Who knew that what happens in the World Cup might change what goes on in the NFL?
Yet with each passing day, that becomes more and more likely — with even some owners, such as the Raiders' Mark Davis, gung-ho about turning back the clock to 1964, the year before Houston's Astrodome opened, and with it the era of artificial turf in sports.
(The United States also hosted the World Cup in 1994 — but the mandated grass fields for that event attracted little attention, or at least compared to the level of attention it's attracting this time around.)
And all this ties in with the future duration of the NFL's regular-season schedule, as obviously the NFLPA will want something in return for an 18th regular-season game (more than just one "something" — but whatever).
Beyond the obvious — an 11% across-the-board salary increase for all players (20 being 11% more than 18, the actual number of weeks in the future regular season vs. the current regular season) — other changes could include letting the game clock continue to run after incomplete passes, except in the last two minutes of the first half and the last five minutes of the second half (and continuing to let the clock run throughout overtime because there actually should be more tie games so that battles for division titles and/or playoff berths can get decided by half-game margins instead of on tie-breakers that at least as often as not reward the wrong team; e.g., what if one NFC team finishes tied with another in a year when the AFC won the interconference season series, and the former team had a better record within the conference — thus rewarding the team that did better against weaker competition?)
And besides, didn't John Madden say that there is nothing wrong with a tie? Chuck Noll expressed similar sentiments — and if it seems that I'm going out of my way to write about the NFL instead of MLB, maybe that's because I actually am doing that: A wealth tax — a terminally lame idea in politics — is essentially the same thing as a salary cap, in that the latter will prevent teams like the 1927 Yankees, 1942 Cardinals, and 1961 Yankees from achieving such success ever again — and as Ricky Watters famously said: For who? For what?
Remember the days when the "early" game started at 1:00 PM Eastern Time and the "late" game started at 4:00 PM Eastern Time?
Don't know about you — but I for one would like the NFL to "Make Pro Football Great Again," at least on this score.
While the NFL doesn't have their backs to the wall as baseball does, that means that the NFL has a chance to get their ducks in a row and negotiate a settlement that will keep it on a firm financial footing through at least the middle of the century — with labor peace lasting at least that long.
After all, the NFL is the most profitable sports league of all time — so clearly it can make the necessary compromises to avoid a deadly labor dispute, as MLB is poised to experience in only a few months.
The NFL would be well advised to use the five years that they have to come to a new collective bargaining agreement with the NFLPA so that the strike (or, more likely, lockout) that seems inevitable in baseball doesn't happen to them — and as saying that they would rather play on natural grass (so we're not talking about one voice crying in the wilderness).
The owners want one thing — dropping a game that doesn't count in the standings and replacing it with a game that does — and the union wants another — no more artificial turf and the unnecessary injuries it causes.
Everything else is dollars and cents — a "baby" that can always be split — just like the one in the Bible, at 1 Kings 3:24-25.
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