With the Madden NFL 24 expanding the regular season it  Mut 24 coins simply makes sense to throw in a second bye week, one shared by every team in the league. Make it Week 8, pressure the best players in the Madden NFL 24 to actually play the game and suddenly we can get something people actually want to see — not just a week to do some yard work or cleaning ahead of the Super Bowl.

The issue remains: How do we get players to actually want to compete in this thing? Which brings us to. This is a place MLB has it right when it comes to their All Star game. Dangling the carrot of home field advantage in the World Series is a very solid prize that incentives the teams to actually care about the game itself. With the Madden NFL 24 it’s obviously very different. A one-off game in the Super Bowl changes the dynamic a lot, but there’s some nuance we can play with here too. I’m not an expert on how we can balance the Madden NFL 24 by adding stakes to the Pro Bowl, but here are some ideas I had:

The winning conference in the Pro Bowl gets to decide whether to kick or receive if there’s overtime in the Super Bowl.The winning conference gets to play its non-conference opponents at home in the following season.Teams from the winning conference get compensatory 4th round draft picks in the upcoming draft.Teams from the winning conference get $5M bonuses to their salary cap for the upcoming season. None of these ideas are perfect, but making the game count for something is integral in ensuring people want to watch.

Even then, nobody has any honor or care for the rest of their conference. So why are we pretending that AFC vs. NFC is a thing? In my opinion the world sports league who has NAILED the All Star game is the NRL, Australia’s rugby league. Instead of a traditional contest among the best players, rugby players take a break to take part in a three game tournament mid-season called the “State of Origin.” I’ve written about this in the past, and it’s such a genius concept.

Instead of worrying about who plays professional ball where, this goes back to which of Australia’s two major rugby states a player was born in: New South Wales or Queensland. It’s the biggest rivalry in rugby and sees teams torn apart to complete for their place of birth, rather than their professional club.

Obviously it’s more difficult here, but with a little work I think you could make a fair 25 state split, or even divide up the USA by east and west, based on where players were born. If this seems too difficult you could take another page out of rugby league’s book as do “city vs. country,” pulling players who grew up in metropolitan areas, and putting them against pros from rural areas. Hell, you could even divide up players by college for the ultimate dose of nostalgia. Essentially any split would be better than AFC vs. NFC and give something for fans to care about.