What Would NFL Division Realignment Look Like?

With the St. Louis Rams moving to Los Angeles there has been lots of buzz on twitter and in the media about how the NFL divisions will need to be realigned in the near future. I decided to take a look into potential options for realignment.

In order to come up with the below divisions I made two assumptions. One was that I didn't want any team to have to change conference (also made it easier to narrow down choices). The second assumption was that I was not going to try to keep great divisional rivalries together (DAL vs NYG or PIT vs BAL). So with these two assumptions lets take a look at what the future NFL divisions might look like:

If this were to be correct it would involve the Dolphins leaving the AFC East for the South and the Ravens replacing them in the AFC East. This would mean that the poorly run Miami organization would be swapped out for a well-run Ravens franchise and that would not be good news for the Bills.

There are other people who see the Bills moving into the AFC North with some combination of the Browns, Steelers, Bengals and Colts. A few years ago being realigned to this division would have been more attractive but that is no longer be the case. The Steelers are one of the best run teams in the league, Cincinnati has become a perennial playoff team (even if they lose in the first round) and Indianapolis should be decent for the foreseeable future as long as Andrew Luck can prove this year was an abberation.

So yes while it would be nice to be in the same division as the Browns, I would still prefer to remain in the AFC East in order to keep alive the rivalries with the Jets and the Patriots if there were to be some realignment of NFL divisions in the near future.