In case you haven't heard, Minnesota Vikings quarterback J.J. McCarthy, who went an almost inconceivable 27-1 as a starter at Michigan and had a passer rating of 160.5 (that's not a typo: College football observes a different passer rating formula than the NFL, where the best possible passer rating is 158.3), suffered a torn meniscus in an August 10 game against the Raiders that didn't even count in the standings because it was an exhibition, or "preseason" game, aborting his rookie season.
Every time an injury of this sort happens, it makes cynical, unscrupulous owners lick their proverbial chops — because it strengthens their argument in favor of deleting one game from the exhibition season and transferring it to the regular season, creating a "2-and-18" pattern.
And if the owners really want to get greedy (just couldn't resist!), they could play the Hall of Fame Game on the same week that the rest of the league commences their exhibition schedule (and play it on a Thursday night so that it is always the first preseason game).
Reducing the number of exhibition games each year from 49 to 32 would mean 17 fewer meaningless games in which catastrophic injuries can occur — and would also foster more "competitive balance" (do people even use that term anymore?) because if a team makes a mistake and turns out to have placed a future star on waivers, that "future star" will very likely be claimed by an inferior team (at least according to the previous season's standings anyway).
In an 18-game season, a second bye week can be added to each team's schedule (the CFL first started doing this in 1986) — and every team playing a Thursday game can receive an automatic bye the week before. And to simplify things, the NFL can go back to the old policy of giving all four teams from the same division a bye in the same week, meaning that this would always be the case since all eight of the NFL's divisions have four teams (for the first five years of the "bye era," four divisions had five teams and the other two had four teams).
Eighteen games also makes expansion more likely, as more teams — at least 34, if not, indeed, 36 — would make an 18-game schedule both fairer and easier to understand (34 teams playing 18 games would lead to a scenario closely resembling that of the 31-team, 16-game schedule of 1999-2001 — which many teams, especially in the AFC, complained about; but 36 teams playing 18 games would be far more straightforward, and would also likely lead to adding two more teams to the playoffs).
But back to J.J. McCarthy: with him lost for the season, the starting quarterback duties fall to Sam Darnold, who is 21-35 as a starter with three different teams (the Jets, Panthers, and 49ers); and after the injury to McCarthy, the Vikings signed Matt Corral, who is 0-0 as an NFL starter despite having been on the rosters first the Panthers, then the Patriots, and now the Vikings — and like McCarthy, Corral has a preseason injury tale to tell, in that he, too, suffered a catastrophic injury in one of these lovely "preseason" games (a Lisfranc injury in his case) that caused him to miss his entire rookie season of 2022 (he did, however, play for the USFL's Birmingham Stallions this past spring, playing in four of the team's games and starting in three).
While the Panthers remain the logical favorites to land the top pick in the 2025 draft, their closest pursuers include the Patriots, Broncos, Titans, Commanders, Giants — and now, the Vikings (the above teams are no doubt salivating at the prospect of getting the #1 pick — and interestingly, not a single NFL team has traded away their first-round pick in 2025).
So while they're considering the 18-game schedule and expansion, the owners need to take a good, hard look at implementing an NFL draft lottery.
It can be held, amid much fanfare, on the Sunday after the Super Bowl.
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