While baseball's owners and players are exchanging dueling plans reminiscent of the "Dueling Banjos" in the 1972 movie Deliverance, to head off their seemingly inevitable labor dispute, the NFL and its union, with five years to go before their own deadline, could do something far simpler: by adding an 18th game to its regular-season schedule in return for eliminating artificial turf fields in the NFL (although Las Vegas might not like it, since they book tons of bets against teams "as a visitor on the carpet" and "as a visitor on the grass" — terms that Benjamin Lee Eckstein popularized).
And as if on cue, the first "Super Bowl Monday" in history will take place this coming February regardless, in that Super Bowl XLI will be played on February 14, 2027, making the following day, February 15, the third Monday in February, Presidents' Day, and therefore a national holiday (maybe once the owners get to pop, maybe they won't want to stop?).
It's not as if the NFL owners haven't done this sort of thing before: when a strike wiped out half the regular season in 1982, Super Bowl XVII was pushed back one week so as to fit in one more week of regular-season games, all but two of them same-division matchups.
When 9/11 caused the postponement of what would have been Week 2 of 2001, its games were moved to the end of the regular season; and Super Bowl XXXVI was also pushed back — into February for the first time ever. And except for the following year's Super Bowl, every Super Bowl since has been played in the month that includes Groundhog Day (and Super Bowl LVI was played on the second Sunday in February, as have the four since).
Beyond the obvious, an 18-game schedule would have many attractive features.
First, a second bye week can be added for each team's schedule, thus increasing the number of regular-season weeks from 18 to 20 (think of it as the distance of a horse race being lengthened from a mile and an eighth to a mile and a quarter). The optimum scenario has all four teams from the same division having the same week off, with all but the first two weeks and the last two weeks of the season having four teams on a bye. In addition, teams playing Thursday games can also be idle the week before (Ben Roethlisberger suggested this). For its part, the CFL has had three bye weeks for each team since 2018 — except in 2020, when the entire season was canceled due to COVID, and the 2021 season ended up getting shortened to 14 games.
Second, by having entire divisions having byes in the same week, it will do away with grossly unfair fatigue games. Of course, sooner or later, expansion will add a fifth team to some divisions — but as Ted Kennedy should have said, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
Third, a week's worth of meaningless exhibition games can be deleted (some of us are old enough to remember when every team had to play at least six such games — and the two teams that played in the Hall of Fame Game had to play seven). By contrast. there were no preseason games in 2020 at all because of COVID (north of the border, each team plays two every year) — and speaking of the Hall of Fame game, it can be played on the Thursday night of the same week in which the rest of the league plays their exhibition openers (thus telescoping four preseason weeks into two).
Fourth, 18 games will give teams a better chance to overcome slow starts: only one team in NFL history — the 1992 Chargers — has ever made the playoffs after starting 0-4; and no team has ever done so after an 0-5 start. Keeping hope alive longer will put more fans in the seats (baseball's 1914 "Miracle Braves" were in last place in the National League as late as July 18; they went 59-16 the rest of the way to win the NL pennant by an unbelievable 10 1/2 games, then won the World Series in a 4-game sweep). Imagine an NFL team doing the same thing, or some reasonable facsimile thereof?
And finally, the Super Bowl can be held on the Presidents' Day weekend every year — giving everyone a day to recover (Super Bowl Sunday leading the entire calendar in alcohol consumption in the United States) and giving the phrase "Super Bowl hangover" two definitions instead of only one.
But what's in it for the players, you ask?
How about an 11 per cent across-the-board salary increase for all players — 20 being 11% more than 18, the number of weeks (not games) in the present regular season?
George Kittle is about to become a hero to everyone involved — on a par with Curt Flood and Andy Messersmith.
He just doesn't realize it yet.
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