Mr Khan said:
That just seems like a recipe for overexposure: exhausted players and increasingly apathetic fans. Football may be the biggest of the major sports in terms of popularity and cultural impact, but everything has its limits, as the NFL will soon discover. It would seem the easier strategy would be to cook up a few new teams. Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, and Portland OR would be easy targets. Maybe Omaha? |
Oh yeah, I think part of why many sports are as popular as they are...is they go away for half the year. The anticipation of OTA's, Pre-season, training camp, reg season opening etc... builds dramatically over the off-season and has everyone glued to their sets when it starts. Spreading the 'official' NFL year out further will most certainly lead to apathy in my opinion. As far as revenue in the States, not sure if that's really their ultimate goal (expansion locally). The prevailing thought seems to be adding an expansion team on foreign soil. England's been tossed around numerous times at this point, however, I'm inclined to think they'd give Canada a test-run first (logistically speaking, much easier to work with), though, there is a rather healthy NFL following in the UK at this point (speaking from how packed Wembley was, when the Pats/Rams played there). Ultimately, the UK would represent a far more lucrative market than Canada, considering it's a foothold into the much broader and densley populated, Europe. But, what a mess of a first season that'd be for that team.
All that aside, you briefly touched on it, but I certainly think increasing the regular season to 18, raises the injury risks much, much higher.
