"I think the Colts stand a better chance of winning with Jim Sorgi than the Patriots do with Cassel."

Completely agree, but I don't think Cassel is going to be on the roster come week 1. Its pretty clear that Gutierrez is MUCH better (cassel has bledsoitis...takes forever in the pocket)

This: There's a yoga and Pilates studio here.

That sound you hear is Vince Lombardi spinning in his grave.

Since these King comment threads always turn out to be overwhelmingly negative, I'll start with the positive: He's absolutely right about the longer regular season. It turns the game into even more of a war of attrition than it already is. Fans want to see their team win because their stars are better players than the stars on the other team. They don't want to see their team win because they happened to be the only team to survive the season with their important players healthy. The longer the season gets, the more the competitive balance resembles Russian Roulette.

3: "Fans want to see their team win because their stars are better players than the stars on the other team. They don’t want to see their team win because they happened to be the only team to survive the season with their important players healthy."

I don't know about that. Personally, I'll take what I can get.

"the preseason tells us in spades that 16 is enough when players start dropping in games that mean nothing."

This seems a little silly.

How does a longer season cause more injurys in the pre-season games?

I would expect more injurys at the end due to accumulated damage and exhaustion but blaming preseason injurys on a long season makes no sense.

I found it a little funny that he didn't put in his little "Coffeenerdness" note. Of all the places he goes in the season, he has nothing to say about his visit to Seattle? Coffee-central?

"At the Hudson Newsstand/General Store (don't know what else you'd call those all-in-one stores) at Newark Airport's Terminal C Friday, there were 51 pieces of athletic apparel for sale. No Jeter jerseys, no Eli Manning jerseys, no A-Rod jerseys. All 51 items for sale on the sports rack were Favre Jets jerseys."

Did he really count the number of Favre jerseys on the rack? Or does he know because he bought them all?

Re 7:

Except it wasn't really about coffee, it was about wifi.

"This: There’s a yoga and Pilates studio here."
"That sound you hear is Vince Lombardi spinning in his grave."

Awesome unintentional pun!

The quantity of Favre references has decreased, but the unintentional comedy quality of them is through the roof.

re 9:

And the fact that there's not a Caribou Coffee in Seattle.

Re: 4

Yeah, put me in the 'I don't care how they win, so long as they win (without cheating)' camp. Winning with superior depth is every bit as satisfying as winning with superior stars.

Regarding the number of games, I tend to think King's right and the NFL won't increase it anytime soon. I wouldn't be surprised to see another buy week added to incease TV revenue (assuming the networks go for it).

Nothing wrong with going to a 17-game season if you do a couple of other things to mitigate the wear-and-tear and Russian Roulette nature of injuries:

(1) Include a second bye. Byes do wonders for letting players recover. And make sure you space them out enough.

(2) Increase roster sizes. Every year teams cut players who go on to become good backups for other teams, because of the 53 man roster limit. And teams are forced to abandon developmental project players, agains because of the 53 man roster limit. Increase the roster size to ~60 or so.

(3) Change the IR rules, and allow an IR player to come off the list after a certain amount of time. Currently, if a player gets hurt in the preseason, or Week 1, and is expected to miss ~8-9 games, then he is almost surely placed on IR unless he's a pro-bowler, even if he could be totally healthy by the end of the season. Baseball lets players come off the DL--why not let football players come off if they get healthy?

Re: #5

You're missing a very obvious point. Starters only play about 1 full game's worth of snaps over 4 preseason games. In the regular season, starters play the whole game. So increasing the number of regular season games will increase the number of injuries to starters.

To wit: The current setup of 4 preseason and 16 regular season games equates to 17 games of playing time for starters (16 regular, 1 preseason). If you play 3 preseason games and 17 regular season games, that's the playing time equivalent of 17 3/4 games. So you've just added 3/4 of a game of PT during which a starter could get hurt.

Addendum:

I like each of MJK's suggestions. A longer season would be more palatable under those conditions.

Triple-post:

PK yet again demonstrates that he doesn't understand fantasy. Carlson might be a good TE, but rookie TE's are rarely valuable and almost never worth drafting except in super-deep leagues.

RE: 13

If you add a game and another bye week, where do you add the two extra weeks onto the season? Do we start playing regular season games in the middle of August or move the Super Bowl to the middle of February? Ahhhh, a Super Bowl on Valentines Day. The implications are delicious.

13. Even as a fan of a team that will cut multiple players that will be picked up by other teams, I'm against (2). Limiting the roster size helps even out the talent level in the league, and also helps guys prove themselves on other teams.

Roster positions 54-60 aren't going to see a lot of playing time on their current team, but they could become backups, get more playing time, and move up the ladder on other teams. This is the same reason that the Rule 5 draft in baseball exists.

I'll take Alex Smith-style indignity any day.

Why is it so exciting that he found a coffee shop with free wifi? Isn't this normal? My wife's from a small Iowa town of about 1500 people and a large Amish population, and the library there has free wifi. Is it really surprising to find a coffee shop offering the same?

#20: Believe it or not, yes. I've always found that in smaller areas, free wifi is very common, but not so much in more urban environments.

There are 4 coffee shops near the university in Columbus - only two offer free wifi. Caribou Coffee's isn't even "completely free" wifi - you need to buy something to get it, and it only lasts an hour (if memory serves). The other place is a local owner, and it does have completely free wifi.

Where I am right now, the only places that offer free wifi are the locally owned coffee shops. The chain ones don't, at all.

I don't understand why King was impressed with the underwater treadmill- training in water is a pretty common practice. and I especially don't get the incredulity over the yoga and pilates studios. Announcers often say "so-and-so has actually been doing yoga this offseason" as if it's a crazy thing to do exercises that improve strength and flexibility. I swear, a lot of established sportswriters/broadcasters seem to think that the weight room is the be all and end all of conditioning.

I'm way against the 17-game season. I would be happy with them adding a second bye and ditching one preseason game, though.

20-

For all intents and purposes, teams already have players who don't play in roster spots 54-60 - the practice squad. It is possible for other teams to sign those players, yes, but only if they will be promoted to the active roster, which doesn't happen all that much. Making those spots into actual protected roster spots would reward teams who do a good job of scouting and developing young talent by allowing them to keep it - I've got no problem with that.

I like MJK's other suggestions as well - a second bye and a more flexible IR policy would be improvements from both a competitive and a financial standpoint, irrespective of whether the season was made longer. Personally I think a 16 game schedule works out quite nicely from a scheduling perspective given that there are 32 teams. The only reason to expand it is to play games abroad, and given that the NFL is basically nothing to anyone abroad except moderate-sized fanbases in Canada and Mexico and smaller ones in places like Australia and the UK, I'm not all that enthusiastic about overseas games.

Does anybody know why the two bye week schedule introduced in 1993 was abandoned after only one year? Just curious...

i'm from Australia. What is the facination with Peter King as a journalist?

Did he win a prize or something?

Re: 24

If European press is to be believed the demand for the NFL game in London would've sold out the 90,000 seats over ten times, why would the NFL ignore the guaranteed revenue that selling out a stadium that size, plus the publicity brings in?

@22 Disco Stu:

I assume you've seen this Slate article from 3 years ago (linked in my name).

Ten-and-a-Half Things I'm Fairly Sure I'd Think If I Thought About Them:

A. I evacuated my bowels. Smelled like coffee and lard.

3. How about those Red Socks? I mean really; how about them?

m. Brett Favre is like a kid out there, he really is.

17c. Grey Ruegamer has gray hair and it's like cold fusion or something.

44 b. My toenails have little ridges in them. Heckuva thing.

Re 24:

I can think of a couple things. 1) Pissing off the established fan base. I wasn't too happy about NFL teams not playing their home games at least near their home, and I'm not even a Giants or Jets fan. If the Bears took one of the 8 games they play at home away, I would be very angry. 2)The interest in an NFL game in England might have been due to novelty, or to scarcity. Having one game a week there or something like that might drive interest down.

Heck, I'm impressed that Xeynon managed to get the correct terms "intents and purposes" and "irrespective" into one comment.

Re 26. The NFL is the most secretive, insular institution in America. Access is given to only the most sycophantic, uncritical journalist. Those who object are denied access, and those that are not given access, but use NFL images are prosecuted to the full extent of the law. In that world, Peter King has a Hall of Fame vote.

Re 28- yeah I remember that piece- still tough to believe that sportswriters, as a group, are so behind the times.

Does anybody know why the two bye week schedule introduced in 1993 was abandoned after only one year? Just curious…

As a fan, it wasn't much fun. Fewer games each week on average, so less chance of getting a good game on TV, an additional week of not seeing your team. It was like a normal football season, just watered down.

24. It is possible for other teams to sign those players, yes, but only if they will be promoted to the active roster, which doesn’t happen all that much.

It happens more often than you know. For instance, the Cowboys last year had a young QB named Matt Moore that they really liked, but needed a lot of development. They couldn't sacrifice another roster spot to keep him though and tried to put him on the practice squad.

However, Carolina signed him as their 3rd QB, presumably because they had more roster space than the Cowboys did. And of course, the Panthers lose their Delhomme and Carr to injury, sign Testeverde only to lose him later on to muscle soreness or something, and Moore ends up playing in a couple games near the end. Even against Dallas.

In the end, the situation worked out exactly as it should. A team with less talent and more roster space signed a developmental guy that would have stayed behind Romo and probably never seen the light of day and gave him the opportunity to develop and grow through playing time. It was good for the team and the player, though not as good for the Cowboys. But it does even out talent levels.

Where I'm at, all the locally owned coffee shops offer free wifi. The chains don't.

#30 - Football is still some way from being a major spectator sport in the UK, but it's rapidly moving closer towards that status. SkySports' coverage may be bad (their studio analysts are without exception appalling) but it is pretty extensive - choice of two games at a time on Sunday afternoons (UK evenings) as well as the Sunday and Thursday night games and the playoffs, and a lot of NFLN content. Channel 5 only have the Monday night games, which is a shame because Mike Carlson (who sometimes posts here, under his own name) is actually a very good, albeit eccentric, studio analyst. Coincidentally, he played football and lacrosse for Wesleyan, on the same teams as Bill Belichick. Carlson also covered the Superbowl for the BBC in 2008, the first year in a long time that they've shown it. That in itself is a big indicator of the strides in popularity football has made in the UK.

That one regular season game a year at Wembley can sell out in minutes should surprise nobody. Whether that would continue to be the case if England got more games, I have no idea. From the NFL's point of view, however, it is crucial to understand the difference this game makes to coverage of the sport in the mainstream UK media. Ordinarily, football is covered in the sports pages only in the form of tiny printed results, or at most a weekly round-up column. In the period leading up to the Wembley game last year, it was unavoidable, occupying multiple prominent pages in sports sections and extensive coverage in TV and radio news. If the NFL wants to build an overseas fanbase, they have no other comparably valuable tool by means of which to do so. If the Wembley games continue to be a success, look for games in China and Germany in a hurry and a seventeen game regular season before too long, whether US fans like it or not.

Eccentric? Mike Carlson? When he finishes his hot plaster pilates karate workout he'll show you eccentric!

Two small corrections: Five does the Sunday night game once baseball season is over, and welcomes most of Sky's audience when they do

And Belichick didnt play football his freshman year, so he and Carlson only played lacrosse together at then-powerhouse Wesleyan

And do I really post under my own name?