Thoughts On 18 game Regular Season

What Roger Goodell wants, he gets. And for those of you that haven't heard, he wants an 18 game regular season.

Just looking at it from the surface to most fans it seems like a good idea. They would get rid of two meaningless preseason games, and add two more meaningful games. That's more bang for your buck, two more weekends of NFL action.

But personally, I don't think it's a very good idea at all for a number of reasons. First reason would be that it would make the preperation time to get ready for the season shorter. Training camp would get shorter. There would be less time to evaluate players. More starters resting during the preseason, possibly not even taking a snap. While that may not seem like a huge deal, in my opinion it would make the first few games of the season sloppier, even more so than they already are.

Another reason I don't like it is because you'd have more teams resting star players longer towards the end of the season if they were in a position to do so, i.e. leading the division. You'd have more seperation of divisional leaders than before, imagine what week 17 is like, only it would be like two more weeks of that. I don't think that is a great thing.

The players union is obviously going to use this as a bargaining tool in the CBA talks, and why wouldn't they? If they're playing more games the players are going to want to be compensated for it.

In the end this is all about money and generating more revenue, which I totally understand from the owners point of view. But how much football is too much? Some say there can never be enough, but a longer season brings some unwanted consequences that I think could hurt the game.