I've always kind of wondered what would happen if the NFL had, like, 50-60 teams (kind of like college football has in active, "Power" programs of some nature) instead of its current 32.
There's approximately a dozen or so true "franchise" quarterbacks to go around. The competitive benefit given the culture of the league, style of play, and the rules from having one of those franchise quarterbacks is night and day. It's essentially have one, be good, do not have one, you're going to suck in the NFL.
Seattle without Wilson is Houston--good, great roster even, but not even enough to make the playoffs. Put a serviceable quarterback on there, two straight Super Bowls.
Indianapolis has been a basket case of an organization and wasted draft picks left and right, but having Peyton Manning and Andrew Luck around has fixed a lot of that problem.
This makes the NFL less interesting to me in some regards. You know the teams with the good quarterbacks are going to be good and everybody else not. The overall rosters of, say, Jacksonville and New England are going to be much closer than college teams (imagine Alabama versus Vanderbilt or Kansas/ISU versus OU/TCU) in terms of talent, but the leverage of talent at that one position is so high it swamps anything else so easily.
Thing is, the ~12-18 franchise guys versus 32 teams mean most teams are going to try for that "business model" of success given it is all they know, all they've seen, and most successful coaches and coordinators came of age and learned from that plan and circumstance, so they're going to try to recreate it elsewhere. If things were more like college football, and only ~20% of the teams in the league could have that kind of signal caller, it might force teams to become more creative simply because they have to at that point. They have to find other types of offenses, roster constructions, and ways to win from then.
Interesting that I tell myself I like the college game more, though, though the lack of competitive balance in talent makes it less interesting from an objective standpoint. The blue bloods are always going to have more to work with. That's it. Not the same in the NFL. Everybody has the same cap space and draft resources. However, though the NFL has competitive balance from roster construction, it lacks it from QB play. College maintains it through creative roster construction and scheming, which leads to a more interesting style of play, to me, to watch.
Trying to play like you've got Tom Brady when you've got Brian Hoyer isn't ever fun to watch.
If only there was a way to have the diversity of the college schemes/systems/styles with the NFL's balance in talent and resources. Both games are unfair, just in their own ways.
