10-24-2016, 08:49 PM
(10-24-2016, 06:10 PM)Benton Wrote: I'm admittedly bad at math, but if you expand it to eight games, I was thinking it worked out to where nobody loses a real home game.
Under the current Collective Bargaining Agreement there can only be 16 games played per team per season - the player's union wouldn't let the NFL expand the season above that during the last lockout.
For each of the 32 teams to have 8 matches in their actual home stadium that would be 256 matches in a season. But they need other teams to come over to play against so if the obligation of being the away team in those 256 matches was split evenly between the 32 teams then each team would play 8 away games as well. And that's your 16 games played per team so there would be no room for the league to have overseas matches.
As soon as the NFL decided they wanted to have overseas matches something had to give. There either had to be
a) no overseas matches (but the league and owners want the money), or
b) not limiting the season to 16 games (see below for how that would work if it became a 17 game season) (but the player's union wouldn't agree to that), or
c) some teams losing home games every year (which is what has happened because the NFL doesn't care about fans).
No way around that unfortunately - you can't have 32 teams each having 8 true games at home (for the fans) and there being overseas games (for the league and owners) and each team only playing 16 games a year (for the players) - it just doesn't work out mathamatically.
Now as I said I would just ditch the overseas games but when it comes to owners vs players vs fans and someone losing out - well only one group of people it's going to be.
Now if the next CBA allowed for 17 games played per team then you could have each team having 8 true games at home, 8 true away games at an opponent's home and 1 neutral-site game. But for that to work, as well as getting the agreement of the player's union, the league would also need to find places to hold 16 neutral matches for each of the 32 teams to play 1 neutral-site game each.
You could carry on doing three or maybe four in the UK, two or three in Mexico should sell well with the fanbase and some US fans willing to travel and have a holiday at the same time, two or three in Canada too for the same reason. But then 6-8 more? You could do places in the US that don't have NFL teams but could you find 8 sell outs? I don't know enough about major US cities without NFL teams to have an informed opinion.
(10-24-2016, 06:10 PM)Benton Wrote: Regardless, though, it's a horrible direction. Not like re-instituting the military draft or handing out cigarettes to preschoolers, but horrible enough. It's one more thing to distance traditional fans from the sport in hopes of adding more. NFL Europe didn't work out for a lot of reasons, mostly because the talent level wasn't there. That doesn't mean you should take actual NFL talent and try to wedge it into the market a few times a year. I'd have less of an issue if they just added two expansion teams (London and Mexico, or London and some other European city) and go that route.
I completely agree - it's wrong to alienate your existing fanbase in this way - the Bengals/Cowboys/Jaguars/Steelers/RedSkins/Packers etc fans who go to matches rain or shine, win or lose, year-in and year-out are the heart of the NFL and the NFL's teams. It is their dollars and support that have made the teams and the league the phenom that it is. But most professional sports teams and leagues these days are run by owners who are looking to expand their wallets in the way they see best and at the moment it looks like this is the way they want to try to do it.
