By Michael Heilman
With the 2019 NFL season now in the books, it’s time to look ahead at what will be a busy offseason for the NFL. The NFL will vote on a new collective bargaining agreement that could include extending the season to a seventeen-game regular season that would go into effect in 2021.
In the current collective bargaining agreement that was signed back in 2011, which you can read it here, players are limited in practice from full contact using pads and helmets. Where I’m getting at is if player safety is an issue for the NFL, why is extending the regular season such a great idea? It’s not; this is the NFL owners looking for more money with very little concern about player safety.
If player safety were such an issue for NFL owners, they would be finding ways to ease the season schedule while allowing players to still hit with pads and helmets at practice. By not allowing players to practice with full pads and helmets, the play on the field has become terrible. You don’t get game experience in a couple of preseason games where you are allowed to hit. In practice, the basics are taught, and the repetition builds skills. Teams have gone as far as not allowing their starters to play in the preseason when in reality, they should be playing to work the rust off and get in sync with the players on their team. Cutting preseason games is not the answer, and extending the season is not the answer. So, what is the answer?
What I would love to see happen in the NFL is to cut down the regular season games to fourteen weeks with each team getting a bye playing thirteen games and the season ends in January. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the NFL played a fourteen-game regular-season schedule. My proposal would be the season starts the first week of September and ends in early December with the playoffs beginning in mid-December and the Super Bowl the third week of January. This schedule change would give players a more extended offseason to recover from injuries. The schedule change would also benefit coaches to get some extra time off before they start to prepare for next season.
The new schedule for teams would look like this. Take the Eagles, for example. Because they finished in first place last year, they would still play their division rivals six times (three home, three away). They would play the AFC North division for four games (two home, two away), and would play the other first-place teams from last year (San Francisco, Green Bay, and New Orleans) to make up the thirteen games and would get a bye week to make it a fourteen weeks total.
You would be getting, for the most part, even matchups and not waste the bad teams playing the good teams. The networks would love this as they would be able to broadcast the best matchups of the week. By week ten, you would know who the contending teams are.
A scheduling change would do wonders for the players and coaches. It would also be a relief for fans, especially if your team is not doing well, and you just want the season to be done and over with. If your team wins the championship, you don’t have to wait till February to celebrate. A schedule change would also open the doors for a spring football league like the XFL to start in January instead of February.
Less is more, the reason some sports leagues do bad in the ratings is that their seasons are too long, players are tired, and you see a lot of injuries. Sometimes the line-ups don’t consist of many of the starters. By cutting the schedule down, every game would have more meaning. While injuries are part of the game, this could help to minimalize them which could lead to better play; thus, the televised games would pull in more viewers. How many times this past season were you doing something else while watching the game? Did you have another game on your device, were you watching racing or hockey? Why didn’t the current game hold your attention? Poor play, poor officiated (don’t get me started), or just no reason to watch as your team’s record showed they weren’t making it to the playoffs.
If the NFL is serious about player safety besides the rules, they would also think about cutting the schedule down for the players. NFL owners are not going to lose money if they did this; in fact, they would make more because of the demand for football.
It’s time to cut down
the schedule for football. No need to drag it out to the first week of January.
Let the players play their hardest for thirteen weeks to give fans the best
games that money can buy.
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