Sports Divisions, Ranked

Dec 11, 2018 1:34PM EST ARGUMENTS

Tom Scocca is the editor of Hmm Daily

On Sunday, the Miami Dolphins used a series of laterals and some backyard-game running to improbably work their way through the final seconds of the game clock, 69 yards of field, and the entire New England Patriots defense, scoring the winning touchdown and inscribing the name “the Miami Miracle” in NFL history. It was wildly unlikely but it also made sense: it was the AFC East—home of white hats, of weird scoring plays, of the Dolphins humbling the Patriots.

Sports leagues are too large, but divisions are small enough to enjoy—or to consolidate the unlikeable and unwatchable in one place, so they can be safely ignored. The AFC East is a fun division, where things like the Dolphins beating the Patriots happen. It is not as entertaining as the near-perfectly balanced knot of rivalry and malice that is the NFC East, but it is much more entertaining than the AFC North, which is like watching middle-aged drunks in a dim bar at midafternoon have a shouting argument about something nobody else knows or cares about. Football and baseball divisions, where teams play each other at a rate wildly disproportionate to the rest of the league, are generally better than NBA divisions, which are mostly a bookkeeping formality. Tradition can help make a talented division superior to other talented divisions, as with the American League East, but it can’t save a division like the NBA Atlantic Division from declining into irrelevance. Good uniforms help. Here are the correct rankings of the divisions across the three major North American professional sports: