New 18-Game Season Proposal Comes With International Guarantee

Despite having signed a 10-year collective bargaining agreement in 2020, the NFL and the league’s ownership group have been pushing relentlessly for what they’ve insisted is an inevitable addition of an 18th game to the NFL regular season schedule. The newest update on the owners’ 18-game proposal comes with an international twist, as well.

The NFL’s 2020 CBA expanded the regular season from 16 to 17 games, reducing the preseason from four to three games, and added the standard gameday practice squad elevation rules that allow for NFL teams to call up two taxi squad players each week to be active on a gameday roster. It also altered the postseason, bringing in a third wild-card team for each conference and eliminating the first-round bye for the No. 2 seed of each conference, creating two more games for the first round of the playoffs.

The news of a shorter preseason runup to the regular season and extra games in the regular season and playoffs brought mixed reactions from the players. While the extra games meant extra paychecks, the altered schedule brought questions of health considerations after the NFL Players Association had done so much to advocate for player safety in prior years. So, as the NFL immediately began to bang the table for the addition of an 18th game, the NFLPA and the players it represents made it clear that they were not fans of the idea.

This week, though, the newest updates came out of New England, when Patriots owner Robert Kraft appeared on 98.5 The Sports Hub and gave the crew the lowdown on the owners’ current plan. The plan, as it currently stands, is to expand the regular season from 17 to 18 games, shortening the preseason from three to two games, while also guaranteeing that each team will play an international game, expanding the international schedule to 16 games.

“I want to tell you guys that we’re going to push like the dickens now to make international (games) more important with us,” Kraft informed them. “Every team will go to 18 (regular season games) and two (preseason games) and eliminate one of the preseason games, and every team every year will play one game overseas.”

He went on to expound on what it would mean for the players, but the only topic he really touched on was money. Not offering any considerations for player health, Kraft spoke to the additional revenue that increased international presentations and additional regular season home games would bring to the league and how that would help the owners “to grow the cap and keep (their) labor happy.” As long as players and the NFLPA continue to push back on any notion of altering the existing CBA, though, the league and owners will be forced to wait until the CBA expires in 2031.

If the league and ownership is able to get a regular season expansion, though, Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk claims that postseason change could, once again, follow. In...