NFL 2019

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.

I had high hopes for the XFL (and AAF) originally, but they are both just tried to copy the NFL playbook and hope it would work because offseason. I was really hoping they’d be innovative and have a good streaming platform or better ways for modern digital-savvy always-online fans to engage with the sport but they are just copying the NFL and going for network deal money. So I have the same problem with them that I have with the NFL, in that I’m not going to subscribe to cable (or one of the cable-equivalent streaming services) just to watch the ocassional football game

Trying to be NFL junior with the exact same business model won’t work because you can’t compete with real NFL. They’ve already hoovered up the vast majority of market share and dollars in their business model. I think the XFL is d0med.

I’ve always thought this XFL reincranation was McMahon trying to cash in on Trump’s crowd by giving them “real Merican football without the politics and the kneeling.” The problem is shitty football is shitty football, and no likes watching shitty football.

I agree with you both but Tortilla is on point. The XFL needs to set itself apart in some way since it is NOT the NFL. Better engagement in some way would be ideal. “Everything is the same but now it’s out of season,” is not gonna work.