WHY IN THE WORLD IS IT 17?

By STEVE KING

It’s an odd number, in more ways than one.
We’re talking about 17, the new number of games in the NFL regular season starting in 2012 after the league added a game the other day.
It’s the first time, at least in the modern era of standardized and balanced schedules, that the NFL has played an odd number of games. It throws everything out of whack, giving teams an unequal number of home and road games. The Browns will have nine home games, with a date against the Arizona Cardinals having been added, and the same eight road games they had before the move, as determined immediately after the 2020 regular season ended. So, then, it’s not an equal playing field anymore. Everybody wants to play at home, and those teams with nine games there obviously have an advantage over those with just eight.
Those with a little — or a lot — of grey hair, or no hair at home, will remember 3.2 percent, or “three-two,” beer in Ohio. Young people could drink only three-two beer from the time they turned 18 through age 20. When they became 21, they could begin drinking full-power beer.
That is the 17-game season in a nutshell. Why not just go to 18 games now — it’s been obvious for a while now that the league will get there anyway at some point — and counsel with the NFL PLayers Association to make all the other changes necessary to go with it and make it work? Why make this halfway kind of move? It just doesn’t make sense.
After all, adding two games at the same time to the season has been how these increases have been handled in the past in the modern era of the NFL, such as 1961 when it went from 12 games to 14, and then again in 1978 when it went from 14 to 16 games.
But then again, this COVID-19 pandemic is still going on, so weird things happening in all realms of life, including sports, should be no surprise by this juncture.