It's not the protected rivalries that's screwing it up.
It's the "no divisions" model that conferences are moving towards that gives the scheduler too much leeway without proper guardrails. I fully recognize that I have limited coding knowledge, and things I might think of as easy are probably deceptively difficult, but a realistic home-away split for conference games just does not seem like moving mountains to me. It is 4-5, or 5-4 for a 9 game conference model, and 4-4 for and 8 game conference model. These do not seem like the most impossible checks to add on to generating a schedule.
The other thing I don't get is how the game will have conference schedules spit out 3 or more home or away conference games in a row. NO CONFERENCE OFFICE WOULD DO THAT.
I fully agree that conference schedules need fixing, but protected rivalries is not the issue. EA cannot fix a problem if you cannot identify the real root of the issue.
Thank you for your response. As I said in a Reddit, I've run multiple tests where I took 2 of the exact same teams in different saves, and after season 1, I would turn on the protected rival setting for one of the saves and leave it off for the other. The one with the protected setting just pretty much **bleep** up the conference scheduling, and it's continuous for nearly every season I sim towards, while the other is pretty fine, but in addition, you don't get to play some traditional rivals that you should be playing every year (not talking about rivalry week) but I just hope if I'm wrong the issue still gets resolved either way.
