Should the NFL expand to a 30 game season?
Should the NFL expand to a 30 game season?
One of my favorite Twitter accounts is Nick Walker, @nw3, a private equity guy in the Midwest who has offbeat takes on otherwise ultra-mainstream topics like making money, football, and Taylor Swift.
I don’t know whether Nick has been to MBA school, but he reminds me of my reaction to my MBA education at UCLA in 1980-82: they sure teach you some crazy perspectives in B-school, although most MBAs don’t notice how weird the implications of what they are taught are. That’s probably why nobody ever seems to respond to Nick on X.com.
Lately, Nick raises the topic of: why does the NFL limit itself to the Autumn?
In contrast to the NFL’s 17 games (up from 12 games in the early 1960s) from the second week in September to early January, the English soccer Premier League runs for 38 games from August to May. This year, the Premier League regular season starts on September 1 and ends on May 10, 8 and 1/3rd months later. In contrast, the NFL regular season only lasts 18 weeks (17 games and a bye week.)
During World Cup years, the soccer season runs from August to July.
People (in other countries) love soccer.
Personally, I much prefer baseball to football, but in 2024, most Americans do not. Americans love American football, even if they are recently less likely to send their sons to play it. Eventually, the increasing gladiatorialization of American football might cause the NFL a problem, but that sure hasn’t happened yet.
So, what’s stopping the NFL from expanding from a regular season of 17 games to 30 games? Why not start the NFL season right after the NBA Finals in June?
That sounds horrible to me, but I’m a traditionalist, not a profit maximalist.
Well, the limits of the human body are one thing. Patrick Mahomes couldn’t play all 30 games (not to mention the playoffs).
On the other hand, baseball pitchers don’t play all their games either. Clayton Kershaw has never played in even 21% of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ regular season baseball games. In the five seasons of this decade, he’s never played in 17% of their games.
So, what if there were a rule that NFL players could only play in 17 of the 30 regular season games? Would that strike fans as bogus? Or would talk radio go nuts strategizing over which 17 games Mahomes should play in?
I could imagine this would lead to a lot of blowouts in which the opponents of the Chiefs respond to Mahomes starting the game on the first drive by pulling their starters and sending in their second stringers. Gamblers would be insanely interested by the first play: do the opponents respond to the Chiefs sending Mahomes out to play by resting their first team? Do they get their stars off the field in time?
The failure of various non-NFL professional football leagues implies to me that people don’t love football sufficiently to want simply “more!”
Part of the NFL’s appeal I think is similar to what people used to do around water coolers the morning after a popular network show ran: everyone was watching the same thing at the same time and had an opinion on it, etc. If, instead of everyone focused on the same storylines featuring the same stars, you had a couple A-list versions and simultaneously a bunch of B-grade knockoffs and no one was ever sure week to week which would be which, you might gain some attention from the hardest of hardcore fans but lose quite a bit from the vastly more numerous casuals.
No.