Three games in 11 days?
The NFL's most recognizable player doesn't like it one bit (neither did Ben Roethlisberger).
After a lackluster — at least by Chiefs standards anyway — 21-7 victory at Cleveland Sunday, Kansas City hosts the Texans (yes, the NFL still plays those Saturday games in December), followed by a road game at Pittsburgh on Christmas Day (only four days later). The Chiefs end the regular season with a game at Denver on January 5.
Having to play on Christmas Day is bad enough (the Steelers and the Ravens will also have to do it).
But to do it as part of a three-game stretch over such a short span?
While Kansas City holds a one-game lead over Buffalo in the race for the top playoff seed in the AFC and the first-round bye that comes bundled with it, the Bills hold the tiebreaker due to their 30-21 victory over the Chiefs in Week 11.
But why should any team have to play three games in 11 days?
No team would have to do it in an 18-game schedule.
And why is that?
Because one of the concessions that the NFLPA would have to receive from the owners is a second bye week for every team — and playing the 18 games over 20 weeks is something that the owners (and the networks) would be more than happy to do, since it would add not one but two more weeks' worth of games to televise.
In an 18-game, 20-week season, all 32 teams would play in both the first two weeks of the regular season and also in the last two weeks of the regular season; in each of the 16 weeks in between, all four teams from one division can get their bye week and then play each other the following week, meaning that there would no longer be any "fatigue games", in which one team is not coming off a bye week, but their opponents are.
(When the NFL had 31 teams in 1999, 2000, and 2001, at least one team had to be idle every week; in 2003, the Cowboys and Eagles had their byes in Week 3, and six teams did not play in Week 14 this season.)
Furthermore, with the bye weeks spread out that far (and two byes for each team), every team playing a mid-week game can be given an automatic bye the week before — so that there would be no case of a team playing three games in 11 days ever again.
Of course as it turns out, Mahomes may have to miss at least one, or even both, of his upcoming games, due to the mild high ankle sprain that he sustained in the Cleveland game (and the thing about having a mild high ankle sprain is that it is rather like being mildly pregnant).
And with the injuries piling up in Detroit (four more in Sunday's marathon loss to Buffalo), everybody's favorite Super Bowl LIX matchup may have to go on without either favorite present.
Now they're all saying that it will be the Bills vs. the Eagles.
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