Solving the NFL Regular Season Schedule Expansion Problem

During the midseason NFL owner’s meetings in St. Petersburg, Florida last week, the topic of NFL scheduling was discussed. The NFL owners reviewed a number of options including one proposal to expand the NFL regular season to 18 games, another to expand it to 17 games initially then later to 18, and yet another proposal which would have the NFL playing pre-season games in the spring!

As with most key league issues, the NFL owners are not all in agreement on the best way to address expanding the regular season schedule, and some are not in favor of adding additional games at all. Issues such as having enough pre-season games to properly prepare rookie quarterbacks for the season, as well as the inevitable compensation requests that will come from the NFLPA related to how to administer the extra revenue that additional televised regular season games would generate, will likely keep this issue on the back burner for a while longer, but it seems inevitable that the regular season schedule will expand sooner or later.

Some owners, such as Pittsburgh’s Dan Rooney, voiced a preference at the meetings to expand the schedule by only one game rather than two, giving each NFL team 17 regular season games. Rooney indicated that he felt adding two additional games would water down the importance of regular season games. Apparently Rooney thinks 16 is a good number, 17 is better, but 18 is too many. I’m not sure I follow that logic, but I do agree that an initial expansion of the schedule to 17 games presents an interesting opportunity for the NFL to address a number of issues that it is interested in.

The NFL owners opted to table the issue and schedule a special meeting during the month of November to address the scheduling issue again, which could include an owner vote on expanding the schedule, possibly as early as the 2009 season.

I’m not sure they need to wait an entire month, as I think I have their problem solved.

One of the key challenges with a 17 game schedule, is how to properly balance the schedules of all teams, since teams would not have an equal number of HOME and AWAY games unless some significant changes to the current scheduling procedures are developed. Since the NFL has shown interest in staging games in countries outside the U.S., as well as possibly hosting games in cities that do not currently have an NFL Franchise, I’ve developed the following proposal for the 2009 NFL season that I gladly offer to the many NFL executives and team owners that frequent the Café.

The way to address each of these challenges is to continue to schedule games so that every NFL team has 8 HOME games and 8 AWAY games, and then add a 17th game to the schedule for each team at a neutral site. Since the NFL currently uses 17 weeks between September and December for it’s regular season, I’m proposing adding 1 NEUTRAL SITE game to every week of the NFL schedule for 2009, therefore maximizing the exposure of these neutral site games, and spreading them equally over the entire season.

In creating the neutral site schedule below, I’ve tried to take into account games between opponents that are already planned for 2009, existing commitments (The NFL’s commitment for regular season games in London, Buffalo’s contract with the Toronto Argonauts for games in Toronto, etc), as well as the league’s interest in Los Angeles. I’ve assumed 100% of the neutral site games for 2009 would be inter-conference games.

SPODOG’s Proposed 2009 Neutral Site NFL Game Schedule

Schedule Notes
Week 1 – The NFL is already playing here, why not make it count?
Week 2 – Maybe a matchup between two 3-13 teams who used to be in L.A. will remind us why there is no NFL here any longer.
Week 7 – Watch these Texas football fans’ head’s explode trying to determine who to cheer for.
Week 9 – Give Michael Vick a chance to be on the sidelines again and let some of the Bengals see their future quarters.
Week 14 – Memorial Stadium only seats 5,000, but the owners could certainly scout the area resorts for future owner meetings!
Week 16 – Fans of both these teams already think God smiles on their team, why not let them play in his stadium?
Week 17 – Buffalo is already under contract to play in Toronto.

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