I knew the gods would someday send me a message that the Basement needed to come out of hibernation, but I did not expect it to be this obvious. The column Bill Simmons wrote last week was pretty much a burning fucking bush. He has pulled some painfully dumb stuff out of his ass in his time, but this one might just be the dumbest:

When I was falling in love with football in the mid-’70s, my beloved Patriots played in the AFC East. There were 28 teams and six divisions by 1976, which meant one division in each league had just four teams instead of five. Teams earned a playoff spot by winning their division or grabbing the one wild-card slot, which eliminated the ’77 Pats: they finished 9-5, one game behind division rivals Miami and Baltimore. Meanwhile, the AFC Central shook out like this:

Pittsburgh, 9-5
Cincinnati, 8-6
Houston, 8-6
Cleveland, 6-8

I remember bristling at the standings. Wait a second. We finished 9-5 and the Steelers finished 9-5. We were in a more difficult division with more teams. But THEY made the playoffs??? This would have been my most traumatic moment of 1977 if Farrah Fawcett-Majors hadn’t left “Charlie’s Angels.” I haven’t trusted the NFL’s divisional setup since.

Let’s take a look at just how big of an injustice the 1977 Patriots suffered:

Patriots 1977 Season

9 Wins: KC (2-12), SEA (5-9), @SD (7-7), BAL (10-4), NYJ (3-13), @BUF (3-13), PHI (5-9), @ATL (7-7), MIA(9-5)

5 Losses: @CLE (6-8), @NYJ (3-13), BUF (3-13), @MIA (9-5), @BAL (10-4)

Total Opponents Record: 82-114

Playoff Teams on Schedule: BAL (1^st Round Loss)

Steelers 1977 Season

9 Wins: SF (5-9), @CLE (6-8), CIN (8-6), HOU (8-6), CLE (6-8), DAL (12-2), @NYJ (3-13), SEA (5-9), @SD (7-7)

5 Losses: OAK (11-3), @HOU (8-6), @BAL (10-4), @DEN (12-2), @CIN (8-6)

Total Opponents Record: 109-87

Playoff Teams on Schedule: DAL (Won Super Bowl), DEN (Lost Super Bowl), OAK (Lost Championship Game), BAL (1^st Round Loss)

That pretty much speaks for itself. The driving force behind Simmons’ supposed “distrust” of the divisional format is total bullshit. The Steelers’ schedule was much, much harder in just about any way you look at it, and the poor Patriots’ unfair 5 team division included two 3-13 teams, both of whom they lost to. If a college student wrote a term paper using evidence that was this poorly researched and this easily disproved, he would get an F, yet this gem goes on the front page of the most visited sports website in America.

Granted, I probably would have loved it had the Patriots not been stuck in the AFC East. The Dolphins kicked our butts through the ’70s (the Griese/Shula Era) and ’80s (when Dan Marino showed up), which was especially galling because Miami is located in Florida … which, of course, is nowhere near Massachusetts. Buffalo eventually assumed control of the division, ripping off 124 wins from 1988 to 1999 — let’s take a break while the tortured Bills fans solemnly pour a 40 on the ground — and just as they were fading, Peyton Manning’s Colts jelled into a contender. My Pats finally caught a break before the 2002 season, when the league expanded and realigned to eight divisions (sending Indy to the AFC South). The playing field finally seemed fair: 32 teams, four teams per division. What could go wrong?

Fast-forward to 2010: Have you checked out the NFC West lately?

So the second piece of evidence cited is the fact that 4 of the 5 AFC East teams had a separate window of dominance over a 30+ year period. If the goal here was to prove how the NFL is cyclical, then job well done. Unfortunately, it was intended to prove that the divisions are somehow inherently unfair, which is pretty much the opposite of that. And also you cannot compare the 70’s, 80’s or even much of the 90’s to now. In that era, teams could stockpile players and hold onto their nucleus for years. Nowadays, rosters turn over quicker than David Halberstam did when he read this article inside his casket.

DIVISION RECORDS SINCE 2002

Division	W	L	T	Pct.
AFC East	273	247	0	.525
AFC North	260	258	2	.502
AFC South	287	233	0	.552
AFC West	255	265	0	.490
NFC East	279	240	1	.538
NFC North	240	280	0	.462
NFC South	266	253	1	.513
NFC West	218	302	0	.419

I know, it isn’t exactly stunning when the NFC West Albatross drags down another NFL season. Since 2002, that division has been like Lt. Stephanie Holden on “Baywatch” — unable to measure up to everyone else no matter how hard the producers kept pushing it (see sidebar). But this season is particularly rancid even by NFC West standards. By my calculations, San Francisco (I have them ranked 23rd), Seattle (25th), Arizona (27th) and St. Louis (30th) are four of the league’s worst 10 teams. So far, their only victories have come against one another. A closer look:

Well no matter how idiotic the premise of this article is, at least we all got a good belly laugh out of that Baywatch joke. I’m going to go ahead and make this point now, because this is where Simmons starts to get into the crux of his argument. The NFL is a salary capped league. Every team is on a level playing field regardless of the size of their media markets or fan bases and this is pretty clearly demonstrated by the unpredictability of each season. It seems that every year, at least one team goes from worst to first, or vice versa. Last year, the Super Bowl was won by a team that was mediocre the season before. No one knows who will be good year to year, so the idea that we need to scrap all the history and rivalries currently in place, just because one division is going through a dry spell, is so asinine that I really feel like we all have a solid case to sue ESPN for posting it.

Seahawks (1-1): Won nine games total in 2008 and 2009, overpaid a college coach, gutted their team and somehow ended up with the league’s fifth-highest payroll ($138.8 million). Throw in a general Washington sports malaise — the Mariners might lose 100 games, the Zombie Sonics look like a title contender, Kevin Durant flashed GOAT potential in Turkey, the Jake Locker Heisman Bandwagon careened off I-5 and flipped 35 times and the state’s two biggest sports highlights of the past three years involved the WNBA and MLS — and it’s hard to imagine the Hawks winning more than six games.

Would someone fucking tell Leon Washington that Kevin Durant played well in a tournament no one cared about? He obviously doesn’t know or the malaise would’ve prevented him from returning those kicks the other day.

You can’t overstate how devastating the Sonics/Durant double whammy has been for Seattle fans. After my gushing Durant column last week, my former editor KJ, a lifelong Sonics die-hard, sent me an e-mail that simply read, “Cue up Eddie Vedder: ‘I know someday you’ll have a beautiful life, I know you’ll be a sun in somebody else’s sky, but why can’t it be mine?’” Any time sports drives a fan to quote “Black,” the single most depressing song by a Seattle band other than “Black Hole Sun,” you know something truly hideous has happened.

Thank God he qualified that with Black Hole Sun. I wouldn’t have been able to sleep at night if a column proposing NFL realignment unfairly credited Eddie Vedder with having the most depressing song by a Seattle band.

Rams (0-2): Losers of 15 straight NFC West games, 11 straight divisional home games and 44 of their past 50 games. Here’s their 2010 team picture.

They just got a guy who looks like a potential franchise QB. Do you think we should give them a few years to continue to build the team around him? Or should we use their mediocrity as part of our excuse to blow up the whole fucking league? Tough call.

Cardinals (1-1): Their star quarterback ditched them for “Dancing With the Stars,” murdering their offense, sending Larry Fitzgerald into therapy (I’m guessing) and leading to last week’s humiliating trouncing in Atlanta; after cruising to a 41-7 lead, the Falcons took mercy with a few minutes to go by having Matt Ryan kneel four times inside Arizona’s 10. And yes, we’re three-fourths of the way through the division.

They almost won the Super Bowl two years ago and made it to the Divisional round last year, which based on the recent history of Super Bowl losers, is a pretty good season. Now, their QB retired, Boldin was traded, and Dansby left via Free Agency. Peaks and valleys, Bill. That’s how the NFL works.

(Quick tangent: Kurt Warner’s new TV career led to the funniest subplot of the 2010 season, when Cardinals fans subjected themselves to “Dancing With the Stars” and prayed that Warner would be the worst star — that way, he’d get voted off first and might get talked into a comeback — only Margaret Cho, David Hasselhoff and The Situation were significantly more inept, leading to an unexpected scenario in which red-blooded football fans were complaining about things like: “I can’t believe Margaret Cho wore that outfit, it killed her!” and “Really, The Situation couldn’t have found more than five days in his busy schedule of showing off his abs at nightclubs to practice his routine?”)

I mentioned earlier that this would get an F from a college professor, but out of curiosity, if this were a term paper, how would he cite those quotes? What is the MLA format for fake people saying made up things?

Niners (0-2): Even though they lost 66 of their past 99 games and haven’t topped .500 since 2002, everyone assumed they’d win this wretched division by default until Seattle improbably whupped them in Week 1, then the Niners choked on Monday night against a Saints team that seemed genuinely uninterested until the final 90 seconds. Although Vegas still gives it the best NFC West odds (-120), San Fran’s next two games are in Kansas City and Atlanta — and by the way, only one 0-4 team has ever made the playoffs — and the Niners have road games in Green Bay (Week 13) and San Diego (Week 15) coming later.

Could the Niners finish 8-8 or 9-7? Of course. Their remaining home games: Philly, Oakland, Denver, St. Louis, Tampa Bay, Seattle and Arizona. That’s seven non-playoff teams unless Tampa is for real. (Which isn’t as impossible as it sounds. These past two weeks, Josh Freeman looked like a young Ben Roethlisberger with faster legs: impossible to take down and consistently able to extend plays. And no, I can’t believe I just wrote that, either.) We may end up considering San Fran’s 0-2 start an unfortunate hiccup. Then again, that scenario includes the Niners growing up into a real football team, which seems unlikely after what happened Monday night: It wasn’t just the turnovers (four) or the coaching (disjointed as always), but the lame excuses that followed. Sure, these excuses weren’t as ridiculous as Buffalo coach Chan Gailey telling reporters this week, “We can be a good football team, but we’re not right now, and we have to get there … it’s taking longer than I hoped it would.” (Wait, what?) But they were still pretty bad.

If you’re a female between the ages of 18-40 (large majority of our readership), please be advised that we have unconfirmed reports of “a young Ben Roethlisberger with faster legs” roaming around. Enter bathrooms at your own risk.

You know what that means? We might make history in two ways:

1. The 2010 NFC West could break the record for “fewest wins by a four-team division” (22 wins, previously held by the 2008 NFC West) and “lowest average wins per division team in NFL history” (5.5, also held by the NFC West). How pathetic would that be? Breaking your own record of historic incompetence?

How pathetic would that be if this random record no one cares about hypothetically gets broken?

2.Since the league expanded to a 16-game schedule in 1978, 50 9-7 teams have made the playoffs, one 8-7-1 team made it (the ’78 Vikings) and eight 8-8 teams have made it (’85 Browns, ’90 Saints, ’91 Jets, ’99 Cowboys, ’99 Lions, ’04 Vikings, ’04 Rams, ’08 Chargers) … but never a sub-.500 team. Unless a ’10 NFC West team does it.

7 of the 8 current divisions are represented by those 8 teams. I realize he went back further than the 8 division format, but the point remains the same: The league is cyclical, asshole. Ten years from now some other division will suck. It might even be the AFC East.

I honestly wonder if Simmons was watching a Red Sox game and bitching about how one of the best teams in baseball would miss the playoffs because of the division they play in, then started to write a column about it, and then at the last second, changed the subject from MLB to the NFL because he realized he had to shit out a football column by Friday.

Here’s my question: Why create the potential of a 10-win team missing the playoffs just because we were obligated to include a sub-.500 team? The easiest solution: Any division champ that doesn’t win eight games loses its guaranteed playoff spot. If you go 7-8-1, 7-7-2, 7-6-3, 6-6-4, whatever … you’re out. I want eight victories. Minimum. Then again, you shouldn’t sneak into the playoffs with eight wins just because you lucked out with a crappy division. The NFC West has lost 58 percent of its games since 2002. Fifty-eight percent! Why should the division champ be grandfathered in every year like some drunk legacy kid at a country club?

There’s something oddly Marxist about that paragraph. Like a much, much dumber version of Marx, of course. But anyway, the teams inside any given division play 14 common games. The other two games are based on records from the previous season. In my mind, it is a very symmetrical, easy to understand format. You finish with a better record than the other 3 teams playing the same schedule, then you make the playoffs. If you don’t, tough shit, you take your chances in the Wild Card race.

A more radical (and fairer) solution: We shake things up starting in 2011 and create four eight-team divisions …

AFC East: New England, New York, New York, Buffalo, Philly, Baltimore, Washington, Carolina.

AFC West: Oakland, San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, Denver, Arizona, Kansas City, St. Louis.

(Pause here to notice that his brilliant realignment scheme has still produced a division that would be significantly shittier than any other division in 2010.)

NFC Central: Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Cincinnati, Green Bay, Indianapolis, Chicago, Minnesota.

NFC South: Miami, Tampa Bay, Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, Tennessee, Atlanta, Jacksonville.

Geographically? Makes total sense. Finally. (Is there anything dumber than Baltimore being in the AFC Central but Miami being in the AFC East?)

Strictly based on geography, I’d argue that Dallas being in the NFC East is much, much dumber.  They belong in that division though, just as Miami belongs in the AFC East, because the rivalries created over years and years of grudge matches are way more important to the league than where places are on a fucking map. There are so many problems with these divisions that I don’t even want to start singling things out for fear that I’ll never be able to stop.

I do want to make one point though. He has completely raped the historical setup of the league, so why even keep the AFC/NFC names? It just looks dumb having an East and West in one conference, and a Central and South in the other. If you’re going to embrace geography over history to this extent, then why not just do Eastern Conference and Western Conference? I actually think that would be less of a slap in the face than potentially having a Super Bowl where a team like Miami represented the NFC against, let’s say, the Giants representing the AFC.

Competitively, since the owners are stupidly/stubbornly/indefensibly/greedily/soullessly/selfishly pushing for an 18-game regular season and will inevitably prevail (sadly, there’s no real way to stop them even as their sport inches closer and closer to that final scene of “Rollerball”), we change the schedule’s requirements so teams play home-and-homes with three of their division rivals every season (never the same three teams); they play the other four division rivals once; they play four teams from the other division in their conference; then they play four teams from the other conference. That’s 18 games … and tons of collateral damage. But, hey, who cares about the health, happiness and well-being of retired football players?

Bill Simmons, the man who wants to completely ignore 50 years of rivalries and take a meat cleaver to the setup of the league, is now lecturing the NFL on how they treat their retired players. I’m sure setting up the conferences in such a way that the original meaning of the Super Bowl (AFL vs. NFL) is bludgeoned beyond recognition would really make Chuck Bednarik and Len Dawson feel warm and fuzzy at night. Clearly, paying medical bills is of much greater concern to the players from that era, but I think they’d also like their legacies to be somewhat meaningful to the current generation of players and fans. And having a national sports columnist essentially argue that it is more important to avoid an 8-8 playoff team than it is to keep intact any connection to the past does not help with that.

For my revamped playoffs, the four division champs would earn byes for Round 1. Everything else would play out like it does now: 12 playoff teams, four rounds, winner takes all. And we’d never have to worry about a sub-.500 team getting 10-plus points at home in a first-round playoff game ever again.

(On second thought, it would be kinda fun to wager against Alex Smith or Derek Anderson in a playoff game.)

(Especially in a two-team teaser.)

(Forget I brought this up.)

Believe me, I wish I could.