If we're going to mess with the playoff formant, let's really mix things up
Did anyone ever go to a summer football camp where they'd have loads of short games on pitches next to each other and if you won your game you'd move up to the next pitch and if you lost you'd move down? Let's do that!
Top 2 go up automatically. Bottom 2 go down. Then for the other 20, we set up 10 pitches side by side. The top pitch starts with 3rd vs 4th. Second pitch is 5th vs 6th and so on until the bottom pitch is 21st vs 22nd. Everyone plays a 10 minute match simultaneously. At the end of 10 minutes, the winners move up and the losers move down. If it's a draw, the team that finished lower in the league is awarded the win for overcoming the odds against a theoretically better team, so they move up. The winners on the top pitch stay on and the losers on the bottom pitch are stuck there. Then everyone plays another 10 minute game on their new pitch. Repeat for 10 rounds. The winners of the final game on the top pitch are promoted and the losers of the final game on the bottom pitch are relegated.
Posted Mar 6, 2026, 3:51 PM UTC