NFL: TV Drives Potential Preseason Change

For more than a year now, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has set the groundwork (through overall planning and public interviews) for an eventual schedule change -- increasing the regular season to 18 games by cutting the preseason from four games to two.

According to Goodell last week: "It's clear the fans don't want four preseason games."

Maybe that's true, but what's more obvious is that the possible solution -- simply making two current preseason games regular season games -- provides the easiest possibly way for the NFL and its owners to increase their income (on site at stadiums and from TV partners) without significantly altering the format of the league's schedule.

If ESPN Radio were to run Goodell's comments from last week through it's "BSPN Translator," a nice gimmick used every so often that helps "interpret" what people really mean when they talk, what the fans want would not be the primary reason for a possible preseason change.

No, it would come down to TV revenue. So a more appropriate answer might emerge from Goodell as: "It's the easiest way for us to make more money. We just cut the preseason from four to two games and everybody makes more."

It is a wonderfully simplistic solution. It creates more "inventory" for TV partners and, by making the already scheduled games more important, it creates more revenue for owners because fans will attend meaningful regular season games in bigger numbers as opposed to seemingly less important preseason games.

Downsides to the move include the dillution of the regular season schedule because with 18 games each one becomes a little less important than when there were 16. In that sense regular season games would be a little less valuable to fans buying tickets.

In addition, the move would make divisional games less meaningful because they comprise a smaller portion of the schedule. Instead of division games being 38 percent of a team's schedule (6 of 16 games), they would be 33 percent.

For the league, owners and TV partners, two extra weeks of games would mean two more Sunday and Monday nights of games as well as two weeks of potential high-profile, made-for-TV matchups not possible with the current schedule of division rivals and teams playing opposite-conference foes from a specific division.

Ast the league addresses the schedule, its offseason approach must alter as well because teams will almost necessarily conduct more important personnel evaluations with two less games, which are major means of evaluation. That could be an interesting challenge -- especially because the league has punished a handful of teams this offseason for conducting organized team activities (OTAs) that were too organized or strenuous.

Here's one pretty fair bet, though. If the league shortens the preseason and finds a way for teams to conduct evalutions if the offseason, those evaluations and events will show up on TV in some form as well. And that's not BS.