An 18-game regular season is coming to the NFL, perhaps as soon as 2021 when a new CBA between the owners and players theoretically kicks in. The owners want it because it means a lot more money. The fans want it because they will get more bang for their ticket-buying buck. The players hate the idea because of the added risk of injury, but they will sell their soul to the devil for the right price. They always do.
An 18-game season will happen.
The topic that won’t go away jumped back in the news late last week when the Wall Street Journal reported the owners officially had made an 18-game proposal to the NFLPA. To address the union’s injury concerns, the owners’ plan called for each player to be limited to 16 games.
Intriguing, I first thought.
The proposal would add another fascinating layer of strategy to the NFL game. What two games does Mike Tomlin sit Ben Roethlisberger? How about Bill Belichick and Tom Brady in New England?
Impractical, I then concluded.
Great players are too competitive to want to sit out any game. Fans don’t want to see Mason Rudolph and Brian Hoyer play. They want to watch the stars.
I see an 18-game season coming with no restrictions.
The reason is – what else? – the added money. Each team shared in the NFL’s $8.78 billion of combined revenue last season, receiving $274.3 million per club. Adding two meaningful regular-season games and eliminating two of the awful exhibition games would mean an additional $500 million a year, according to The Action Network’s Darren Rovell.
The NFLPA consistently has said it won’t sell out on this issue. Steelers defensive end Cam Heyward was among the players who tweeted out last week, “18 games is straight baloney either way you cut it.” Union executive director DeMaurice Smith expanded on that view, telling ESPN, “I don’t see an 18-game schedule – under any circumstance – being in the best interest of our players. … If a coal miner is willing to spend more time in the hole, does it likely result in more money? Yeah. Is that a good thing for him as a person? Probably not. That’s the question nobody confronts. It’s easy to say it’s more money. But is it good for us? The answer is no.”
The owners will continue to push.
18 games is straight baloney either way you cut it
— Cam Heyward (@CamHeyward) July 13, 2019
“What we do know is our current preseason is not a good product,” Green Bay Packers President Mark Murphy told Rovell. “Our players don’t need four games and it seems like fewer starters are playing in them.”
That’s why fans quickly will learn to like the 18-game model. They have to be tired of paying full price to see two home exhibition games in which the top players play very little if at all. The only people who like the four-game preseason are coaches and scouts for evaluation purposes and bubble players who are fighting to make the team.
The owners will have to make it worth it to the players to go to 18 games, of course. The players want guaranteed contracts like they have in Major League Baseball, the NHL and the NBA. The players could negotiate for better health and pension benefits, perhaps getting a reduction in the service-time requirement to qualify for a pension. There are ways for the owners to get more money to the players.
Everybody has a price.
The NFL went from 12 to 14 games in 1961 and from 14 to 16 in 1978.
The time to go to 18 is coming soon.
Ron Cook: rcook@post-gazette.com and Twitter@RonCookPG. Ron Cook can be heard on the “Cook and Joe” show weekdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on 93.7 The Fan.
First Published: July 14, 2019, 9:03 p.m.
