NFL Looking To Expand Schedule To 18 Games In Coming Years
Absolutely nobody actually enjoys NFL preseason games. You might watch the first quarter of week one just to see your starting quarterback jog through a hopelessly vanilla script, but after that? It’s three quarters of guys fighting for a practice squad spot while you struggle to keep your eyes open on the couch.
Well, New England Patriots Owner Robert Kraft has a solution, and it is exactly the one we all knew was coming. Kraft is openly banging the drum for an 18-game NFL regular season, and if you read between the lines, it feels more like a matter of when, rather than if.
Robert Kraft Isn’t Hiding the Ultimate Goal
Kraft recently made it crystal clear that the league’s power brokers are pushing “like the dickens” to expand the schedule. The proposed math is pretty simple, and honestly, it makes a bunch of financial sense for the billionaires in the owners’ boxes. They want to drop the universally despised preseason down to just two games, bump the regular season up to a grueling 18 games, and ensure every single franchise plays an international game every year.
Why the heavy push for overseas action? The NFL already dominates the American television landscape. A staggering 93 of the top 100 TV broadcasts last year were professional football games. Domestically, the ceiling has pretty much been reached. If the league wants to keep ballooning the salary cap and generating unprecedented revenue, they have to take the product global. London, Munich, Madrid, Brazil; the league is planting flags all over the map.
The Player Perspective: Is More NFL Football Actually Better?
Here is where the human element crashes headfirst into the business spreadsheet. You can’t just add another high-speed car crash to the calendar and expect the human body to shrug it off.
Veteran quarterback and Super Bowl champion Joe Flacco recently voiced what a lot of players are whispering behind closed doors. Flacco warned that while adding an 18th game sounds great for ticket sales and television contracts, it threatens to completely water down the playoffs. Football is a brutal sport, and by the time January rolls around, locker rooms look like triage units.
Flacco fears that instead of getting top-tier gladiators battling at full strength in the postseason, fans will end up watching two battered, exhausted rosters limping through a war of attrition at 75 percent capacity.
Unspoken Clues Pointing To a 2027 Schedule Change
If you think this is just idle billionaire chatter, look at the schedule. Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio astutely pointed out that the NFL has yet to lock in a specific date for the 2028 Super Bowl in Atlanta. Why the hold-up? Because if an 18-game season (plus two bye weeks) gets implemented by 2027, the entire calendar shifts.
The current collective bargaining agreement runs through March 2031, but the league clearly doesn’t want to wait that long. Expect plenty of quiet negotiations this summer. The owners want their 18th game, and history tells us that what the NFL wants, the NFL eventually gets.
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