In Ireland, they have a saying — or at least they used to have one: "England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity."
We saw how this worked not once but twice in the 20th Century — after each of the two World Wars.
After World War I, Ireland's status changed from a de-facto colony to that of a dominion (the Irish Free State), same as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand — and in 1949, after World War II, the Irish Free State become a totally independent, sovereign nation, the Irish Republic.
(Similarly, African-Americans were the vastly inordinate beneficiaries in both cases on this side of the proverbial pond: when the wars broke out in 1914 and 1939 respectively, northern employers were suddenly cut off from what had been their normal supply of immigrant labor, leaving them with no choice but to bring black workers up from the Jim Crow South to take those jobs. Thus began the Harlem Renaissance and other black cultural phenomena.)
Well, in the NFL, they should have a saying: the NFLPA's difficulty is the owners' opportunity.
The NFLPA — that's the union, for those of you in Rio Linda, West Palm Beach and Staten Island — has just been hit by a major scandal involving "conflict of interest" — and while the union is denying the existence of any such conflict, an old expression may prove cogent:
He who excuses himself accuses himself.
With the union knocked off balance in this fashion, now could be the time for the owners to make a renewed push for the 18-game regular-season schedule that everyone knows is coming anyway.
If it is done by decade's end, it doesn't have to be accompanied by expansion or realignment. As for the schedule itself, the fifth interconference game that was added in 2021 can be transferred to the intraconference schedule, with another intraconference game also added, so that every team would play 14 intraconference games, increasing the likelihood that two teams who had finished with the same regular-season record would have had a head-to-head meeting therein.
And if the rules for the head-to-head tiebreaker are made to revert to those in effect from 1970 through 1977; i.e., if three teams, all in different divisions, finish tied and Team A went 1-0 against the other two while Team B was 1-1 and Team C 0-1, the teams get seeded in that order, most ties would not go beyond head-to-head results.
Let's also not forget that there will be more tie games in 2025 and beyond, for the first time in fifty years, due to the changes to overtime that the owners approved in the spring — so many division and playoff races will henceforth be decided by half-game margins; e.g., a 10-7 team getting in over a 9-7-1 team, and the tiebreakers won't even come into play.
When Mr. Spock said (in the Star Trek episode Let That Be Your Last Battlefield, which focused on racism on a faraway planet) that "change is the essential process of all existence," maybe he was looking back on the early 21st century NFL?
Because it looks as if the NFL is going to be keeping those changes coming.
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