NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said on Friday he would support extending the NFL season to 18 games and reducing pre-season games in the future, meaning the Super Bowl would fall on a three-day weekend—a move that could require players’ buy-in.
Rumors of a reinvigorated push for an 18-game schedule swirled in March, and on Friday the NFL ... [+]
Goodell said he’s happy with a 17-game regular season now, but said as the league looks forward, he could see reducing pre-season games and adding an 18th regular season game.
“If we got to 18 [regular-season] and two [pre-season games], that’s not an unreasonable thing,” Goodell said on The Pat McAfee Show on Friday.
Goodell also pointed out that if the NFL season were extended by one week, the Super Bowl would be played the Sunday of Presidents’ Day weekend, meaning many people would have the following Monday off—a thought that was met with cheers from the crowd.
Goodell told McAfee he doesn’t like the pre-season, and he doesn’t think fans like it either. “I’m not a fan of the pre-season,” Goodell said, adding: “I’d rather replace a pre-season game with a regular-season game any day.”
The NFL switched to its current 17-game regular-season and three pre-season games scheduled in 2021, extending the regular season and shortening the pre-season by one game. A year earlier, the players’ union and owners both voted to approve the first switch to the schedule in more than four decades. At the time, Goodell said the switch was “a monumental moment in NFL history” that would help “continue to grow our game around the world.” In March, rumors swirled that the push for an 18-game season was picking up again, as the NFL—whose massive TV audience and multibillion-dollar broadcast contracts have bucked an overall trend of declining TV viewership—realizes the financial benefit of adding another game. But there are also concerns around the safety of players adding another game, and the players’ union would likely need to agree on the shift.