This past week the National Football League put forward a new Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) to its player's union. It was more than just your standard CBA as there were a couple of major items in there that will fundamentally change how each season of the NFL Will unfold. Those being adding an additional team in each conference in the playoffs, moving it from six teams per conference to seven, and adding an extra game for each team in the regular season, moving from sixteen games to seventeen games per season.
Let's start with the good decision that the NFL is making. Moving to fourteen playoff teams is a smart move by the NFL. This new format would mean that only one team in each conference would earn a bye to the divisional round of the playoffs. This can encourage teams at the top of the league to fight harder in order to earn that bye, as it is even more valuable to have it if only two teams in the NFL will have that first-round bye in the playoffs. This could also discourage teams as, effectively, the second, third, and fourth seeds are the same position in the first two rounds and this could discourage teams from competing later on in the season once they cannot secure the first-round bye, but that bye is so much more valuable that teams will covet it even more. This will also give us more football games in the Wild Card Weekend of the NFL playoffs, which if you ask me, will be incredibly exciting to see more teams eligible to fight for the Lombardi. The extra spot will enable more teams that heat up late in the season to be able to earn a playoff spot and play more football. More football is always good.
Well, it's not always good. The move to a seventeen game schedule is a little boggling to me. The proposal in this issue is that the league will drop one preseason game (moving from four to three) and adding it to the regular season. That makes sense, but where does that get added in the regular season. How do you decide who plays who? There would need to be a new formula in deciding which teams will play which, but that would not be too difficult to decide. The toughest factor would be how to add the game in terms of home or away. A seventeenth game would mean an uneven number of games and would require some teams to play more games at home than on the road and vice versa. This is not something that the owners are going to like as that means more revenue for some than others, as well how would you decide who would get an extra home game? If you base it on one team play, then some teams may never relinquish the extra game (New England), and some may never earn one (Cleveland). This is not suitable for a league such as the NFL. To alternate years is just not a suitable method as that can go bad fast with a simple mistake.
The only way in my mind that this would work would be to have every team play a neutral site game each year, but even that may not work as there may not be enough venues. The NFL currently plans to have five neutral site games in 2020, but that number would have to grow to sixteen if they would be able to have each team play a neutral site game. Where could the NFL go for those games? I suggest another Mexico City game, but they're not in the market for that, especially if the CFL is making inroads there and are growing ties with football there, but that doesn't mean the No Fun League would come in and ruin that. The league could return to Toronto, but that could squash the CFL there too. There is the possibility of playing neutral site games in the United States, but that could get very old, very quick. The prospect of seventeen games is not smart by the NFL.
This new CBA proposal by the NFL is typical NFL, they seem to have done something right, but even were able to screw that up. Can they get a better proposal, or will we lose the good with the bad? Only time will tell.
La Cheeserie, Littles
Fight On, Sleepers
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