out of conference teams to play them. Even with two conferences, there are no opportunities for the poorer and mediocre teams to do well. They will be perpetually on the bottom.
Also, I think that if you isolate to the east, you lose out on millions of eyeballs (read money). If they really are thinking of being ultra exclusive as a league, they lose out on opportunities to beat other teams. If you exclude everyone else to keep all the money, you end up destroying the system that supplies you the money.
I don’t know if any of that made any sense other than in my head.