Miami Dolphins Stuck in Same Division With Habitual Cheaters

In England, the National Football League's pointless promotional efforts notwithstanding, the predominant "football" game is what we know as soccer.  The wildly popular Barclay's Premier League, which corresponds there in importance to our NFL, consists of 20 teams each season...with the lowest three finishers each year relegated to the next lower league and that league's top three promoted to the top league.  That, along with the fact that the regular season top finisher automatically wins the championship without the need for all the playoff games we see in the NFL, establishes to me the superiority of English league football to the way things are done over here.  But it's also the fact that the teams are all grouped together instead of being pigeonholed permanently in divisions that gives their system more appeal to me...

I am a Miami Dolphins fan and have been since 1968, their third year in existence.  They are in the American Conference East Division, perpetually lumped together with the Buffalo Bills, New York Jets, and New England Patriots.  I understand the reasoning of league organizers who believe that having the same teams in these small divisions year after year will foster interesting rivalries.  But it's one thing to play these teams two times a year, each and every year...and another to have to twice play a team like the New England Patriots, a franchise that seems intent on winning at all costs, including searching for ways to skirt the rules.

Whether it's surreptitiously spiriting away footballs to a bathroom in order to quickly deflate them to the cheating quarterback's preferences or video-taping the other team on the sidelines in order to steal their signals and discover which plays they are running, this team goes way over the top in its unsportsmanlike conduct.  And my Dolphins are forced to contend with this low-life arrogance twice each season...many teams don't even have to play them once...

I believe these divisional rivalries are overblown, anyway.  I have an idea: instead of a draft that favors the worst performing teams and encourages those starting with poor seasons to give up halfway through, why not instead have a kind of random lottery/drawing after each season that sets up the eight four-team divisions for the next year.  After all, isn't that how the groups in the overwhelmingly popular World Cup in soccer are filled?  For example, you might end up with, say, a division with St.Louis, Miami, Denver, and Washington...randomly constructed and limited to one season, after which another random realignment takes place.  I think that would be very interesting...and much more fair to the different teams as well.  As for the New England "Cheatriots", well, someone has to play in their division, I suppose...