Your Division Is Not As Tough As You Think

Everyone knows their division is the hard one. Nobody has ever been able to prove it. So: Strength of Division, by year and all-time, in The League and the AFL both.

Start with the number everyone already argues about: the overall record — every division’s wins and losses pulled out of the standings and ranked strongest to weakest. Worth knowing what it can and can't do, though. Every game a division plays against itself hands one of its own teams a win and another a loss, so that half of the schedule is pinned to .500 by arithmetic no matter how good anybody is. Pick a single season and the page ranks on the honest version instead — what a division did against everyone ELSE — because on one year's sample the two can genuinely disagree. Across twenty years they don't: we checked, and they order the divisions identically, seven for seven, in both leagues.

Then the part worth the price of admission: as currently constituted. A division name outlives the people who earned its record, so every division is also scored over the exact span its current group of owners has been together — and a team changing hands resets that clock just as a realignment does. The East and the Northwest are the long marriages: the same four owners since 2016. The Central's four have been together since 2018 and are running .432 against the rest of the league, forty-four points below what the Central name has done across nineteen seasons. The Southwest's group is six years old. In the AFL only the South has held its six together as far back as 2019, and the North's current six have exactly one season on the clock — which the page says out loud rather than lending them the record of the six who came before. Founded sits right next to Together for that reason: a one-year group inside a twenty-three-year-old division is news, not a typo.

Which sets up the ranking that actually settles it. A division name is a label; the record belongs to the people. So every group a division has kept together for at least four straight seasons is a row of its own — the Central turns up three separate times, 2007-2011, 2012-2015 and 2018-present, because those are three different sets of owners — and all of them are ranked against each other. Four seasons is the floor because a group that lasted one realignment cycle has a record, not a history. In The League that puts six groups on the board: the 2012-2015 Central on top at .536, the Central sitting there today fourth, and the Southwest's current six dead last. Same names, different people, opposite ends of the list. In the AFL the 2019-2022 North leads it and the South, together since 2019, is last — two divisions that realigned in the same offseason and went opposite directions. And because the crests sit on every row, you can see exactly which teams you are looking at.

And it knows about the offseason. Records only ever count seasons that were actually played, but the lineups are the ones taking the field next — so the Southwest is flagged for 2026, where Dead Cap Walking takes over from Heavy Chevy. A division with an incoming owner hasn't played a snap with that exact group yet, and the page says so rather than quietly crediting the new owner with the old one's record.

It goes down to division vs division, too, which is what Nick actually asked for: a grid of every division's record against every other, all-time and season by season. And because a division is really just the people in it, each one lists every team that has ever sat there — current and former, with the years they were in it, what they went, and what they won. The all-time ranking and the all-time table carry those crests too, with a franchise dimmed once it has moved on, so you can tell at a glance whose record you are actually reading. The grouping is by owner, so a rebrand mid-tenure stays one line instead of splitting into two strangers, and the name you see is the last one that owner used. Former owners included, which means seasons that appear on no franchise page anywhere else on this site show up here.

One thing this page will not do is crown an all-time strongest division, and the reason is sample size rather than shyness: the division leading the AFL's list existed for exactly one season. So you get the full ranking, both rates on every row, the season counts next to them, and no fake verdict. Pick a single season and it will name a winner and a loser without flinching — one season is a fair sample of itself.