Football is an accepted battle of attrition. Ultimately, though, don't we want to see a champion claim the crown by squaring up against the best players on the field, not on IR?
If football is good, more football is better, right? If NFL Sundays are the finest of Sundays, why not create another one? More football means more revenue for the league and broadcast partners, more opportunity for fantasy and gambling for fans, more of everything that makes football great. Who wouldn’t want the NFL season to add an 18th game?
“I’m not a big fan of it,” one NFL player said back in July when asked about the possibility of the NFL season moving to 18 games. “You've seen the amount of injuries that have kind of piled up there at the end of seasons, and you want to have the best players playing in the biggest games.”
That player was Patrick Mahomes. And, like most of his biggest-game passes, he was right on target.
Mahomes is lost for the season thanks to a Week 15 ACL tear. Also likely gone for 2025: Green Bay’s Micah Parsons, who may have torn his ACL in the Packers’ loss to Denver. Plus, the Rams’ Davante Adams went down with a hamstring injury that could keep him out of this week’s key Thursday matchup against Seattle.
Three players who have held the keys to their team’s success this season. Three injuries, all of which forced their normally expressive head coaches into the exact same generic diagnosis:
“It didn’t look good,” Andy Reid said of Mahomes’ injury.
“It doesn’t look good,” Matt LaFleur said of Parsons.
“It didn’t look good,” Sean McVay said of Adams.
It never looks good when a player hits the turf with a season-ending injury. And yet, that’s exactly what happens each week in the NFL. And as the Mahomes and Parsons injuries demonstrated, injuries strike stars and journeymen with equal severity and finality.
Every week’s NFL injury report runs into the hundreds of names, with teams reporting anywhere from a handful to a couple dozen players, some of whom are simply navigating nagging injuries, others who are out for a full game or more. And then there’s the Injured Reserve list, where Mahomes and (presumably) Parsons are the latest on a grim tally of players out for anywhere from several weeks to the rest of the year. Heading into Week 15, 320 players — an average of 10 a team — have suffered injuries severe enough to cost them multiple games.
Injuries are an assumed risk in the NFL, yes. A player who hasn’t spent some time injured is a player that hasn’t spent some time on the field. Injuries are part of the accepted cost of those massive paychecks NFL players receive. The question now is how much more risk, more work players should accept.
The Chiefs were already all but toast this season before Mahomes crumpled to the Arrowhead grass. But Mahomes remains part of the NFL’s promotion machine — a Kansas City Christmas Day game looks a whole lot less appealing now. And the effect of Parsons’ absence on the Packers’ playoff hopes is likely to be substantial and devastating. Football is a team game, yes, and it's an accepted battle of attrition. Ultimately, though, don't we want to see a champion claim the crown by squaring up against the best players on the field, not on IR?
If the NFL goes to an 18-game season in the next few years, that means players will be playing 12.5 percent more games, suffering 12.5 percent more hits, enduring 12.5 percent more punishment than they did as recently as 2020. That’s a pretty substantial increase in workload — the equivalent of an extra hour on an eight-hour workday for the rest of us. And most of us don’t have to deal with the certainty of taking multiple car-crash-level hits at our workplace.
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has aired the idea of an 18-game season before, including at this year’s Super Bowl. “If we do, 18 (regular season games) and 2 (preseason games) might be a possibility,” Goodell said earlier this year at his annual conference before the Super Bowl. “We know fans love football and they want more football. But we have to be incredibly sensitive and smart with the balance and how we deal with that.”
The first problem with simply converting a preseason game into a regular-season one is the fact that most elite-level NFL players now sit out most, if not all, of the entire preseason. Sitting out a regular-season game doesn’t exactly seem like a viable option. Some players, including Mahomes, have pushed for a second bye week to aid in rest and recovery, but the punishing extra game is still there, regardless of whether players get an extra week off before it.
The league and the NFLPA could begin discussing the possibility of an extra game early next year. The earliest an 18-game season could come to pass would be the 2027 season. There are multiple logistical hurdles, from financial terms to broadcast rights agreements to the calendar itself. (A two-bye, 20-week season would either start in August or push almost into March.) First and foremost, though, the 18-week season would need to address the concerns of those most directly affected by it.
Every play in the NFL is a roulette-wheel spin that carries with it the possibility of a catastrophic injury. And every extra game means another 40 or 50 spins of that wheel. For Mahomes and Parsons, the wheel came up double-zeroes on Sunday. Asking who’s next — wondering whose season is about to be derailed by injury — is a grim endeavor, but a necessary one if we’re talking about adding yet another game.
The seasons will be longer, but the careers will be shorter. That doesn’t seem quite fair, does it?
Category: General Sports
