NFL misses point in fight for 18-game schedule

Summer is over, school is back in session and it's nearly time for one of the most popular forms of entertainment in America to begin again: professional football. The defending champion New Orleans Saints will kick off the season with a matchup against the Minnesota Vikings on Sept. 9. From that date until the Super Bowl in February, our Sunday afternoons will be spent in front of the television where we will devour hours upon hours of the scintillating action of the NFL. 

While baseball owns the title of "America's pastime," football is probably the most "American" sport. It is really only prevalent here in the United States. Last season's Super Bowl was the most-watched television program of all time in the U.S., seizing the record that had been held by the finale of "M*A*S*H" since 1983. 

Americans love football, and unlike the other major professional sports in which many people identify flaws — the slow pace of baseball, the minimal scoring of hockey or the lack of effort often seen in regular season basketball — there is little or nothing we would want to change about it. 

But a change is exactly what NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and the league's team owners are looking to make. Currently, teams play 16 games over the course of a 17-week regular season. Four preseason exhibition games precede that season, and a playoff culminating in the Super Bowl follows it. The change that Goodell and the owners want to introduce is to add two more regular season games, increasing the season to 18. They have also proposed to drop two of the preseason games — teams play their starters sparingly during those contests because the games don't count, and it is not worth risking the injury of much-needed players. 

On the surface, this change looks small and harmless. We love football, so why not add a couple more games to each year? The more the better, right? Wrong. First of all, part of what makes football so exciting is how few games there are. Unlike in other sports, such as baseball with its 162-game marathon of a season, each time a football team takes the field is a critical contest. The importance of each individual game means that players must give it their all on every down if they hope to compete. The only time we see teams let up is at the end of the season, if they've already clinched their standing for the playoffs. Adding two more games certainly won't change that; if anything, it will just increase the number of meaningless games at the end of the season.

The motive for the league's bigwigs desire to add games is obvious, and it has to do strictly with the little green pieces of paper that our country runs on. 

Professional football is an $8 billion business, and adding two more games to the season would mean that many more tickets could be sold, much more television time would be available allowing that many more commercials and so on. There's no crime in trying to make more money, and it's understandable that team owners want to get the most they can out of their investments. 

But there's another reason that the football season is so much shorter than other sports, and it has nothing to do with making each contest so meaningful. Football is a violent game. 

It can be hard to sympathize with athletes who become multimillionaires by playing a sport, but it does have an immense toll on their bodies. 

And that's what we love about it — the commercials airing on ESPN lately advertising the approaching start of the football season seem to feature less touchdown runs and beautiful passes and more bone crunching hits and helmet-to-helmet smashing tackles. 

The Romans had their gladiators, and we have our football. But we need to remember that there are brains inside those helmets and bones underneath those pads. The gruesome effects that multiple concussions can have on players' brains have been exposed in recent studies, and just last week Sports Illustrated ran a piece chronicling the plight of NFL running backs in particular, whose careers last only a few years on average. 

Players' bodies can only take so much abuse, and adding a couple more games to each season will significantly cut the number of seasons that players can last. The violent nature of football entertains us, and in turn we make the players rich. 

But we would never intentionally want to cause an increase in the number of injuries, and adding games to a season that is already more than many players' bodies can handle seems to be doing just that.