spread around the country in another conference?
If they did, how much media would the other conference get in NYC?
5%?

The AFC began life as the American Football League, a rival competition to the NFL which had been in existence for 30 years prior.
There wasn’t a single competition that suddenly decided to break into separate conferences, and the Super Bowl was more a ‘marriage of convenience’.

NFL teams began to be grouped in Divisions on a geographical basis because it allowed you to build a playoff system that sent the winner of the division to the next stage.
There was no Top 5 or Top 8 (this was the US, right, where 2nd place is for losers).

Wild Card teams were added to the playoff mix to bring in more television revenue through extra playoff games.
There was solid reasoning behind why it all happened.
At the moment, I don’t see that same reasoning in this NRL conference idea.
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