Duane Sampson
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MOMENTUM BUILDS FOR EXPANDED 17-18 GAME SEASON
Posted by Mike Florio on August 18, 2008, 9:23 a.m.
For a while now, the NFL has been considering the possibility of expanding the regular season. Talk is heating up, and the timing makes sense.
With the league hoping to reel in the relative dollars that are devoted to the players via the next round of Collective Bargaining Agreement negotiations, this is a perfect opportunity for the owners to create more money for everyone.
“We have to grow the pie; the biggest way of quickly growing the pie is in the media area,” Patriots owner Bob Kraft tells Mike Reiss of the Boston Globe. “The feeling is that we would get greater revenue for media if we had more regular-season games.”
Even though owners make greater profit in the preseason by charging the same amount for tickets and by paying less money to the players, the key is the television revenue. An 18-game regular season could translate into a 12-percent increase to the money paid by the various networks for airing the games.
“The bottom line is that I think you’ll see us going to 17 or 18 regular-season games in the future,” Kraft told Reiss.
Such a move could/would trim the preseason, possibly down to two games. But a larger regular season creates all sorts of other issues.
With 18 games, there’s a greater chance for some real snooze-fests at the tail end of the season. If a bad team is already clearly bad after 14 or 15 games, the team could be even worse after 16 or 17, increasing the chances of vast expanses of empty seats and low ratings during the last few weekends.
Then there’s the legitimate need to prepare each team for the season, and to give guys at the bottom of the roster a fair chance to show what they can do. Kraft recognized this in saying, “[Y]ou’d have to balance that with the need that coaches have to develop and get a team ready to play. Could it be two preseason games, or three? I personally wouldn’t be adverse to either one.”
Another real question is scheduling. With 18 games, there would still be a perception of unfairness when some of the teams are forced to give up a home date as the league continues its plan to export regular-season contests to other countries. At 17, a full 16 games could be played at neutral sites, with everyone getting their eight regular-season home games.
But then the problem would be that half the teams would lose a home game in the preseason, if the slate moves from four to three in response to a one-game bump in the regular season.
Another point to keep in mind in this regard is the calendar. In the late ’90s, the league wisely decided to avoid Labor Day weekend as the launch of the season. So adding games would push the regular season into the next year, bumping the Super Bowl farther into February. And on the front end a reduced preseason would cause camps to open later, giving baseball even more time as the dominant pro sport.
If, in the end, the goal is to grow the pie, why not expand the regular season to 17 games and keep the four preseason games? This would give every team ten home games, maintain the current July-August camp/preseason activity, add another week to the regular season, and provide the league with sixteen opportunities every year to play games in places where games currently aren’t played.
So while there’s a presumption that growth of the regular season would result in shrinkage of the preseason, truly growing the pie will happen only by truly growing the season. The entire season. Not just the part of it that counts, at the expense of the part that doesn’t.
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