The silence has been broken.
NFL Players Association interim executive director David White, who had done a grand total of none interviews since getting the job a month ago today, has spoken to Rob Maaddi of the Associated Press. (I’m still waiting, mostly patiently, to see if he’ll be talking to PFT in this life, or the next.)
Among other things, White addressed the question of whether the regular season will expand from 17 to 18 games.
“The league has the right to bring any issue they want to the table and, presumably, to propose what they’re willing to give to receive what they want in negotiation but we’ll see when that happens,” White told Maaddi. “We haven’t talked about it yet, and it certainly is not inevitable and should not be presented as such.”
But here’s the thing. It is inevitable, because the league will lock the players out in 2031 and, before a single game check is missed, the players will agree to an offer that will include 18 games. It’s one of the basic realities of the fact that the owners will shut the sport down for a season and the players won’t shut it down for a weekend. (Keep that in mind, fans, when you happily wash the balls of the multi-billionaires’ feet.)
That’s what is inevitable. Unless White — whose first order of business will be to lose the “interim” label from his title — can somehow come up with a plan to get players to call the league’s bluff and endure a work stoppage, there will be 18 games. By 2031.
The better goal, in our view, would be to accelerate talks in order to allow the league to add another game by 2027, the first year that has a Super Bowl not based on a 17-game formula. But the clock is ticking loudly on that possibility; sooner than later, the Super Bowl to be played in Atlanta in February 2028 will have a date certain.
And the union will have lost a chance to share in the cash (and to score the concessions) that will come from giving the oligarchs the thing they currently covet.
Don’t take that to mean we think 18 games is a good idea. I personally don’t. But it doesn’t matter. I’ve accepted that it’s inevitable. The sooner the union does, the sooner it can turn that inevitability into the biggest net positive for the players.
