An 18-game NFL season is coming: Here's how the league can keep the balance right

Ted Hyman, CBS Sports

There is little question that the next collective bargaining agreement between the NFL and its players will include an 18th regular season game.

That change is at least two years away -- 2028 at the absolute earliest, 2031 at the latest -- and it will come with considerable back and forth between the sides. The league will rid itself of one of three preseason games. A second bye week will be non-negotiable from the player perspective. The financial windfall, which is well north of an extra billion dollars in revenue, is obvious, but how the pie is split will be at the center of the discussion.

There's a hidden challenge, however, to the expected increase in regular season games the league has quietly been assessing for years. And what we just saw in the NBA's regular season is instructive for the NFL in its expansion plans. The more games that are played between the haves and have-nots will result in more low-leverage games, thus diluting the premier live television product in the world.

It is obvious that more competitive snaps played will result in more injuries, and naturally the league will work to address that universal truth. But 16 more games at the end of the season will also reveal a wider gap in a league long hailed for its competitive balance.

The NBA is reeling from what one veteran journalist recently described as the least-competitive month in the 80-year history of the association. Teams put together rosters filled with players who will never again see an NBA court just for positioning in what's expected to be a historically good draft. Though the problems with tanking have persisted in the NBA for some time, it has never been this widespread or flagrant.

The NBA's playoff teams were essentially solidified since the February trade deadline. Can you imagine if we knew the 14 playoff teams by Halloween of a given NFL season?

"I think tanking exists but not to the extent in the NBA," one NFC team executive said.

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has kept an eye on what's going on with basketball. So, too, has the league's competition committee. But asked earlier this month whether the league feels susceptible to tanking, Goodell said it is of no concern to the league and its owners.

"This is something that we obviously keep a keen focus on but we don't see any evidence of that," Goodell said. "I think what you see is a very competitive league and you see players and coaches who want to win. And they're out there playing their hearts out. And so I couldn't be prouder of where the game is right now. So that is not something that we have spent -- I think I spent most of the time with the competition committee in Indianapolis  and I don't think it was even discussed."

But whether a team is actively tanking, simply trying to rebuild or is just downright bad, the results of having a noncompetitive team are the same. And the longer the season goes, "mathematically there will be more scenarios where there are lower leverage games," one league source admits.

NFL quality of play dips as the season grinds on

For the past several years the league has proudly touted statistics toward the end of the season to show just how competitive the NFL has been, and this year was no different.

The NFL highlights topics like close games, fantastic finishes, comebacks and how often teams go from worst in their division to winning it in a span of a year.

Just last year, the league saw 73 games decided by three of fewer points, which was tied for the most in league history. A record-high five games were won by teams trailing by 15 or more points in the fourth quarter. Three teams went worst-to-first, which has been done by at least one team in 20 of the past 23 seasons.

And the two Super Bowl participants did not even make the playoffs in the year prior.

Even Goodell referenced earlier this month how 70% of their games were one-score contests entering the fourth quarter. It's a strong statistic that enforces the belief that most games can be won by either team depending on how the ball bounces.

All of this is true on the whole. But most years, the final weeks of the season tell a different story than the aggregate.

In the last 10 seasons, the NFL has seen 53% of all its regular-season games finish with a margin of eight points or fewer according to CBS Sports research. That number ticks up to 53.6% of all games outside the last two weeks of the year. But in the final two weeks of the season, that drops to 47.6% of the games.

The numbers show that across the years -- with some year-to-year fluctuation -- the margins get wider late in the season, which coincides with a typically heavy slate of divisional games. That means that the later-season games that presumably have higher leverage are, on the whole, not as competitive as the rest of the season.

If more games are added, why wouldn't that gap widen?

Blatant tanking not likely to become widespread NFL problem

No team in NFL history has ever been punished for tanking. There is an art to it that is based on "playing the young guys" toward the end of the season and building for the future. If done correctly, the only difference between an outright tank and a "rebuild" is some hand-written smoking gun from a decision-maker.

Last season the Raiders careened to a 3-14 season with replacements at two of three coordinator positions. Las Vegas added most of its best players to the injured reserve. They lost 10 straight games and Pete Carroll was certain to get fired, but they still managed a season-finale victory over a battered Kansas City Chiefs team. The Raiders did enter that game with the No. 1 pick secured, meaning their quarterback of the future was locked in thanks to such a disappointing season.

In 2023, the Washington Commanders hovered around .500 when it sent away its two best defensive players for draft capital. Fifth-round rookie quarterback Sam Howell started every game as Ron Rivera's Commanders lost their last eight games and wound up with the No. 2 overall pick in next year's draft. A new regime went in and took Jayden Daniels at that spot, and he won Offensive Rookie of the Year in 2024.

The Commanders did not tank in 2023, but the closing eight-game stretch with Sam Howell at the helm landed them Jayden Daniels.  Getty Images

Whether you're certain those are tank jobs or just bad teams, the NFL does not always see noncompetitive teams lean into losing down the stretch. In 2024, a three-win Patriots team led by soon-to-be-fired Jerod Mayo beat the AFC East champion Bills in the finale (though New England already had its quarterback of the future in Drake Maye on the roster).

More memorably, Lovie Smith coached the 2022 Houston Texans, 2-13-1 at the time, to a 32-31 upset over the Colts that took the No. 1 pick away from Houston. Smith would be fired after one year and Houston wound up just fine with C.J. Stroud at No. 2.

Perhaps the closest any team has come to a punishment related to a perceived tank was Dolphins owner Stephen Ross. Four years ago the league suspended Ross for tampering with Tom Brady and Sean Payton following allegations from former head coach Brian Flores. But the six-month investigation did not confirm Flores's allegations that Ross directed the 2019 Dolphins to intentionally lose games.

But according to the investigation, "on a number of occasions during the 2019 season, Mr. Ross expressed his belief that the Dolphins' position in the upcoming 2020 draft should take priority over the team's win-loss record."

Basketball has seen this for years, and it turned into a full-blown epidemic among a third of its teams this season. The NBA had to launch an investigation into whether the head coach of one of its tanking teams demanded his team intentionally foul a great free-throw shooter to help them lose a game down the stretch. The league is currently figuring out how to rework its lottery odds to reduce tanking with some options that appear to actually incentivize tanking even ore.

"There is an aspect of team-building that is called a genuine rebuild -- a rebuild with integrity," NBA commissioner Adam Silver said in March. "The problem we're having these days is it's become almost impossible to distinguish between the tank and rebuild. ... It's one that we take very seriously, and we are going to fix it. Full stop."

But whereas its issues are more directly tied to intentionality, the NFL's may more directly be linked to injuries.

"If I had to guess, I don't think the league is super concerned about the wildly uncompetitive blowout games that are terrible," said one league source. "In general parity is tighter. Even with bad teams, it's still a real product. It's not over in the first quarter. The best teams and worse teams are separated by so little these days.

"The bigger concern is now we're going to add another game, even if you multiply everything out with sensible assumptions, there are going to be more injuries. And it won't just be hamstrings. There are going to be season-enders and next-season-enders in Week 18 and 19. That's the biggest sticking point on the field."

Indeed, many star players sit later in the year either to rest of the postseason or be spared from potential injury. Buffalo has regularly rested Josh Allen at the end of the season. The Eagles have put their guys on the shelf. On Sunday in the NBA, more than $2 billion in combined salary sat out the final game of the season as nearly 200 players were ruled out.

"The NFL's issue will be more related to getting top players to play in games beyond playoff contention, which I believe get exacerbated the more regular season games they play," one player told me.

"Top players will check themselves out more because games that don't matter late in the season will happen more often."

How will the NFL feed the ducks?

The simplest fix to reduce the number of noncompetitive games in any sport is to reduce the number of regular-season games. Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr has been advocating for the NBA to shrink from 82 to 72 games for years.

"I'm well aware fewer games would mean less revenue, which means everybody takes a pay cut and I'm willing to stick my neck out and say I'm all for that because I think the quality of the product is the most important thing," Kerr said recently. "So I don't say these things flippantly. I say these things because I mean them."

Any NFL observer reading this story chuckles at the idea of the genie going back in the bottle in this league, though. It is impossible to conceive of an NFL that will actually remove regular-season games when they are consistently the most-watched TV event in a given week and, more importantly, the easiest way to make the most money for the league.

"When the ducks quack, feed them," Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said to a question of mine recently. "And we have that demand for our games. And because of the hard work and great players that we have, we have great demand. We should address it, respond to it, and feed it."

An 18th game and a second bye week would do several things. It assuages some injury concerns. It would bring much more money into the league. It would help the league get to 16 international games, which would mean all 32 teams could play outside the United States each season. And would help line the calendar up so that the Super Bowl falls on the weekend of Presidents Day.

But would that extra game be in-division or out? Right now the six divisional games teams play fit nicely with each team playing each other in a home-and-home. If a seventh divisional game is added, how does the formula change?

And if the game is out of division, the NFL further diminishes its own pods of teams. At 16 games, divisional contests account for 37.5% of all regular season games. If only six of the 18 games are played within a division, then two-thirds of the league plays outside its division.

That is where Detroit's proposal from last offseason comes into play. The Lions proposed that winning one's division only ensures a playoff spot but not a home playoff game. Goodell backs the proposal, even if it didn't get enough support last year and was not addressed this offseason at the league meetings.

A change like that to the playoff format would incentivize playoff-bound teams to keep playing their starters late in the year. For example, the Eagles rested the top guys in Week 18 last year when they had either the No. 2 or 3 seed locked up. But Jalen Hurts & Co. likely would have played against the Commanders if the next week's wild-card game had not been guaranteed to be played at Lincoln Financial Field as they battled the Bears and the NFC West for playoff positioning.

The thinking goes that teams will remain competitive later in the season. And it also takes away the reward from winning the division when those divisional victories matter less with added games.

Those are the sort of knobs the league is considering turning in the coming years as the 18th game gets nearer. To the NFL, the only thing better than more games is more close games.

"Ultimately any concerns will be dwarfed by more football," a league source said. "People like more football and people like more money. Even if there are a few more dud games, you're going to get a few more good ones."