Dear Roger Goodell: Don't stop at 17

I believe it was at the most recent owners' meetings where NFL commissioner Roger Goodell proposed the league add a 17th game to its schedule. Goodell provided few details. He mentioned it was a response to the (long-standing) problem of the poor quality of (and lack of interest in) the teams' four pre-season games. Rather than eliminate a couple of games, and (god forbid!) rather than ANY team come up with a fan-friendly way to tier-price these fairly useless, yet preciously-priced, spectator exercises, Goodell proposed a 17th regular-season game, indicating it would make each team more money. I assume he would expect to increase the TV contract by 1/16. The gate would change very little for most franchises, since most sell out nearly all of their seats anyway, and preseason games are priced the same as regular season games.

Every football fan's next question would seem to be "Who would play whom in the 17th game?" The NFL has very tidy scheduling right now, with 32 teams split between two conferences, which are split into four divisions. The league's been playing a 16-game schedule for 30+ years now. The schedule is tidily engineered to guarantee you can see every other NFL team play your team in your home stadium in an eight-year period. The current schedule works fabulously, and is part of the reason the NFL is America's pastime.

17 is not exactly a round number. And being an -odd- number, it would require half the teams to play one fewer home game a season. That disparity - or worse - may be fine for the podunks who run college football, but in a league that values parity (not to mention declaring a real champion at the end of the season), it just doesn't fly.

It shouldn't fly with fans, either. Assume all teams charge the same price for tickets. Should I have to pay the same fare for eight regular season games and two preseason games as a fan of another team who's getting nine regular season games and putting up with just one exhibition? Will a 9/1 team charge more for tickets because of the extra "real" game? You bet. Will 8/2 teams bump their prices up to keep pace? You bet. The extra game appears to screw the fans and the half of the teams who don't get the extra home game.

And what teams will those be? Will the league's favorites simply get the extra home game every year? No, nothing that blatant. Goodell tipped his hand a little bit when he also said the conferences would alternate having the extra game every season. The AFC one year, the NFC the next.

That only works if the extra game is always an interconference game. Where Goodell seems to be headed with his idea is that the game will be the dreaded "traditional" rivalry interconference game. Never mind that almost no NFL team has a traditional interconference rival. The NFL has been itching for years to have the New York - New York game every year, and that's what this is all about.

Some teams have fairly natural interconference rivals, based on geography. St. Louis - Kansas City, to be sure. I'd also count:
yes, Giants - Jets
Philadelphia - Pittsburgh
Washington - Baltimore
Dallas - Houston
San Francisco - Oakland
Tampa Bay - Miami

Others are "close enough" and have some appeal.
San Diego - Arizona would probably draw good road crowds back and forth. Same for Chicago - Indianapolis.
I'd pair Jacksonville with Carolina, though Atlanta is closer, because the Jagwires and Panthers have had a good rivalry going ever since they entered the league together in 1995.
New Orleans - Tennessee is a logical geographical matchup, though I doubt it would generate much excitement with casual fans.
Seattle ends up with Denver because they are so hard to match. This at least revives the old AFC West rivalry, though I suspect Seattle fans would rather butt heads with Raider Nation.

As for the leftovers?
Atlanta and Cincinnati would pair up by default. THERE'S an exciting reason to add another game to the schedule.
Cleveland, the oldest AFC city, ought to get one of the old-line NFC teams. I'll say Detroit because they're closest.
With eight Super Bowl losses between them, and no AFC rival very close to the Twin Cities, Minnesota - Buffalo is hard to resist. Which leaves Green Bay - New England.

You could tweak this a lot of ways, and the NFL would seem likely to rotate "rivalries" from year to year. Maybe one biennium, they change up to: Seattle-Oakland, SF-SD, Arizona-Denver.

But whatever they do is going to suck. Not only are many of these rivalries questionable, not only will you have half the teams playing more home games than others, there are other problems. For instance, in years the NFC West is scheduled to play the AFC West, will the Rams and Chiefs play TWICE? What if that's the NFC's year to host the extra game? I've got to pay for TWO Rams-Chiefs games? Yes, you can fix that by rotating rivalries (StL-Indy?) (KC-Chi?), but in the end, even if some of these rivalries do happen to become good ones, they'll have to rotated often enough that it'll kill any momentum the rivalry has. These games will never resemble rivalries as much as they will arbitrary slapping together of teams.

And it punches a hole in the league's preference for parity, a preference that has made the NFL the most successful professional sports league in the history of the world. One game means everything in a league where most years a team is eliminated from making the playoffs on a technicality, a second or third tiebreaker. But arbitrary rivalry scheduling discriminates against the teams trying to catch up a lot of the time. Tampa would love to start this schedule right now. While they're playing 1-15 Miami, Carolina and New Orleans have to play tough playoff teams from last year. Whereas the hurdle just got a lot higher for some non-playoff teams, like the Jets, Texans, Eagles, and Bears, among others. The NFL hasn't succeeded by making life harder for the worse-off teams.

There's something to like about Mike Florio's idea of having all the extra games in L.A. But why would you have the Jets play the Giants on the west coast? How big an L.A. crowd would you draw for Lions-Browns? And, rivalry game or no, if you bid out to other cities, you're just going to give the Cowboys an extra game in San Antonio every year, the Titans in Memphis, Florida teams in Orlando, the Seahawks in Portland or Vancouver, and so on. And those are the teams those cities will want. What kind of a crowd would even a game as attractive as Patriots-Packers or Bears-Colts draw in Orlando? Then again, we know Bears and Packers fans travel well. Maybe that's where the truth of a 17-game schedule with a neutral site game lies. Maybe not.

What the league should do is go to an 18-game schedule. It would eliminate the arbitrariness of the 17th game of the 17-game schedule. It would also restore scheduling parity the league had to get away from when it expanded to 32 teams. It'll strengthen your intraconference rivalries by making them occur more often, without losing the unique element of the occasional interconference games. Also importantly, every team would play the same number of home and away games. Duh. It would also eliminate two STUPID preseason games.

Rams 18-game schedule (4th place)
Division: Seahawks 2, Big Dead 2, Whiners 2
AFC: Patriots, Dolphins, Jets, Bills
NFC Rotating: NFC East: Cowboys, Giants, Redskins, Eagles
NFC At-large: Bears (4th), Falcons (4th), Vikings (2nd), Saints (3rd).

Seahawks 18-game schedule (1st place)
Division: Rams 2, Big Dead 2, Whiners 2
AFC: Patriots, Dolphins, Jets, Bills
NFC Rotating: Cowboys, Giants, Redskins, Eagles
NFC At-large: Packers (1st), Buccaneers (1st), Lions (3rd), Panthers (2nd).

Whiners 18-game schedule (3rd place)
Division: Rams 2, Big Dead 2, Seahawks 2
AFC: Patriots, Dolphins, Jets, Bills
NFC Rotating: Cowboys, Giants, Redskins, Eagles
NFC At-large: Lions (3rd), Saints (3rd), Packers (1st), Falcons (4th).

Big Dead 18-game schedule (2nd place)
Division: Rams 2, Big Dead 2, Whiners 2
AFC: Patriots, Dolphins, Jets, Bills
NFC Rotating: Cowboys, Giants, Redskins, Eagles
NFC At-large: Vikings (2nd), Panthers (2nd), Bears (4th), Buccaneers (1st).

The at-large opponents vary depending on where a team finished in its division the previous season.

Much, much better than Goodell's ham-handed proposal to force in a 17th, "rivalry" game, while improving on the problems of both that system and the NFL's trend away from parity-conscious scheduling since its last realignment.

Oh, except there isn't a precious freaking Giants-Jets game every year.