Tell me again why I shouldn’t like an 18-game NFL season

Man, I’ve really had enough of this (insert sport) season.

You might find yourself saying that during baseball, basketball, and hockey season, but no football lover this side of the Atlantic, worth his (or her) weight in pigskin, has ever, EVER, muttered that phrase. That’s akin to Tiger Woods telling his fourth-string babe, “Nah, I’m just going to stay home with the wife and kids tonight” — not happening!

Seriously, why wouldn’t you want more football?

Oddly enough, this is not the prevailing thought on the subject. I’ve digested a lot of internet columns from the mainstream media and hardly any are supportive of an 18-game regular season. Granted, a simple Google search for “18-game regular season” turns in a positive review in the second organic search term — a Forbes blog. Since you nor I go to Forbes for my sports fix, it’s safe to assume that only Google finds this article relevant.

Look, I can understand why the players wouldn’t want to play two additional games — duh — but I’m at a loss for why sports fans are against it.

Take Gregg Easterbrook, the author of one of my favorite columns, ESPN.com’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback (TMQ) column. This self-professed lover of all things gridiron can’t get himself around the idea of bonus football, claiming that the product will likely suffer as a result. Like most other logical thinkers, Easterbrook argues that the additional two games will lead to more injuries — hence the players’ obvious objections to the two-game increase. Hard to argue with that logic, but last time I checked, most NFL players make it through the season without visiting the injured reserve list. I really don’t think two games won’t bring about the injured reserve apocalypse. Personally, I’d rather see one of my team’s players injured during a game that counts than during the current four-game preseason. So if we’re wiping out two preseason games and adding on two games that actually matter, please sign me up.

(Although if rivers and seas boil; we get 30 years of darkness, earthquakes, and volcanoes; the dead rise from the grave; human sacrifice, dog and cats live together, or mass hysteria occur due to the injured reserve apocalypse, I don’t want any “told ya so” comments. Nobody likes a know-it-all.)

Easterbrook’s second point — which also makes sense at first glance — is that downtrodden franchises, like St. Louis and Detroit last year, will drag down the NFL season if forced to play an additional two games. While that’s true, you might as well go back to a 14-game regular season if watching crappy, meaningless football ruins the experience. Last time I checked, that sort of football depression only affects the fans of those teams. I don’t remember losing any sleep over the fact that the Rams had to tank games in December to improve its draft position. Let’s not ruin a good thing just to appease the minority of fans that must endure at least eight more quarters of crappy football.

(Memo to Rams fans: Feel free to try out DirecTV and its Sunday Ticket when bored late in the season.)

(Memo to my apartment complex: Please cut down the large trees so that DirecTV satellites can get signal next to my place. Thanks.)

I think the real story in the move to an 18-game regular season is the labor unrest between the players and owners. A lot of people think that this move by the owners is a labor ploy against the NFL Players Association, and I’m apt to agree. I side the players in this particular case because, let’s face it, football players get the short end of the stick. Still, both sides don’t feel like they are getting a fair deal, and as such the specter of a lockout in the 2011 NFL season is looming over us like a Katrina-sized cloud. I don’t really want to spend a lot of time talking about the NFL’s labor problems — who does? — but let’s take a look at the plight of today’s NFL owner — who apparently needs more cost-certainty in times of the Great Recession:

Back in 1985, the Philadelphia Eagles were sold by the loan-shark hunted Leonard Tose to Norman Brahman for $65 million, who flipped the team just nine years later for $185 million to current owner Jeffrey Lurie. Today, a mere 16 years later, the franchise is worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 billion. It doesn’t take a business school degree to figure out how amazing an investment an NFL franchise has been to the uber wealthy.

In addition to your HUGE return on investment, you also have these luxuries as an NFL owner:

• Publicly-funded stadiums,
• Non-guaranteed contracts (the only major sport which boasts this),
• A hard salary cap,
• Off-the-charts broadcasting revenue,
• The ability to charge full price for, pardon my French, bullshit preseason games,
• The right to blackout the game when it’s not sold out, despite the rich TV rights.
• Pricey personal seat licenses (PSLs) that season ticket holders are required to purchase BEFORE buying any tickets, which really is the perfect thank-you gift to the tax payers that helped fund your beautiful stadium.

To recap the plight of today’s NFL owner: Your business has only gone up in value, taxpayers built your business’s facility, you charge taxpayers to enter that facility (twice actually, and you make them pay for a product they do not want — preseason games), you received millions from TV networks (although you can blackout a game if every seat isn’t bought and paid for by those taxpayers), and you receive an anti-trust exemption from Congress. If you give an NFL owner a cookie, he is probably going to want to take as much from you as he possibly can.

Returning to the business at hand, the prospects of an 18-game NFL schedule are really the first bone that NFL owners have thrown fans in a real long time. For everyone that wants the NFL to eliminate preseason games, this is your answer. Sure this puts the players at risk for greater injury, but asking these greedy owners to give up two games that they charge to season-ticket holders is asking a little too much. They’re going to get that money one way or another. At least they’ve decided to give us more games that matter, while simultaneously eliminating games that don’t.

I call that progress, even if you and everyone else in the sports world won’t.