18 games?

[Montana Tom]

Thats a really long season.

They are going to have to consider expanded rosters - but at some point you start diluting the game too.

This does absolutely nothing to extend the season.  
Get rid of one more meaningless exhibition game (for which they charge full price for what is basically a team scrimmage). 

There's a lot of talented football players out there who never get their shot.  I don't believe that the game will be diluted.
I've been a proponent of this for some time.  
It makes sense.  Turn that useless exhibition game into something of real value.  Hire more players (expanded rosters), pay the players their share.

It's not that the game is any safer (it is, particularly with a focus on reducing injuries), but the money will speak, the players will say "how much of it goes to us?" and it will happen.  

I completely agree that it is the next logical step. 
Just like taking the college football playoffs from a 4 arbitrarily ranked team playoff to 12 teams.  It was the next logical step.  Now going forward, the next logical step is a 16 team playoff, with no bye week for top seeds.  It is the next logical step.  The FCS has expanded to a 24 team playoff, and it has proven that it works pretty darn well.

[medaille]

I don’t think the number of preseason games really affects how ready the teams are for the regular season. I think that shift would have occurred no matter how many preseason games we have, as teams think they are better prepared by the practices that they have rather than the preseason games, and they don’t want to risk injuries to their starters by playing them in a sloppy game.

The thing I have biggest beef with is unbalanced home vs away games. It’s completely ridiculous in a 17 game season that one team can have 9 homes games - 8 away games, and another team can have 8 homes games and 9 away games. That’s a large advantage. This can be solved by having every team play one neutral site game.

You can also have this same problem in a 16 or 18 game season, where a team has only one neutral site game, and now we’re back to having unbalanced home/away games.

I think my most preferred setup would by 17 games with one mandatory neutral site game per team. I’d also be fine with an 18 game season with two mandatory neutral site games. Where neutral site could be in a foreign country or it could be in an existing NFL stadium, like the Vikings-Seahawks playing in Miami or something like that, but I think division games should be banned from neutral sites.

I don’t want the season to drag on any later into winter. I’m fine with cannibalizing the weekend before the SB for the last playoff games and I’m fine starting earlier.

I think they should eliminate the practice squad by making them all on the roster and force teams to roster 4 QBs to encourage QB development. They should eliminate the distinction between active and inactive roster. I don’t see the benefit of having a handful of people that are healthy but inactive.