Goodell says playoff expansion talk hasn’t cooled

A year ago, the NFL seemed to be poised to expand the playoffs from 12 to 14 teams, effective in 2015.  And then someone apparently realized that it didn’t make much sense to expand the playoffs before the year in which the playoffs would be expanded.
So it’s now 2015, and there’s no proposal for expanding the playoffs as the league meetings commence — along with plenty of talk that there won’t be expansion of the playoffs this year.  So Peter King of TheMMQB.com asked Commissioner Roger Goodell why the subject had cooled.
“I don’t think it’s cooled at all,” Goodell said.  “There are a lot of factors that go into it.  One, we want to be right when we do it. . . .  It’s something that we think has got a lot of merit from a competitive side, because it would actually add more teams to the race as you get toward the end of the season.  There’s the broadcasting side of it.  When would you play that extra game?”
Scheduling of that one extra game per conference, where the No. 2 seed would face the No. 7 seed, also becomes a challenge, as Steelers owner Art Rooney II recently noted.  Bumping a game to Monday night of wild-card weekend gives the winner limited rest for the divisional round — and it creates a potential conflict with the NCAA title game.
“We’re respectful of college football,” Goodell said of the NFL’s free farm system.
Goodell mentioned another complication that we (or at least I) hadn’t previously considered.  The No. 2 seed could, in theory, end up playing home games for five straight weekends.  If, for example, the team that emerges as the second best team in the conference finishes with back-to-back regular-season home games, hosts the No. 7 seed and wins in the wild-card round, hosts the divisional round and wins, and then if the No. 1 seed loses in the divisional round (which happens nearly half the time), the No. 2 seed would be looking at five home games in five weekends.
“If you have a northern climate, that’s a lot to ask of your fans,” Goodell said.  “So we have a lot to balance.”
Still, dollars will drive this bus (as they always do), and there are plenty of dollars to be made by staging two extra wild-card games.  The prevailing belief is that even more dollars will be made by tying the extra playoff games to the Thursday night package.
Once that happens, the other details will easily fall into place, with the college title game sliding to Tuesday night if need be and with teams that play outdoors in northern climates not finishing the regular season with consecutive home games.


Source: PFT.com
Author: Mike Florio
Photo: US Presswire