Early Game on West Coast, Late Game on East Coast

[themunn]

It could have the potential of giving a team one day less than the other to heal/rest/practice/travel. There's no way to avoid that going from the wild card (say on a Sunday) to the divisional round (say the following Saturday) sometimes, but it can be avoided when going from the divisional to the conference games by simply having both on Sunday.

Sunday is football day anyway. The only reason there are even Saturday games is because there's no way to get 4 games in one day without having networks directly competing simultaneously over a time slot, reducing ratings.

Well there is really - there are 2 NFC and 2 AFC Wildcard games, 2 NFC and 2 AFC Divisional games, 1 NFC and 1 AFC championship.

So all you need to do is alternate years where the 2 NFC games are on the Saturday on WC week, divisional week and championship week, and the AFC games the Sunday. It would mean one team getting an extra day of rest prior to the Superbowl, but given it's 2 weeks, it shouldn't really have an impact - also it means there's less of a team playing Sunday and then Saturday between WC and Divisional rounds (it hasn't happened the last couple of years due to pure chance, but it's not impossible if results go the right way).

With all that said, I don't mind - as a UK fan the 12pm local time kickoff is 8pm my time - I'm not a big fan of waiting up until 1.30am for kickoff like Saturday's game (albeit I do love the fact that we win almost every one of them). I'm not going to complain about it, because obviously they're catering to the US market and not us, but playing at that time doesn't really present a problem to anybody, so I don't think it should be criticised in the way it is being.