How many of you enjoyed The Week Without Football?
One would speculate that very few of you did.
But help is on the way — in the form of the 18-game schedule.
Once it happens, a second bye week for each team will come bundled with the software so to speak (the NFLPA will demand it) — meaning a 20-week regular season (the CFL observes a 21-week regular season, with each team getting three byes); and in addition to that, the idle week between the conference championship games and the Super Bowl will have to be abolished.
Otherwise, the Super Bowl cannot be played on the Presidents' Day weekend, which will make "Super Bowl Monday" a national holiday without creating another such holiday: next season, the Super Bowl will actually be played on that weekend, with Super Bowl LXI scheduled to be played on February 14, 2027, the latest date ever (the following day being Presidents' Day) — and since it is going to happen next year regardless, the owners will no doubt gleefully quote that old Pringle's commercial: once you pop, you can't stop!
And it will go over big at the polls, especially among voters that lean toward Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters.
In such a schedule, four teams — all from the same division — can have their byes in the same week (and then play each other the following week), which is what the NFL actually did for the first nine years after the "bye era" began in 1990, thus eliminating grossly unfair fatigue games.
Only the first two weeks and the last two weeks of the regular season would see all 32 teams playing.
To further compress the total length of the entire season, the Hall of Fame Game can be moved to Thursday night, in the same week before the rest of the league begins their preseason schedule (which will be cut from the present three games to two), so that all 32 teams shall henceforth play only two exhibition — oops, I mean "preseason" — games, while the "Pro Bowl Games" can be held the week after the Super Bowl, reviving the tradition of the Pro Bowl coming one week after the Super Bowl (after all, we're all "purists" at heart).
Another intriguing possibility is to bring back the College All-Star Game, last played in 1976 — except that this time around the college team would play the NFL team that finished with the worst record the previous season, thus forcing the latter to report to camp one week earlier. Who knows? It just might discourage tanking, been as the owners do not appear to be amenable toward implementing a lottery.
So far, seven Super Bowls had no idle week prior, the last one being Super Bowl XXXVII, which concluded the 2002 season.
Only one of those seven were blowouts (the most recent one, in which the Buccaneers blew out the Raiders by 27), defined by Dan "The Genius" Gordon, that latter-day Damon Runyon, as games having a final margin of victory of 21 points or more (Gordon defines a blowout in basketball as a game decided by 15 points or more). By contrast, 13 of the other 52 Super Bowls were blowouts by Gordon's definition.
It would appear that with an extra week to "think about it," one team or the other will crack under the added hype, making blowouts more likely.
But the bottom line is that there just isn't anything bad about an 18-game schedule.
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