National Football League owners could vote in May on plans to lengthen the regular season to 17 or 18 games. The longer regular season, however, is unlikely to begin any earlier than 2011, Commissioner Roger Goodell said Monday at the N.F.L.’s annual meeting.
Adding at least one regular-season game while reducing the preseason schedule is a critical component of what Goodell called “increasing value” — the league’s attempt to find new revenue while remaining attractive to fans in the challenging economic climate. There is almost no chance that the regular season will remain at 16 games.
My initial reaction is that the more real football we have, the happier I'll be. Preseason football is brutal. Regular season football is awesome. Less of the former and more of the latter is a good thing.
But there is another side to it, and that's that football is a viciously physical sport, and it's played by human beings and not robots. At the end of a season, guys are beat up, bruised and battered to the point where not letting them take human growth hormone seems almost cruel. More games means more injuries means shorter careers.
And even though the idea of more football is obviously appealing to most fans, really, at the end of week 17, has anyone ever thought, "That really needed to be longer"? Sixteen games is plenty to determine who's the best team out there.
There's an upside and there's a downside. It's not like fans are going to get a choice, though, because anything that the owners would approve that would make them more money, the owners are going to approve. Records are going to fall. Careers are going to get shorter. The regular season's going to get longer, whether it's a good idea or not.
Subject: The NFL's regular season is about to get longer 
Thu Mar 26, 2009 9:10 am
