NFL’s Push for 18-Game Season Gains Traction, but Players Have Demands

The idea of an 18-game NFL regular season is gaining steam, even though the 2024 NFL season will be just the fourth since the league expanded from 16 to 17 games.

The NFL and the NFL Players Association have had “high-level discussions” about the idea of adding an additional game to the league’s regular-season calendar, according to The Washington Post. 

NFLPA executive director Lloyd Howell said the two sides have spoken about adding an additional game but have yet to begin formal negotiations. Howell said he will need to discuss the idea with players during their next meetings, but the extra game could take effect before the end of the current collective bargaining agreement, which expires after the 2030 season.

Team owners have long wanted an 18-game schedule, and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell made his strongest public push for the idea yet during various media appearances at draft weekend in Detroit. “I’m not a fan of the preseason,” Goodell said, while touring the benefits of exchanging one of the three exhibition games for a meaningful one.

Howell said that before making a decision, several factors need to be “fleshed out,” including economic, health, and safety considerations.

More Rest, Please

When discussing a theoretical 18-game season, the obvious compromise is to reduce the number of preseason games from three to two. Goodell said in an owners meeting in May that he thinks that’s a “fair trade.”

Goodell hasn’t said the league would automatically add a second bye week—which several star players have suggested as their request if the 18-game schedule were to be implemented.

“It’s going to get to 18 games at some point, right?” 49ers tight end George Kittle said on The Rich Eisen Show. And the five-time Pro-Bowler is ready to negotiate. “I’m totally fine with that, just give us two byes,” he added.

Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow (above) echoes that sentiment. “Gotta have two bye weeks,” he said on Pardon My Take when asked about expanding to 18 games. Burrow also pitched an idea for a league-wide bye week roughly two-thirds of the way through the season that would include an all-star weekend of events in place of the season-ending Pro Bowl. “I think it’d be cool.”

‘Only a Matter of Time’

Would getting to 18 games really be as simple as the owners agreeing to add a second bye week, though? “The fact that Joe Burrow is even talking about the 18 games, to me, it just seems like there’s a momentum to this,” ESPN insider Adam Schefter said on The Pat McAfee Show. “I don’t think it’s real right now, but it’s only a matter of time before it does get real.”

In addition to the current CBA expiring after the 2030 season, the NFL has the ability to opt out of its $110 billion media-rights deals at the end of the decade. Combining a new, longer NFL season with fresh broadcast bids could be too much of a potential revenue hike for the league to pass up.