First this: NFL players have talked plenty tough about an expanded regular season, saying it would be nothing less than an assault on their short- and long-term health.
Some have indicated that an extra game would be a non-starter in these CBA negotiations, that they would choose to preserve what's left of their battered bodies rather than succumb to the league's latest bribe, and how dare the league even ask.
I was gullible enough to believe them, and maybe they'll surprise me _ and everyone else _ by remaining true to their conviction. Maybe they'll reject a CBA proposal that includes a 17th game. And maybe I'll marry Jennifer Aniston (not that I'm looking to get out of my current marriage, which grows more blissful by the millisecond).
Money is the issue here. Isn't it always? The players stand to make a bunch more of it if they agree to more games, and who can't appreciate that? Players at the lower end of the scale would be especially eager to vote yes. Awesome. Do it. Just don't ever talk about your health again, because you will have sold your bodies for a buck.
Don't talk about it three weeks from now. Don't talk about it 30 years from now, when you can't walk.
If you don't care about your bodies, why should we?
As for the league _ which is to say the owners _ shame on them. Shame on commissioner Roger Goodell. I'm no scientist, but it's patently obvious that the best way to curb long-term concussion issues and other health problems is to play less football, while the surest path to more problems is more football.
That's where we're headed, thanks to the owners pushing extra games like drug dealers on a street corner, all so they can go from filthy rich to filthier rich. Remove a scantly watched exhibition game. Add a lucrative regular season game. Beef up the TV packages. More, more, more!
How much is enough?
In a related issue, how much can the human body take? Seems to me we're already pushing it at 16 games. I walk into those locker rooms after the four-month marathon that is the regular season. Players are beaten to a bloody pulp. Lengthening the season _ and you know 17 games will eventually lead to 18 _ will only break more bodies and dilute the product. We will have reached the point where a player could participate in 21 games in a given season, including four playoff games. That is borderline criminal (though, again, the players will have chosen it).
And if that's not bad enough, the NFL also is poised to reward mediocrity by adding two more playoff teams each year. You know, like last year's Steelers, who stumbled to an 8-8 record by flaming out in Baltimore in the regular season finale. The Steelers and the rotten Los Angeles Rams would have been your final two playoff teams last season.
How can anyone be excited about this? We're going to have coaches making the playoffs and getting fired for a bad record in the same year. The Steelers would have made the playoffs the past two seasons, in fact, despite collapsing down the stretch both years. The NFL is going to take the best playoff system in sports and soil it.
Notice I didn't say ruin it, because it's impossible to ruin the NFL, just like it's impossible to ruin the NCAA basketball tournament. You could have 100 teams in the NCAA tourney, including 10 comprised of clowns on tricycles, and people would gleefully fill out their brackets and bet on the games and watch like crazy. You could have 20 games and 20 playoff teams in the NFL, and people would gobble it up. They would bet on games and obsess over their fantasy teams and watch like crazy.
But that wouldn't justify those moves. Intense interest wouldn't justify a 17-game season and a 14-team playoff field, either, but that's what you're going to have.
This is pure gluttony, in the end. Football gluttony. And you know what I' m going to do about it?
Gorge myself, just like you.
