Insider shares big prediction about NFL expanding regular season

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell made it known ahead of this past weekend that he'd prefer a scheduling format that included every team playing 18 regular-season games and two preseason contests.

On Monday, league insider Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk confidently predicted that team owners won't stop at scheduling 18 meaningful games for clubs each season. 

"For the same reason 17 was a stepping stone to 18, 18 could be a stepping stone to 19 — which could be a stepping stone to 20," Florio explained. "Goodell started the push for more games that count by publicly criticizing the games that don’t. The same argument that applies to cutting the preseason from four games to three applies to cutting it to two, which will apply to cutting it to one — and which will apply to cutting it to none."

Even before the NFL expanded the regular season to 17 games per team in March 2021, Florio and others noted that league owners prefer for clubs to play a total of at least 20 games every campaign. 

Each summer, fans across the country complain about either not being able to sell their preseason tickets or about feeling forced to attend meaningless exhibition contests that often feature a plethora of veteran starters watching the action from the sidelines as inactive spectators. 

It's believed that the NFL Players Association could ask that team owners add a second bye week to the schedule and agree to expand club rosters to get to 18 regular-season games. Florio suggested on Monday that owners would lock the players out until the union agreed to an 18-and-two format. 

"That’s what happened in 2011," Florio added. "That’s what would have happened in 2020. That’s what will happen the next time around."

Florio wrote that the NFL eliminating the preseason and switching to a 20 regular-season game schedule "might not happen in my lifetime, but it’s coming." 

He's likely right, considering it took only a handful of months for the NFL to change its mind about holding games on Christmas Day even when the holiday falls on a Wednesday.

The NFL accounted for 93 of the country's 100 most-watched television programs in 2023. There's no sign that giving fans more football a few years ago negatively impacted the overall popularity of the league, and team owners probably assume that replacing three preseason games with regular-season matchups will only mean more money generated for themselves and also for the players.