Former Union Exec: 18-Game NFL Schedule Coming Soon
Former NFLPA executive George Atallah said that the NFL has wanted an 18-game regular season schedule for over 16 years, and that it’ll finally get there by the end of the decade.
The former chief executive of external affairs for the union said on the PFT PM podcast on Tuesday that the owners were prepared to lock players out before the 2011 Collective Bargaining Agreement to achieve their goals, which included expanding from 16 to 18 games. They got halfway there in 2021, and Atallah said that they wanted to time up the second expansion with the new set of media rights deals.
The current one was signed in 2021 and is worth $111 billion. With opt-out clauses after 2029, Atallah anticipated that the owners push for the extra game to be added in time to increase the value of the NFL product to whatever networks or streaming services wants to buy it.
The NFL played a 12-game schedule from 1947 to 1960, moved to 14 games from 1961-77 and played 16 games from 1978-2020. Beside the last four seasons, the only other times the league has had an odd number of games on the docket strike-shortened 1982 and 1987 seasons, and an 11-game schedule before and after World War II, from 1937-42 and again in 1946.
By getting back to an even number, every team would be back to getting the same number of home and away games. In theory, that means fans would gain one home game for their team every two years. As the league continues to play more and more neutral-site games overseas, an extra home game could help replace the ones teams are losing to London, Munich and in Pittsburgh’s case, Dublin.
Atallah continued to say that the last he’d heard, the NFLPA was not interested in adding another game to the schedule, but that it is just one piece in the larger chess match between it and the owners. Earlier this month, Mike Tomlin said he figured the extra game was “inevitable.”
“The real determination for a global collective bargaining agreement negotiation is really founded in ‘what do the players want? What are their priorities? What do they want to go get?’” Atallah said. “and what are they willing to give up to get those things?”