Even with a strong 9-4 showing in Week 7, home teams are still one game under .500 (53-54) so far in 2021, after also having gone one game under .500 (127-128-1) in all of 2020 — the first time in NFL history that home teams finished below .500 over the course of an entire season.
(In 2019, home teams went a more normal 132-123-1 — a .518 winning percentage.)
Worse yet — at least for the home teams (and their fans) anyway — empty stadiums cannot be used as an excuse this time around, since all home games this season are being played before capacity crowds or very close to it in most cases — and don't count on warm-weather and domed-stadium teams having to play in cold weather significantly reversing this trend, as such teams went an extremely competitive 18-20 a year ago, playoffs included ("cold weather" defined as any game played by a team that plays its home games either indoors or in a warm-weather venue at a northern, outdoor stadium from November 1 onward, irrespective of the actual kickoff-time temperature).
This year, the entire regular season will be pushed deeper into the winter because of the 17-game schedule that has taken effect this year, meaning that the season finales for all 32 teams will be played on January 9, the latest ever (by contrast, Super Bowl XI was played on January 9, 1977) — and if the owners get their way (don't they always?) and an 18th regular-season game is added within the present collective bargaining agreement (which is allowed if both the owners and the National Football League Players' Association sign off on it) and a second bye week for each team (which the NFL actually did in 1993, due to a scheduling conflict with the college bowl games that no longer exists) is also added, bringing the NFL into line with the 18 games and two bye weeks for each team (which the NFLPA will no doubt demand in exchange for agreeing to an 18-game regular-season schedule, among other things that they will insist on) that the CFL has observed without any complaints from anyone since 1986 (except for this year's pandemic-driven 14 games and two bye weeks for each team, after the CFL canceled its entire 2020 season due to COVID-19), we're talking a regular season ending in the January 18-24 range, depending on the vagaries of the calendar.
This would always lead to the Super Bowl being played on the Sunday within the Presidents' Day weekend (in years when Labor Day falls on September 7, the league will have to bite the proverbial bullet and begin the regular season on the Labor Day weekend), thus making "Super Bowl Monday" a de-facto national holiday without creating a totally new holiday, as the country has just done with Juneteenth — plus the totally unnecessary off week between the conference championship games and the Super Bowl can be made a permanent thing of the past; and not for nothing, but there have already been seven Super Bowls played in the game's history which were not preceded by an idle week, which was arguably considered necessary in order to hype the game in the early years of its existence — but that is clearly no longer the case now.
But first things first — and even with the end of the regular season being pushed back by one week — potentially making the weather more of an issue — there is no reason to believe, at least from the present vantage point, that things are going to change much this season from what happened last season.
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