Last January, I offered up here and here – free of any charge – a laundry list of suggestions on how the NFL can improve its already excellent product. The reason it’s fun and interesting to think about things like this is precisely because the product is so good already; finding ways to improve other sports isn’t nearly as challenging. Therefore, in the spirit of the Holiday Season and flush with a generosity of spirit, I have a few more suggestions for the NFL mavens.
The NFL schedule – with regard to who plays whom – is set up on a rotation system. It does not take long to figure out who will be on whose schedule next year once a season is over; the questions left are where and when will the games be played. And it is exactly in those dimensions of “where/when” that the NFL can make improvements. Let me explain.
Division rivalries are big things in the NFL. Some of the rivalries are bigger than others; some have waxed and waned over the years. However, interdivisional games are a big deal for the teams and for the fans. Particularly important for the teams and the fans is that the division champion gets a spot in the playoff despite its record; mathematically, it is possible for a team to go 4-12 and win their division; that hypothetical 4-12 team would still be in the playoffs. So why not use the divisional games in a larger way. Why not begin every season with every team playing its first three games against its division opponents? That makes those early season games just a tad more important than they might be with a random schedule.
Then, to put the icing on the cake, assure that every team closes out the season in December by playing its last three games against those same division opponents. The rivalries will be enhanced and the games are likely to be even more meaningful. Moreover, the teams are going to play each other twice in the season under any circumstances so why not use the division games to bracket the season?
Each team plays four out-of conference games each year. You could talk me into the idea of playing all of them in the weeks between the end of September and the beginning of November except for the fact that there has to be at least one inter-conference game on Thanksgiving in order to give both FOX and CBS a game on Thanksgiving under the current rules for televising games. If the NFL can work out a way to handle the “Thanksgiving issue” and simultaneously play all the inter-conference games at the same time, I think that would be a good idea too.
The other scheduling issue that needs a change is the Exhibition Season. The fact that teams require season ticket holders to buy two extra tickets to meaningless exhibition games where the only real objective is to avoid injury to key players goes beyond shameful and all the way to obscene. Fans have to pay regular season prices to see the scrubs play football – - and in some cases they are not even seeing the scrubs because the majority of the guys on the field for most of the game will never make it to the regular season roster/practice squad. This price gouging behavior has gone on for so long that the owners seem to have taken it to be a grandfathered license to pick the pockets of their fans. It really is amazing how those owners can stand up and say that they value their fans and care about them and all that bunkum and still foist that horrible Exhibition Product on the fans and jam it down their throats.
The owners are not lining up in soup lines to get sustenance nor to find shelter with other homeless and downtrodden folks. They can afford to take a little less money in the short run – and maybe “grow the brand a bit” by separating the Exhibition Season games from the season ticket sales and letting anyone/everyone pay lower ticket prices for those games. The marketplace will determine what the traffic will bear rather quickly and the owners will still take in gobs of revenue for games that mean nothing and feature B-List and C-List players for the majority of snaps.
A friend has had Redskins’ season tickets since forever in his family – I think he said his father bought them originally in 1956 so even if I’m off by a year or two in my recollection, he’s had them for a while. He LOVES the Exhibition Games every year because that is when he says he can focus on the draft picks and the free agents on the two teams to see of there is a “diamond in the rough”. That’s fine; and maybe there are hundreds of other folks who would want to do the same thing. After all, there are folks who go to watch NBA Developmental League games too. However, the difference here is that the people attending D-League games are not paying $1000 a seat to park their buns in a chair at courtside; those seats are not even going to cost them “three-digits” – if that is how closely they want to take a look at those “diamonds in the rough”. That is a more equitable way to deal with fans who might want to see an exhibition version of the real product – - sort of like spring training baseball.
The NFL needs to reconsider the way that it maintains its records and stats. Marvin Harrison is a great receiver and he has caught passes in a large number of consecutive games – near 180 as I recall. He is chasing Jerry Rice’s record in this category at 274. However, Harrison has been inactive for many games this year due to a nagging knee injury and that is not enough to “break the string”. When Harrison returns to the line-up for even one snap of the ball, then he needs to catch a pass in that game to keep the streak alive. Somehow, I find that less than satisfying – and I purposely used Marvin Harrison as an example here because I bear no dislike for him at all and I hugely admire the way he has conducted himself on the field for his entire career. I am trying to separate the player from the concept here. A “consecutive game streak” should require that all of the games be consecutive ones in which the players team participated. Oh, by the way, Rice achieved his record under the same rules; he too had some injury time off.
That’s all I have at the moment – - unless of course the people who are outraged at the end-zone call against Kellen Winslow in the game with the Cardinals get their way and have force-outs become reviewable by replay officials. That would be monumentally stupid. The standard now is for “indisputable visual evidence” to exist in order to change a call. What are they going to do for indisputable evidence here; put a super-computer up in the booth and use Newton’s Laws to calculate the position of a receiver’s toes on the sideline given the impact of the bodies involved and all that stuff? Give me a break!
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…