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Gosselin: Here's my four-step plan to fix the NFL; it includes many more trips to London
Rick Gosselin
rgosselin@dallasnews.com
Published: 24 March 2014 09:13 PM
Updated: 24 March 2014 09:16 PM
I’m here to fix the NFL.
Let’s call this the Gosselin Plan. With the NFL owners at their spring meeting in Orlando, Fla., this week, this is as good a time as any to unveil it.
It allows the NFL to add two cities without expanding. It reduces the number of meaningless games, adds meaningful games and eases the financial burden on the ticket-buying public. It also increases both the national and international visibility of the league.
Step 1: Add two teams to the playoffs, one in each conference, and make the opening round of the NFL postseason play-in weekend. Baseball and the NCAA have successfully incorporated play-in games into their postseasons.
The sixth and seventh seeds in each conference would participate, with the winners advancing to the wild-card round the following weekend. The play-in games in 2013 would have pitted Pittsburgh-San Diego in the AFC and Arizona-New Orleans in the NFC.
The AFC would stage its play-in game on a Saturday and the NFC on a Sunday, then flip days every year. That creates another weekend of prime programming for the TV networks, which should increase the size of the league’s financial pie. That also would push the Super Bowl back one weekend. What’s another week? The Super Bowl is already staged in February.
Step 2: Reduce the preseason by two games. Each team would play once at home and once on the road. That’s one less bogus football game each team would force its season ticket-holders to buy. NFL preseason football is the biggest sham in sports.
Step 3: Add one more regular-season game, creating a 17-game schedule for each team. Again, one more regular-season game and one less preseason game should increase the TV money. Football fans want to watch the sport in December, not August.
Step 4: The 17th game for each team would be neither a home nor a road contest. It would be a neutral-field affair. Sixteen of the teams would play that game in London, the other 16 in Los Angeles.
Start by dividing the 32 teams geographically.
Atlanta, Baltimore, Buffalo, Carolina, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Jacksonville, Miami, New England, the New York Giants and Jets, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Tampa Bay and Washington would comprise the East. They would play their neutral-field game in London.
Arizona, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Green Bay, Houston, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Minnesota, New Orleans, Oakland, St. Louis, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle and Tennessee would comprise the West. They would play their neutral-field game in Los Angeles.
That would give London and Los Angeles eight games apiece — allowing those cities to sell attractive season-ticket packages with a mixture of AFC and NFC teams for the complete NFL experience.
That would solve the league’s problem of the nation’s second-largest city not having a team and also give the NFL that foothold in Europe it has been so desperately seeking — without having to expand to either city.
You could flip brackets each year, with the Eastern teams playing in Los Angeles the following season and the Western teams playing in London. You could also assign conferences — the NFC teams play in London one year and Los Angeles the next.
Thus, ticket buyers in Los Angeles and London would have the opportunity to see all 32 NFL teams over a two-year period. And the NFL would no longer have to ask its teams to give up a home date in order to play a game in London (or, in the future, Los Angeles).
Teams playing neutral-field games would be assigned byes the following week. That would create an 18-week calendar for the NFL season, so opening day would be pushed up into the final weekend of August.
The two weekends the NFL loses each preseason would be replaced by two weekends of premium football — a 17th game in the regular season and the play-in round.
What’s not to like about this plan? I’ll leave it up to the NFL to work out all the details.
Rick Gosselin
rgosselin@dallasnews.com
Published: 24 March 2014 09:13 PM
Updated: 24 March 2014 09:16 PM
I’m here to fix the NFL.
Let’s call this the Gosselin Plan. With the NFL owners at their spring meeting in Orlando, Fla., this week, this is as good a time as any to unveil it.
It allows the NFL to add two cities without expanding. It reduces the number of meaningless games, adds meaningful games and eases the financial burden on the ticket-buying public. It also increases both the national and international visibility of the league.
Step 1: Add two teams to the playoffs, one in each conference, and make the opening round of the NFL postseason play-in weekend. Baseball and the NCAA have successfully incorporated play-in games into their postseasons.
The sixth and seventh seeds in each conference would participate, with the winners advancing to the wild-card round the following weekend. The play-in games in 2013 would have pitted Pittsburgh-San Diego in the AFC and Arizona-New Orleans in the NFC.
The AFC would stage its play-in game on a Saturday and the NFC on a Sunday, then flip days every year. That creates another weekend of prime programming for the TV networks, which should increase the size of the league’s financial pie. That also would push the Super Bowl back one weekend. What’s another week? The Super Bowl is already staged in February.
Step 2: Reduce the preseason by two games. Each team would play once at home and once on the road. That’s one less bogus football game each team would force its season ticket-holders to buy. NFL preseason football is the biggest sham in sports.
Step 3: Add one more regular-season game, creating a 17-game schedule for each team. Again, one more regular-season game and one less preseason game should increase the TV money. Football fans want to watch the sport in December, not August.
Step 4: The 17th game for each team would be neither a home nor a road contest. It would be a neutral-field affair. Sixteen of the teams would play that game in London, the other 16 in Los Angeles.
Start by dividing the 32 teams geographically.
Atlanta, Baltimore, Buffalo, Carolina, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Jacksonville, Miami, New England, the New York Giants and Jets, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Tampa Bay and Washington would comprise the East. They would play their neutral-field game in London.
Arizona, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Green Bay, Houston, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Minnesota, New Orleans, Oakland, St. Louis, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle and Tennessee would comprise the West. They would play their neutral-field game in Los Angeles.
That would give London and Los Angeles eight games apiece — allowing those cities to sell attractive season-ticket packages with a mixture of AFC and NFC teams for the complete NFL experience.
That would solve the league’s problem of the nation’s second-largest city not having a team and also give the NFL that foothold in Europe it has been so desperately seeking — without having to expand to either city.
You could flip brackets each year, with the Eastern teams playing in Los Angeles the following season and the Western teams playing in London. You could also assign conferences — the NFC teams play in London one year and Los Angeles the next.
Thus, ticket buyers in Los Angeles and London would have the opportunity to see all 32 NFL teams over a two-year period. And the NFL would no longer have to ask its teams to give up a home date in order to play a game in London (or, in the future, Los Angeles).
Teams playing neutral-field games would be assigned byes the following week. That would create an 18-week calendar for the NFL season, so opening day would be pushed up into the final weekend of August.
The two weekends the NFL loses each preseason would be replaced by two weekends of premium football — a 17th game in the regular season and the play-in round.
What’s not to like about this plan? I’ll leave it up to the NFL to work out all the details.
