MVN - Most Valuable Network

17th Regular Season Game for the NFL?

The NFL preseason is about as exciting as watching ice thaw, and apparently, Roger Goodell isn’t satisfied with his league’s annual August snoozefest. He’s exploring some ways to liven up the preseason — one of which, reports John Clayton, is the addition of a 17th game to the regular season:

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell raised the possibility of having a 17th regular-season game as an option to help settle some of the league’s future labor problems.

“We are actually looking at that as one alternative,” Goodell said Tuesday at the NFL owners meeting in Atlanta, the same day that the league’s owners voted unanimously to opt out of their labor deal with the players’ union two years early. “We think that may have an impact on some of the things we would want to talk to the players about. It’s on the table.”

A 17th regular-season game could replace a fourth preseason game and the possibility comes at a time that the league is not satisfied with the quality of the preseason. The league made a presentation to owners about ways to improve the current preseason Tuesday.

Most NFL fans would warmly welcome a shorter preseason. A common complaint among NFL season ticket holders is that they’re forced to pay full price for preseason tickets, which come packaged with regular season tickets — by reducing the preseason to three games, these complaints could be lessened. Also, I’ve never been convinced that four preseason games are truly necessary for teams to make sound roster decisions (three should be sufficient).

However, 17 seems like a strange amount of games for a regular season — having teams play an odd number of games is a foreign concept to American professional sports leagues. Adding another game of regular season football to the schedule would be excellent, but having a 17-game season would present the issue of teams playing unequal amounts of home and road games, and it would just seem strange to have .500 records become a thing of the past.

Perhaps teams would play one game each season at a neutral site? That would be the fairest option to deal with the odd number of games, and if these games were played in NFL cities, they would become even more compelling. Imagine this: The Saints and Chiefs do battle at Giants Stadium, while the Titans and Rams face off at Qwest Field, and the Vikings play the Ravens at Texas Stadium. Now THAT would be pretty cool.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 21st, 2008 at 3:18 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.