2011 AFC North opponents

The 2011 NFL schedule is uncertain for a couple of reasons.

First, the league's owners and its players' union are currently negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement.  Because of disagreements between the two sides and between the owners themselves, many are anticipating a possible lockout or strike in 2011.  Twice in the past (1982 and 1987), NFL seasons have been shortened because of strikes.  More recently in major American sports, a lockout wiped out the entire 2004-2005 NHL season.

Second, some NFL owners and commisioner Roger Goodell have expressed interest in increasing the number of games in the season, which would require a different scheduling formula.  This is just one of many things the owners and players' union would need to come to agreement on, though.

Assuming the NFL season is not disrupted, and that the league continues to use the same schedule rotation, in 2011, each AFC North team will play a 16-game schedule:

• six games against its AFC North rivals (one home and one away for each)
• four games against the AFC South
• four games against the NFC West
• two games against AFC East and AFC West opponents based on the teams' order of finish in 2010.

Notice that only two out of the 16 opponents on each team's schedule are not shared by the other AFC North teams.

Also, the opponents that the Ravens and Bengals play at home are the opponents that the Browns and Steelers play on the road, and vice versa.  This pattern was an arbitrary decision (based on alphabetical order of city names) made when the current scheduling system was adopted in 2002.

I might have home and away reversed for the games against the NFC West.  Starting in 2010, the league tweaked the schedule rotation so that no team would have to play two non-divisional road games against west coast teams in the same division.

(A team that travels to Seattle, for example, will face San Francisco at home.  A team that travels to San Diego will face Oakland at home.  Before the change, alphabetical grouping by city name made it possible for a team to end up with road games against all four west coast teams.  This is precisely what happened to the New England Patriots and New York Jets in 2008, and it was complaints from those two teams that led to the rule.)

Anyway, I made my best guess as to how this rule would be applied to the AFC North's games against the NFC West in 2011 based on the patterns set in prior years, but I could easily be wrong.