As the NFL and the NFL Players Association work to iron out a new collective bargaining agreement, talk of a potential change to the regular-season schedule has been bandied about.
The game of football is incredibly violent, as anyone with a set of eyes knows. If the league desires to shift from a 16-game schedule to an 18-game schedule, there likely would have to be some changes made to the preseason or some series parameters put in place. Having four preseason games plus 18 regular-season plus playoff games is a lot of football. Players bodies get beat up enough, so it seems unlikely the NFLPA would agree to a change in schedule that would put the players at an even greater risk for injury both now and later in life.
49ers cornerback Richard Sherman is a member of the NFLPA's executive board, and he is privy to the current negotiations going on between the NFL and the Players Association as they look to come to an agreement by 2021. Sherman went on NBC's Peter King's podcast this week, and shot down the thought that an 18-game schedule would be a possibility.
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"I think it has very little chance of happening unless something astronomical is conceded," Sherman told King. "Something that would be in the best interest of the majority of our players. There's so many things that could happen. For the most part, I don't think that's on the table for our guys. There was talk about the proposal in the media talking about 60 players and 18 games and each player only playing 16 games, and people can make those suggestions but that doesn't even add up. So you say 46 active players every game. Forty-six players play 16 games so then you have 14 players to play two games, regardless of how you slice it.
"So you have 14 players to play special teams, kick-off, defense and offense,' Sherman continued. "And three of them are specialists. So you have a kicker, a holder and a snapper, that's three. You got 11 to play three phases. That's cool if we're talking about some crazy hunger games of football, but if you're talking about a reasonable person having these discussions, then you're talking about 46 players playing 18 games."
Limiting the number of games players can play also brings talk of ticket sales (should a player be inactive) and counting quarters into the equation, which Sherman thinks should be the end of the discussion for the 18-game schedule.
"You have games where you're saying, 'We're up by 21 at the half,' and then you sit Tom Brady for the rest of the game because you want to save those two quarters for later," Sherman said. "Then you're going quarter by quarter. We've really gone in-depth about this discussion as you can see. ... It's just not football. it's math, it's science, it's understanding these timelines. It's going to deep."
San Francisco 49ers
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Everyone loves football, and the NFL wants to keep printing money.
But it sounds like the schedule is going to stick at 16 games. As it should.