NFL players will likely weigh in on an expanded season if it is approved by league owners over the next month. Prior to the completion of the new CBA, 49ers cornerback Richard Sherman publicly opposed an expanded regular season. Despite his and other players' public objections, the majority of NFL players voted for the new CBA that included the possibility of an expanded season. But it seems like player safety has a price tag.
Player safety, up to the point of, 'Hey, 17 games makes us this much money, so we really don't care how safe they are, if you're gonna pay us this much money to play another game. By Bryan DeArdo. Dec 27, at am ET 2 min read. Here's a look back at every major stoppage since the league began play in As of now, the NFL remains on track to play a full game season, albeit with unprecedented restrictions pertaining to physical interactions between players, coaches and staff, not to mention game-day attendance, with many teams already planning as if stadiums will at least be at reduced capacity.
Even if, somehow, things proceed as planned in September, the league's already wiped out all in-person spring activities and for months banned staff from even entering team facilities. Training camp is expected to start in late July, with preseason to follow, but even those timelines are already in question. After a failure to negotiate a new collective bargaining agreement CBA with the NFL Players Association, team owners imposed a lockout of players, barring them from team facilities starting in March.
A lengthy back-and-forth legal battle ensued, and while the NFL ultimately didn't need its contingency plans for a shortened season, the league still had essentially no offseason, with spring workouts cancelled and free agency delayed until the two sides finally struck a deal in late July. The Hall of Fame Game preseason opener was also wiped from the schedule, with players reporting to training camp roughly a month before the start of the season.
In response, the league postponed Week 2 games to later in the month and essentially shifted the entire rest of the schedule back one week, making Super Bowl XXXVI, between the Patriots and Rams, the first Super Bowl to be played in February. The last official strike to disrupt the NFL, this marked the fifth time players stepped away from the game in a span of 19 years and famously forced teams to import replacement players.
But after a year away, the preseason is returning, and NFL teams will get their customary tune-up games to get in shape for the regular season. However, the NFL preseason will look a bit different than it has in previous years.
The NFL preseason will feature just three games per team instead of the usual four. Only two teams league-wide — the Steelers and the Cowboys — will be on the field for four preseason games. The NFL preseason was shortened to three weeks as a result of the league's switch to a game regular-season schedule.
To make room for a 17th game, the NFL nixed one of its four exhibition contests. Thus, the three-week preseason was born. Cutting a preseason game will have minimal impact on NFL teams.
Sure, records for most rushing, receiving and passing yards that were set in game seasons are all in jeopardy now that those seeking to beat them get an extra game to do it. But this has happened before. Prior to , the NFL's regular season was just 14 games. Obviously, a large majority of the league's volume-based records have been set since the expansion to 16 games 43 years ago.
And surely, 43 years from now, we'll look back well, maybe you will and say that all of the records had been broken and rebroken several times since The first time someone goes over 2, receiving yards in a season, some Scrooge somewhere is going to say, "Yeah, but Calvin Johnson set the record in only 16 games," and they're going to be right.
But that's just the way of the sports world. We aren't used to it in football because, well, it has been 43 years since we had a change like this. They didn't even have Twitter then so everybody could find out what literally everybody else in the world thought about the change.
Can you imagine? The CBA specifies that the league cannot expand the regular season beyond 17 games for the life of the deal, which runs through So the soonest the owners could expand to 18 games would be , unless the players agreed to open up the CBA and renegotiate it, which would be a whole thing.
Sixteen extra games per season offers the league an opportunity to fill some of the new spaces on the TV schedule that will result from the new TV deals, whether that's Monday Night doubleheaders, late-season Saturday games or Sunday morning-window games in other countries. One of the topics in Tuesday's owners discussion was the future of international games, with Canada, Germany, Mexico, Brazil and the United Kingdom all discussed as potential sites.
Beginning in , all 32 teams will play internationally at least once every eight years. Absolutely possible. Look, those of us who have been in NFL locker rooms in December and January know this is no small thing. These guys are badly beaten up by the end of a game season, and it's only going to be worse once it's Players are going to have to figure out the best way to manage themselves through a longer season, and it's entirely possible that extra rest along the way will be a part of it.
Coaches -- especially coaches of playoff-bound teams -- are going to have to figure out the best way to manage their players through a longer season, and of course it's possible that means more guys sitting in Weeks 17 and 18 just to make sure they're in shape to play in the postseason. There's likely going to be a lot of trial and error on this front in the first couple of years as everybody gets used to it. That, my friend, is a question for whichever team it is whose tickets you buy.
I have no insight to offer there, but I do have a guess. Skip to main content Skip to navigation. The NFL's game season is here: What you need to know, and how the money will work. Arizona Cardinals. Sources: OBJ may return punts in Rams debut.
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