Home or away a problem easily solved for NFL 17th game dilemma
By Brian Miller
The NFL wants a 17 game regular season and it appears that the NFLPA may actually cave and give it to them but scheduling will be an issue.
Forget about the money issues that a 17 game season presents and forget for a moment that the NFL will have to deal with player’s health ahead of the post-season. The biggest problem facing the NFL is how are they going to schedule an odd number of games?
This is what will happen once the games increase from 16 to 17. NFL teams will alternate home and away games each year. As an example, the Miami Dolphins will play nine home games one year and eight home games the next year with nine on the road. It really seems to be the only solution. It doesn’t need to be and in fact, it shouldn’t be.
The NFL has an opportunity to not only expand their brand but also reach new fans across the country and across the world. The easiest solution is to have each team play their odd game in another market, another city, or another country altogether.
With the NFL hellbent on making the International Series a mainstay of its regular season, already up to four games a year with a likely increase to five soon, it only makes sense to add a few more games and throw them all over the pond or south of the border.
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Without bye-weeks, the NFL plays 16 games on any given weekend. That can easily be spread out to the U.K., Mexico, or even Germany if they desire. Too many games being played overseas? Yeah, that might seem like a lot, logistics alone make traveling to another country tough, let alone doing it 16 times. Then, of course, you have to ask if the NFL would not be watering down their existence in that market.
That brings us to another option stateside. Why not rotate games to different non-NFL cities? San Diego doesn’t have a team but they have a stadium. Orlando has a stadium but no team. You get the idea. A neutral site takes away the “home-field advantage” of that extra home game that a team will get. If the game is played outside of that team’s city, it becomes far less an advantage.
This would also allow NFL fans who purchase season tickets each year from being forced to pay for an extra home game one year and not the next. Of course, we all know that the NFL doesn’t forward think about these things.
If the NFL keeps the extra home games at the home team’s city they need to do it in a way that keeps it as fair as possible. The easiest way to do that is to alternate conferences each year.
In odd years, each NFC team will travel for one extra road game and in even years the AFC conference will travel for one extra road game. This is easily accomplished by those road games being against the other conference.
Why? Because those games rarely count in the playoff tie-breaking system. At the very least, each division should play the same number of road and away games each year. If the NFL opts to simply hand out an alternating road and away games with no clear reason as to why this will be a major cluster.