EDITORIAL: Bye Week? Bye Bye 16 game schedule, and what that brings

As a whole, football fans are completely sick of pre-season games after the second week, even knowing the 3rd game is the one all the starters play. Hard to imagine a time when NFL fans had to put up with 6 preseason games! That is absolutely insane by today’s standards, but yet they did play those games, and they took them more seriously. Week 1 in 1977 announcers were talking about a Buccaneer win over the Colts in preseason as if they really did beat that team in Blue. Truth be told, all those preseason games did have more starters in them than not. They were treated more like rehearsals for the starters than tryouts for backups. That is where the NFL went shopping to find 2 more regular season games and no one made a fuss about it at all. In fact, the change to 16 games was when the NFL really took off as a league into the range of elitism, Monday Night Football for instance really saw a major difference as a result of the expansion. Not only did MNF add two more games, but they added some Thursday games too. Ratings went off the charts on MNF with the extra exposure. Quietly, a 1,000 yard rushing season became more do-able, although no one really complained about it, and this is something that will become even more diminished with a switch to an 18 game year. Player injuries is another major concern; in an age where the NFL, and football in general is supposed to be more careful regarding concussions. An extra couple of games starting is bound to add to injuries. So how can the NFL do it and come out ahead in all departments?

• Cut back preseason games to 2– This one is obvious, but there are some reports where the 4 games or even 3 is being considered to stick around. This can’t happen, You will ‘Football Out’ a lot of people, as hard as that is to imagine, especially if you have meaningless games at the end of the year. That is another point.
• Penalize end of season ‘Sitting of Stars’– As i’ve made clear on several articles I’ve written, Parity is dying in the NFL with the way the schedules are done. With a 16 game schedule, we have a lot of “Star Sitting” at the end of the year, and with two more games, we could have a whole month of teams having clinched the playoffs, thus resting starters to save them for the playoffs. This results in more boring football, basically moving preseason games from August to December. Find a way to prevent this; perhaps with rules giving home field advantage to teams with a better record, not just division winners.
• Increase rosters to 62, with 53 allowed to dress on each Sunday– There is another reason for this which I will get to next, but the obvious ramifications here are more players getting NFL jobs will appease the Players union, and more players on the roster to spread the workload not only on game day but practices too.
• Make SPECIAL TEAMS an official side of football– One of the big changes in the game from the old times to today is the specialization of the game. You had players who double teamed; they played both offense and defense. This is totally gone now, but you still have players who have double duty; and that is on Special Teams. Well in what will be another change to the game, the special teams players will be specialized, dedicated wing-men, attackers, etc. This is will cut down on injuries big time as special teamers wont have to worry about what they will be doing on offense/defense too.
• Cut back on OTAs, give players more time off– only 15-20 years ago, football players came to training camp to get exactly that; training to get into shape. Over time however, the competition among fellow athletes is so great, most cannot or will not allow themselves the option of relaxing so they go at it all off-season staying in shape and just coming into camp to learn the playbook.
• Add an extra bye week, two for each team. This gives each team time to recover from injuries.

To be fair, these ideas are not all Niko’s thoughts. They are bits and pieces I have gathered from good ideas brought on by other people, so they are a kind of “best of” and sound like they make sense. If the NFL is going to give us the fans more football to get excited over, they need to realize that the players realize the owners are obviously the ones to get the most out of the change. TV Contracts will go up, money will spread around, and its up to the players to make sure they get their fair share of that money, not so much now, but later when they have long retired and the effects of the extra games have taken their toll.