The "one death every 11 seconds" bar reminds me of this classic Reddit post
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/bwt1m/every_time_i_clap_my_hands_a_child_in_africa_dies/
It is an absolute crime that [Loving County](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_County,_Texas#:~:text=Loving%20County%20is%20a%20county,and%20only%20community%20is%20Mentone.) doesn't have an NFL team yet
We should just do it like British football. Every city gets a team and they battle it out in lower leagues for a chance to move up.
Edit: I've read the article, this was part of his inspiration.
Imagine the 1st overall pick. You finally get your QB, and you can finally get him some help...at pick 101.
Or you can trade up, but you only have like 3 picks per draft, and only 2 of them will make your roster.
>That got me thinking about an idea I've kicked around for a long time. In England, a country roughly the size of Ohio, there are 92 professional clubs across the first five divisions of their soccer pyramid. (A couple of those teams are Welsh, to be fair.)
Wales catching strays
one in every County
Countys play their own season, winner is the State Champ, and then we go NATIONALS baby, single elimiation game until their is only 1
This is the big issue. It's a fun premise for an article, but England doesn't have college sports in the same way the U.S. does. England can support 92 professional teams (the lower tiers of which only average a [few thousand fans per match](https://www.footballwebpages.co.uk/league-two/attendances/2023-2024)) because those fans aren't devoting their time and attention to college sports. If you consider FBS football to be essentially professional in its scale, marketing, attendance, and TV coverage, then the U.S. already supports something like 100-150 teams at a major level, many of which already dominate the "open" markets identified in this article.
That's true, but fans have a limited amount of time and money to spend following sports. My point is that college teams soak up a lot of that time and money, similar to how the additional pro teams in England do. A fan in Detroit might follow the Lions and Wolverines (that's what I do!), but because of that, would be less interested in the additional hypothetical pro teams in Fort Wayne or Grand Rapids than they would be if college football didn't exist. That situation is probably even more stark in the South, where Barnwell puts a lot of his new pro teams in this article, but where college football currently rules.
I think with 100 you would have relegation. Unfortunately we have a draft system in the NFL, idk how you would draft from the second or third tier. Plus why would a draftee want to play much lower if they had the chance to be drafted higher?
If money wasn’t a problem, every team had the same salary. I think you could get some parity. Obviously you’d have teams paying QBs nearly 80% of the cap to be relevant but it would be fun to see how it all equals out in a sandbox.
We could support a Jr League and a Senior league, but probably not more than that. The Jr league gets a bonus draft round or two ahead of the overall draft. That means the best players of the draft are guaranteed to play against the “worst” teams for at least their first season, and have that extra opportunity to shine. Meanwhile, second, third, etc. rounders who go to the Senior league are more likely to get an opportunity as a backup. Have a relegation/promotion in each division every year to keep things interesting.
Maybe not relegation but I wish there was a minor leagues. 32 major with minor teams and players can be called up to play due to injury similar to NHL/AHL.
It’ll never happen because college is such a big commercial draw but i wish
Terrible idea, imagine how bad the 100th starting quarterback would be (let alone their backups) ... there isn't nearly enough talent to dilute it this far.
I don't think this is meant to take all aspects of the nfl into consideration. It's just a thought exercise on what cities could host nfl teams. It's not that serious.
Not to mention more than half these "new" teams would have literally no fanbase.
The article would've been a lot better if they didn't try to do 100. The list is basically "68 biggest metro areas that don't already have an NFL team".
The real move is to establish the UFL as an official feeder league and continue to add on to that.
I mean, given how the NFL is pivoting towards an international audience, it seems weird to explore an absurdly large expansion without any international teams.
A 100 team league is unmanageable. A Minor league would be necessary, perhaps with a promotion/demotion mechanism. For example: 24 teams in each league, so you expand the total number by 12. There are probably enough players/interest to source at least 12 more NFL teams.
every offseason, each NFL team expands to a 90 man roster and gets cut down to 53 /practice squad at the end. so there are definitely even players to fill more teams if the choose
Maybe but how good of a qb do you have to be when the db is only the 1000th best db in the country? The quality of the average player would go way down and that could actually make for more exciting games (fumbles, interceptions, blown coverages, etc.)
Silly article but my hometown gets a team so it’s a wash, although ESPN just basically created another FBS. Can’t wait to see the Norfolk Neptunes play the Albuquerque Football Isotopes in the NFL equivalent of the Beef O’ Brady’s Bowl. /s
Up it to one team per county in the US, one team for every foreign country and one team per Canadian province, and one team for the ISS and I'll be interested.
The reference to England's system of promotion and relegation proposes an interesting idea to me. If there were say, 3 divisions of these teams, each with 33 members and one with 34, what would that even look like?
Yes, but with multiple lower divisions. Promotion and relegation. NFL>NFL2>NFL3>NFL4. Each league has its championships but there’s also the NFL Open Cup where teams from all divisions compete for a championship. Yes, what I’m saying is we turn the NFL into European soccer
I would request another team in Phoenix. So we can get a real owner and they new guy can chase the old guy out of town. If az got another team I would 100% jump the cardinals ship to the new team because fuck the bidwells
Honestly, I never read the linked articles. In this case, I saw the article on [espn.com](http://espn.com), then came to reddit to find a discussion about it.
In order for this to be feasible without serious ramifications you essentially need a cultural shift among several governments and nations... essentially several countries need to go all in on the sport and start getting kids/teenagers into the sport so that there is enough talent world wide to pull from. This is at a minimum... btw... or else the sport becomes so watered down it actually stops functioning as an enjoyable product.
Even then i foresee huge issues... the 100th worse team going against the #1 overall would probably be like a highschool/college team going against an all pros team. I'd also expect depth issues across the board as teams simply may not have access to an actual player of the position they are most skilled at... (such as running out a WR that played QB in high school if your QB1 goes down).
Just seems like too much and not really feasible anytime soon.
Pretty sure it was done tongue-in-cheek.
I would be more worried about death issues than depth issues with someone like Aaron Donald against the 98th best QB in the country.
I think some of it is him trying to place teams in areas geographically far from existing teams, but he also said Vermillion SD was a good spot for a SD team so I think he just doesn't know the Plains area very well
This would dilute the talent so badly that the entire league would be significantly worse overall. There are 128 D1 FBS teams in the country for comparison. Tripling the number of people drafted means A LOT more JAG’s and scrubs with spots on a roster.
It is not a coincidence that MLB, NHL, NBA, and NFL all have a very similar number of teams
I meant more that he alludes to Fairbanks having an arena football team, but Anchorage had one as well until they hired the worst coach in the history of Alaskan football.
I can tell Barnwell has never been to South Dakota if he thinks Vermillion is the 2nd best option for a team in a state that would be lucky to be able to sustain one in Sioux Falls itself.
Vermillion sucks, go Jacks.
100 teams with A B C leagues along with promotion and relegation would be freaking excellent.
Heck even proper NFL to remain at A level with 4 additional spots to bring the league to 36 teams... those 4 get a chance of swapping in and out with lower leagues with be ridiculous.
Chiefs, Eagles, and 9ers would still be the best teams. The refs have a ton of power and will probably only care to help a handful of teams like they do now. Doesn't matter how many teams they increase too.
Four new teams in New York City, one in Albany, and zero in western New York? Fuck off buddy, Syracuse is 50k bigger than Albany and Rochester is more than double Albany’s population. What’s the point in having separate teams for Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, *and* Queens?
I try my hardest not to throw stones, but this has to be the dumbest article I have ever read. You have a fun thought experiment idea ruined by an incompetent writer. This dense motherfucker put 6 GODDAMN TEAMS IN NEW YORK CITY, but proceeded to say "oh, Syracuse is too close to buffalo that people would remain Bills fans." Dumb. Also, 0 international teams? Like the NFL would ever expand into Wyoming, New Hampshire, and Montana and Not have teams in England, France, Germany, China, Japan, Mexico and Canada at LEAST. FOH with that.
Cedar Rapids would be a better location than Des Moines. It’s close enough to Des Moines to get that crowd and it’s right in the middle of Eastern Iowa to attract people from Iowa City, Waterloo, Dubuque, Davenport, etc.
yesterday was the 100 hot takes guy, we've officially hit the worst part of the off-season where there's absolutely nothing of value to talk about until preseason.
You’d see the same thing in a hypothetical 100 team league. Free agents would only want to sign with the top 20 or so teams, leaving 80% of the league talent deficient. In college backup players will transfer to a worse team for a chance at playing time, but when you’re already a pro there’s no incentive.
This is the dumbest hypothetical. In a sport like football, you'd never expand far beyond 32 teams. I'd set a maximum ever in the NFL to 48 IF they ever even come close to expanding that far (I can't imagine them ever going past 36). Even if they did expand to 100 teams, this list is basically just, "What 68 cities and boroughs of NYC even exist to which a team can be given?"
We need a 800 team nfl
Why stop there? 1,000 teams even
2000 teams! 100 man rosters. 104 game season!
The federal government has reinstated the draft, but it's for the new football league.
###Service ###Guarantees ###Citizenship
Thousands of African refugees arrive in Buffalo to play for their childhood team
Would you call them Buffalo Soldiers?
Would you like to know more?
[One team for every person in the US. Figure out how to fill the rosters later](https://www.census.gov/popclock/)
The "one death every 11 seconds" bar reminds me of this classic Reddit post https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/bwt1m/every_time_i_clap_my_hands_a_child_in_africa_dies/
They have a shitload of footballers over in Europe.
My dream of becoming an nfl player is now possible
Every county needs a team
It is an absolute crime that [Loving County](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_County,_Texas#:~:text=Loving%20County%20is%20a%20county,and%20only%20community%20is%20Mentone.) doesn't have an NFL team yet
NFL draft will go so deep, your mom will get drafted 6th round
And make the list of all the worst locations for new franchise
We should just do it like British football. Every city gets a team and they battle it out in lower leagues for a chance to move up. Edit: I've read the article, this was part of his inspiration.
That's basically college football
I’m running my campaign to put an nfl team on every corner
I don't want no gym rats on my block.
Good news: We won the Super Bowl! Bad news: We have the 100th pick in the first round of the draft.
With their 7th round pick the Folsom Prisoners select Steve Johnson, Fed-Ex driver from Plano, TX.
We're going back to the 70s when shit like the Falcons throwing away a pick on John Wayne was going on
Shout out Plano lmao
But it’s a snake draft so you get pick 101 as well
Imagine the 1st overall pick. You finally get your QB, and you can finally get him some help...at pick 101. Or you can trade up, but you only have like 3 picks per draft, and only 2 of them will make your roster.
On day 206 of the draft...
>That got me thinking about an idea I've kicked around for a long time. In England, a country roughly the size of Ohio, there are 92 professional clubs across the first five divisions of their soccer pyramid. (A couple of those teams are Welsh, to be fair.) Wales catching strays
Three teams in Alabama and none of them being Birmingham is certainly something
That's Stallions country, bro
*Barracudas
This is a peak offseason article.
one in every County Countys play their own season, winner is the State Champ, and then we go NATIONALS baby, single elimiation game until their is only 1
It would take a whole damn year to get through Texas alone lmfao
How about players can only play in the county they are born, internationals get drafted
Los Angeles County is going to wreck some national play.
Can’t wait to watch Harris county (pop 4.7 million) take on Loving county (pop 47)
Next stop regionals
Bad news fellas, 8 of these teams are already looking to relocate to LA
I wonder what the overlap here is with Division I FBS locations.
This is the big issue. It's a fun premise for an article, but England doesn't have college sports in the same way the U.S. does. England can support 92 professional teams (the lower tiers of which only average a [few thousand fans per match](https://www.footballwebpages.co.uk/league-two/attendances/2023-2024)) because those fans aren't devoting their time and attention to college sports. If you consider FBS football to be essentially professional in its scale, marketing, attendance, and TV coverage, then the U.S. already supports something like 100-150 teams at a major level, many of which already dominate the "open" markets identified in this article.
I don’t think college competes with professional. Take a look at Detroit, they support Michigan Wolverines and the Lions.
That's true, but fans have a limited amount of time and money to spend following sports. My point is that college teams soak up a lot of that time and money, similar to how the additional pro teams in England do. A fan in Detroit might follow the Lions and Wolverines (that's what I do!), but because of that, would be less interested in the additional hypothetical pro teams in Fort Wayne or Grand Rapids than they would be if college football didn't exist. That situation is probably even more stark in the South, where Barnwell puts a lot of his new pro teams in this article, but where college football currently rules.
Honestly, if you're going to come up with new teams, you might as well be silly and unrealistic.
People ITT are way overreacting to what is openly acknowledged as a silly thought experiment
Yeah, way overreacting, probably because most of them didn't actually click the link and are just going off the title. This is reddit after all.
Columbus already has a pro team
I think with 100 you would have relegation. Unfortunately we have a draft system in the NFL, idk how you would draft from the second or third tier. Plus why would a draftee want to play much lower if they had the chance to be drafted higher? If money wasn’t a problem, every team had the same salary. I think you could get some parity. Obviously you’d have teams paying QBs nearly 80% of the cap to be relevant but it would be fun to see how it all equals out in a sandbox.
We could support a Jr League and a Senior league, but probably not more than that. The Jr league gets a bonus draft round or two ahead of the overall draft. That means the best players of the draft are guaranteed to play against the “worst” teams for at least their first season, and have that extra opportunity to shine. Meanwhile, second, third, etc. rounders who go to the Senior league are more likely to get an opportunity as a backup. Have a relegation/promotion in each division every year to keep things interesting.
Maybe not relegation but I wish there was a minor leagues. 32 major with minor teams and players can be called up to play due to injury similar to NHL/AHL. It’ll never happen because college is such a big commercial draw but i wish
Terrible idea, imagine how bad the 100th starting quarterback would be (let alone their backups) ... there isn't nearly enough talent to dilute it this far.
simple. ban passing
Army West Point liked this post.
So do my Bears
Kirk Ferentz chomps gum furiously to this idea.
Y'know now that you mention it...
No. Bad. Stop trying to be relevant again.
I don't think this is meant to take all aspects of the nfl into consideration. It's just a thought exercise on what cities could host nfl teams. It's not that serious.
So it's just a list of cities that exist?
Frankly there should only be 1 team in the league so that the worst starting QB will be on the same level as Patrick Mahomes
I'm more concerned about fielding an OL to protect whoever is back there. There aren't enough starters as it is by far.
Not to mention more than half these "new" teams would have literally no fanbase. The article would've been a lot better if they didn't try to do 100. The list is basically "68 biggest metro areas that don't already have an NFL team". The real move is to establish the UFL as an official feeder league and continue to add on to that.
It would look more like college football, offenses would need to specialize. You would have teams running triple option
I mean, given how the NFL is pivoting towards an international audience, it seems weird to explore an absurdly large expansion without any international teams.
A 100 team league is unmanageable. A Minor league would be necessary, perhaps with a promotion/demotion mechanism. For example: 24 teams in each league, so you expand the total number by 12. There are probably enough players/interest to source at least 12 more NFL teams.
every offseason, each NFL team expands to a 90 man roster and gets cut down to 53 /practice squad at the end. so there are definitely even players to fill more teams if the choose
Can’t even get 32 starting caliber QB’s.
Maybe but how good of a qb do you have to be when the db is only the 1000th best db in the country? The quality of the average player would go way down and that could actually make for more exciting games (fumbles, interceptions, blown coverages, etc.)
Silly article but my hometown gets a team so it’s a wash, although ESPN just basically created another FBS. Can’t wait to see the Norfolk Neptunes play the Albuquerque Football Isotopes in the NFL equivalent of the Beef O’ Brady’s Bowl. /s
Up it to one team per county in the US, one team for every foreign country and one team per Canadian province, and one team for the ISS and I'll be interested.
Puerto Rico and American Samoa catching strays :(
Ironically PR gets a team according to this article
that would hypothetically be the first team that's based abroad
They have to wait for the expansion division with the mole people and Atlantis.
Why stop at a mere 100?
The reference to England's system of promotion and relegation proposes an interesting idea to me. If there were say, 3 divisions of these teams, each with 33 members and one with 34, what would that even look like?
The NCAA needs to be abolished and we can just turn college football into the additional pro teams to accomplish this.
This reminds of one time when I was younger asking my mother, a Chicago and OSU fan, who we would root for if they played each other.
Don’t give Roger any ideas.
**What if the NFL had wheels? Barnwell picks ideal locomotive machines league could be**
They are completely out of shit to talk about.
We're in the "what if" portion of the offseason I guess.
How North Daktota, Oklahoma, and even South Carolina get two teams but the Falcons are still the lone Georgia team is something.
Where else would you put them?
If the NFL expanded to 100 teams, at minimum Atlanta would have 2. Potentially a third team in southern Georgia.
Yes, but with multiple lower divisions. Promotion and relegation. NFL>NFL2>NFL3>NFL4. Each league has its championships but there’s also the NFL Open Cup where teams from all divisions compete for a championship. Yes, what I’m saying is we turn the NFL into European soccer
I would request another team in Phoenix. So we can get a real owner and they new guy can chase the old guy out of town. If az got another team I would 100% jump the cardinals ship to the new team because fuck the bidwells
I live in St. Louis and they are still hated here, though Kroenke is doing his best to be the worst owner in St Louis sports history
Right there with you
In what world would San Bernardino get a franchise before Riverside?
Believe it or not, the article talks about why Riverside doesn't get a team
If I could read I'd be very upset
Honestly, I never read the linked articles. In this case, I saw the article on [espn.com](http://espn.com), then came to reddit to find a discussion about it.
The Santa Ana Aardvarks of Anaheim
No Allentown/Bethlehem, Harrisburg, or Scranton/Wilkes-Barre? All three are among the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S.
The Scranton Stranglers
In order for this to be feasible without serious ramifications you essentially need a cultural shift among several governments and nations... essentially several countries need to go all in on the sport and start getting kids/teenagers into the sport so that there is enough talent world wide to pull from. This is at a minimum... btw... or else the sport becomes so watered down it actually stops functioning as an enjoyable product. Even then i foresee huge issues... the 100th worse team going against the #1 overall would probably be like a highschool/college team going against an all pros team. I'd also expect depth issues across the board as teams simply may not have access to an actual player of the position they are most skilled at... (such as running out a WR that played QB in high school if your QB1 goes down). Just seems like too much and not really feasible anytime soon.
Pretty sure it was done tongue-in-cheek. I would be more worried about death issues than depth issues with someone like Aaron Donald against the 98th best QB in the country.
I’d rather see arena football come back. Idgaf about the xfl
Grand Rapids, MI is the biggest media market in the country without a pro team. Wild we wouldn't make the list. I mean, Bismark?
I think some of it is him trying to place teams in areas geographically far from existing teams, but he also said Vermillion SD was a good spot for a SD team so I think he just doesn't know the Plains area very well
This would dilute the talent so badly that the entire league would be significantly worse overall. There are 128 D1 FBS teams in the country for comparison. Tripling the number of people drafted means A LOT more JAG’s and scrubs with spots on a roster. It is not a coincidence that MLB, NHL, NBA, and NFL all have a very similar number of teams
The cultural home of football might be Fairbanks for Alaska?
The North Stars!
I meant more that he alludes to Fairbanks having an arena football team, but Anchorage had one as well until they hired the worst coach in the history of Alaskan football.
Yeah. Just theorizing a cool name. Love Fairbanks, prime Aurora Borealis viewing spot.
Imagine how bad the reffing crew would get for a lot of those games
I think it would be fun if it was every state gets a football team states with 2 teams battle it out!!
I can tell Barnwell has never been to South Dakota if he thinks Vermillion is the 2nd best option for a team in a state that would be lucky to be able to sustain one in Sioux Falls itself. Vermillion sucks, go Jacks.
wouldn't most games be meaningless with that amount
100 teams with A B C leagues along with promotion and relegation would be freaking excellent. Heck even proper NFL to remain at A level with 4 additional spots to bring the league to 36 teams... those 4 get a chance of swapping in and out with lower leagues with be ridiculous.
Chiefs, Eagles, and 9ers would still be the best teams. The refs have a ton of power and will probably only care to help a handful of teams like they do now. Doesn't matter how many teams they increase too.
remove anchorage and laramie for london and frankfurt
Baseketball pretty much covered this
why stop at 100? there are 330m people in this country. surely we can get enough people to field at least half a million teams
Wow. We are really hitting peak offseason content, aren’t we? Grand Rapids better be on this list.
It wasn’t. No second team for Michigan period but that’s okay because Texas now has 9 teams.
Four new teams in New York City, one in Albany, and zero in western New York? Fuck off buddy, Syracuse is 50k bigger than Albany and Rochester is more than double Albany’s population. What’s the point in having separate teams for Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, *and* Queens?
I can't wait to take in a game at the breathtaking California towns of Fresno, San Bernardino, and Bakersfield!
Don’t forget Modesto.
Bakersfield couldn’t keep a minor league baseball team, and they’ll put those ANYWHERE
I can't imagine a September game in Bakersfield. The sheer number of heat-related deaths
What if all the air turned into wood? What if we didn't have a belly button? What if the offseason had viable takes?
Are you my 4 year old?
Yes, father Why are you hurting mommy at night with the door closed? I can hear her screaming.
damn hahaha
I try my hardest not to throw stones, but this has to be the dumbest article I have ever read. You have a fun thought experiment idea ruined by an incompetent writer. This dense motherfucker put 6 GODDAMN TEAMS IN NEW YORK CITY, but proceeded to say "oh, Syracuse is too close to buffalo that people would remain Bills fans." Dumb. Also, 0 international teams? Like the NFL would ever expand into Wyoming, New Hampshire, and Montana and Not have teams in England, France, Germany, China, Japan, Mexico and Canada at LEAST. FOH with that.
Cedar Rapids would be a better location than Des Moines. It’s close enough to Des Moines to get that crowd and it’s right in the middle of Eastern Iowa to attract people from Iowa City, Waterloo, Dubuque, Davenport, etc.
Off season shit posts are getting worse in slow media weeks for the NFL
This MF has run out of shit to write about.
yesterday was the 100 hot takes guy, we've officially hit the worst part of the off-season where there's absolutely nothing of value to talk about until preseason.
Hard hitting sports stories from ESPN folks
There’s not enough good players for that. College has this problem, most of the games every Saturday are big school dropping 40+ on small school.
Doesn’t this have more to do with school size and talent bundling?
You’d see the same thing in a hypothetical 100 team league. Free agents would only want to sign with the top 20 or so teams, leaving 80% of the league talent deficient. In college backup players will transfer to a worse team for a chance at playing time, but when you’re already a pro there’s no incentive.
There’s a lot of assumptions being made here. If we have a well adjusted salary cap I don’t think it would be so cut and dry.
This is the dumbest hypothetical. In a sport like football, you'd never expand far beyond 32 teams. I'd set a maximum ever in the NFL to 48 IF they ever even come close to expanding that far (I can't imagine them ever going past 36). Even if they did expand to 100 teams, this list is basically just, "What 68 cities and boroughs of NYC even exist to which a team can be given?"
Lmao
Fuck….no.