Yeah, if you watched the Patriots at all last season, it was clear it was not Tom Brady that was the problem. They had one WR who was playing well and that guy was always double covered.
If you’re a GM you’re not getting fired if you sign Tom Brady - you can say “yeah, I see his stats weren’s very good last year but it was the supporting cast, an abberation, blah, blah, blah” - if you do sign him and he falls off a cliff, then you just cut him the season after as an experiment that failed. But if you sign him and he “recovers” or plays well, you’re a genius.
If you’re a GM and you can actually get Brady to sign with your team your owner is going to love you no matter what.
There is no scenario in which owners give up prospective playoff home game money.
Not quite sure I follow but it’ll be 7 teams instead of 6 so just 1 bye per conference versus 2? Why now an extra team? It makes me think they are also considering expansion soon or imminently.
$$$$$… 7 teams, with only the best record getting a bye, means there are 3 wild card games per conference. You suddenly go from 4 to 6 games on Wild Card weekend. And playoff games are huge money-makers.
The other part of this, not mentioned in Adam’s tweet, is that there would also be a move to 17-game regular season. Again, more $$$$$.
Wouldn’t the CBA push back on 17 games? More time for injury, no more pay for the performance?
I really wish sports changes were pushed by fans, not by owners/players. But I guess it is what it is, money grab or not.
It seems the most obvious solution is to add a second bye week for each team, and make it so that no team has to play on Thursday night four days after playing a Sunday game. That and the added $$$$ for the players would probably be enough to get it through.
Well then, sounds like it will be agreed on.
It’s too bad this isn’t a trade of a preseason game slot to use at the 17th game.
Yeay, @Skipper my first thought is they should cut the preseason if they are adding regular season games. Maybe they can work that in (who really likes or thinks the teams need 4 preseason games anyway?).
I wish they would cut preseason in half. 2 games is fine. College and high school sports don’t have preseason for a reason, they aren’t chasing the money and it isn’t needed. The NFL gets away with it because we’re so hungry for football we’ll still attend games and watch it on TV. Hell, convert all 4 to regular season games. I’d be down for that.
Reports are that preseason will be 3 games once regular season goes to 17. OK for fans, doesn’t make any difference to players, who will play about as much in the preseason as now.
Its only recently that TV money has pushed big-time college football programs to open the season with a competitive game, and even then it is just a minority of schools in any year. The 2020 opening weekend will feature Bowling Green at Ohio State, Missouri State at Oklahoma, UTSA at LSU and so on. Preseason, in other words.
The NFL owners want to add more playoff games and an extra regular season game so they can lower ticket and concessions prices for the fans . They’re just too humble to admit that’s their motivation here.
Could have sworn non-impact games were voted down a while back. So the results of these wouldn’t count?
The results ‘count’, although nearly never in doubt. So Alabama vs Georgia State, Kent State and UT Martin will all go down as wins. But there is college football preseason in that there are non-competitive games that fans still pay for, used to get the players warmed up for the ‘real’ games.
You could say these changes are pulled by fans. They want more football, and they’re willing to pay for it.
They want more NFL football, and they don’t care if the players get hurt.
They could have more football. Historically they have been disinterested in the USFL, XFL, AAFL (or whatever it was called), etc.
It already feels like the new XFL is going to fail. You can just see that it pains the sports talk guys to even talk about it a little bit.
When they would rather headline another Tua’s hip story with no actual content than discuss the actual XFL games that just happened, it’s pretty much over.
Not sure why the players are going along with this. The math under the proposal means the players would play 6.25% more snaps, but for only a 0.5% increase in revenue sharing.
This week will be a good indicator of the sustainabilty of the XFL. Attendance was up 10% from week 1 to 2. However, tv ratings fell significantly. They weren’t bad ratings, but they were down from the previous week so if they can level off this week they are probably ok, if they drop again this week that is a pretty bad sign.