The NFL has made news this offseason for their proposals to make changes to the regular season. There is the Brazil game taking place on the first Friday of the season between the Eagles and the Packers. Christmas Day used to be the unofficial start of the NBA season but now the NFL is looking to take their thunder, with a Netflix deal to air games this Christmas. There have been whispers of adding a game to the 17-game schedule.
With all of these possibilities, there has been pushback from the player’s union, fans, and TV networks. To help meet the league’s wishes while not infringing on other parties, some solutions that could realize these proposals and get ahead of some future discussions.
Are these decisions by the league intelligent ones?
NFL Offseason Headlines
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As the NFL season comes into focus for the fall, some offseason headlines have been more prevalent than others. Contract extensions for quarterbacks and wide receivers occupy much of the space for playoff hopefuls and contenders. Teams also get their first look at rookies with their new teams and dominate franchise talking points for teams hoping to turn it around in 2024. The league itself has made some headlines with its potential attempts to shake up the NFL framework.
From a scheduling standpoint, the 2024 NFL season will have games on every day of the week except Tuesday. This includes opening week and “Black Friday” games on Friday and a pair of games on Christmas. These Christmas Day games will be shown exclusively on Netflix, the platform’s first foray into the football business.
Netflix’s inclusion at the NFL table comes on the heels of Amazon Prime Video attaining the rights to Thursday Night Football, creating more mouths to feed for the NFL’s regular season. To increase the supply of content, the league added a 17th game to the schedule in 2021 and has openly discussed adding an 18th.
Talks of adding an 18th game come despite the league-wide emphasis on player safety, with the hot topics of this off-season being the hip-drop tackle, playing surfaces, and the new kickoff rules. These modifications can help to mitigate some of the concerns that come with playing football but the point stands that playing football is not good for player safety.
The NFL’s Game Quantity Problem
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The talks to add an 18th game have been coupled with the notion that the NFL could eliminate one or more preseason games from the calendar as if those are comparable. If the NFL wants to keep the 18-week format of the season while still making money and good on their claimed concerns of player safety, they could find a different solution than stringing out their top commodities even thinner.
There have been three cities in the not too distant past that have supported NFL teams, some cities that have housed more franchises in their history, and some new locations that could support a professional football team. If the NFL would like to explore avenues for solving some of its issues, league expansion might be the way to go.
If the league is insistent on dominating the sports calendar as they have said, moving to 34 or 36 teams may be a way to do that. The back-to-back Super Bowl Champion Kansas City Chiefs are playing on every available day of the week in the 2024 season while having one bye week on the schedule. This is not a sustainable method for maximizing profits and the quality of play from one of the league’s best assets.
By adding additional teams and baking in two bye weeks, the league can make good on their player safety concerns while not losing any muster on a week-to-week basis. This would also allow the league to be more flexible in their game scheduling for the marquee franchises. The NFL already has a stranglehold on Sundays but if they want to ensure eyeballs on other days of the week, putting their more marketable clubs in prime time is their best shot, made more feasible with these changes.
The Future of the NFL
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Some of these changes can take care of problems on the horizon for the NFL but more importantly, they can address some of the pressures that currently ail the league. Sixteen games is a long enough regular season and a more than reasonable way of determining who is worthy of a postseason berth. As the nation’s preeminent sport, giving more cities and communities a chance to experience the NFL is as close to a can’t miss as you can have.
The NFL is a league where almost half of the players go undrafted and coaching has an overwhelming hand in how teams perform. They might be uniquely set up to enjoy the positives of expansion while not facing the negatives. The drop in quality of play would be negligible when compared to the redress of player safety with an additional bye-week. The rule changes that have been passed, and are being discussed, will create a better product for the league.
The addition of teams could also help to make the playoffs more exclusive. The NFL’s expanded playoff format to include nearly half of the league’s teams has let in some mediocre clubs to the postseason. Keeping the format while adding teams can help improve the quality of the teams that get into the playoffs.
The NFL is unlikely to adopt these ideas but the problems that dominated owners meetings and media discussions are going to amplify with the path that the league is forging. Football is king in this day and age, much like other sports have been in previous decades. Sport management and reactions took them off that pedestal. The NFL is going to have to deal with that at some point. If that time is now, they might want to take a look at some of these ideas.
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