The NFL Ain’t Broke, So Don’t Fix It

Roger Goodell and the NFL are once again contemplating the idea of expanding the NFL season to 18 games.

Here’s what Goodell said Tuesday morning at the NFL’s spring owners meetings in Boston.

“I hear from fans consistently that they want to make every NFL event more valuable. They see the preseason as being less valuable to them because they don’t see the best players and the games do not count. We have to address that, whether we are looking at 18 [regular-season games] and two [preseason games] or 16-and-two and expanded playoffs.”

But the thing is, the NFL is already a great product. It doesn’t need to be tinkered with or changed.

One of the best parts about the NFL is that every game matters. Because there are only 16 games during the regular season, one bad performance can make a huge difference. Each game is already an event. The 59^th game of the MLB season doesn’t necessarily make a huge difference, but a Week 7 NFL game can have a tremendous impact on a team’s chances to make the playoffs. Adding two games to the regular season would diminish the importance of each game.

Isn’t Roger Goodell’s big thing player safety? By the end of the 16 game season, most teams are already riddled with injuries. Even if the team doesn’t list the injury, just about every player has some sort of minor knick or bruise that is bothering them. Adding two more regular season games would just cause more injuries to the players, and put them at risk for major injuries.

This whole decision comes down to money. Two extra regular season games means that the owners will make more money, so at the end of the day, the NFL season will be 18 games long sometime in the near future.

But right now, the NFL ain’t broke, so why are they trying to fix it?