Deus Irae

My sports history has proven otherwise.

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"The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."
- Marcus Aurelius

Wolfpack

You've made roughly 34,000 posts to this forum over the past 7 years. So please don't tell us all how you could just let your interest in the sport diminish over something so tiny. Like I said, the NFL knows that the people like you who complain the loudest are the ones who aren't going anywhere.

Raymond

Let's simply agree all 32 teams make the playoffs now......

The playoffs start week one September.

PatsWickedPissah

Problem is Patsfans posters are not the target audience.
Wildcard week this January featured truly awful games unless you're a fan of the winning team. Those with no dog in the hunt were bored. Click!

But the target audience is the low information football viewer who will tune in to see the additional local favorites play.

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Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as "bad luck." RAH

Zeus

We all want a playoff system that rewards good performance during the regular season. Teams with 10 or more wins should generally be included in the playoffs while teams with 8 or less wins should be excluded.

It would be a pretty easy analysis to go back over the last ten years and see how various alternatives under consideration would have performed. Without doing the work, my guess is that we'd find that the current system performs pretty well.

The 2008 Patriots are the only 11 win team in recent memory to be excluded. There have been some 8-8 playoff teams but these have been division winners, an outcome that is unavoidable in the current format where division winners are guaranteed a spot. We're not seeing 8-8 or 7-9 wild card teams but would likely encounter this if the playoff field were to be expanded.

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"And the anger and the yearning, like fever in my veins, set the fire burning ..." WZ

Frezo

It doesn't matter if he and many others like him watch or not. We are not the NFL's cash cow. Think about the current KFC commercial where the dumb blonde, (no offense to blondes), says, "Chicken go boom." THAT'S the crowd they want to appeal to. The NFL sees losing us and adding the chicken go boom crowd as addition by subtraction. They want to ramp up fantasy football to generate interest in more teams and dumb down the sport to the point to where fans think a 3-4 is the alignment that comes after the 1-2.

I believe that announcers have been told to not complicate the game by referring to sets, schemes and alignments, but to instead concentrate on ball washing any player(s), mostly QBs, with a recognizable name. Remember Gruden's first two games when he was Mr. technical and how overnight he turned into Mr. ball washer? That wasn't his choice. It was the NFL's. During a game this year I heard Collinsworth say, "Not to get too technical...", when he made a statement about defensive alignment. It was the only one I recall him making all season. This has to be totally obvious to anybody here that watches football.

Player safety? Why do you think the NFL is all over it? It's because they can't have an 18 game season if too many players are on IR. They know darned well that if they throw a few more dollars at the players they'll accept an 18 game season and so will the chicken go boom crowd. Face it, hard core football fans are a dieing breed and the NFL couldn't care less.

Deus Irae

You know nothing about me. You're wrong on this subject. In fact, you probably couldn't be more wrong if you tried to be. I'll leave it at that.

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"The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."
- Marcus Aurelius

edgeofepic

I think the only thing the NFL should expand would be to bring back some type of springtime "NFL Farm League" like what they had in the 90s with the World League of American Football. But instead of putting it in Europe they should just have 4-8 cities throughout the US in 2nd tier cities (for example, maybe a team in Hartford, CT.)

The league would play a 6-8 game regular season then a couple weeks for playoffs and finally a championship game in week 11. Each NFL team would be allowed (and required) to play 10 players in the league. These can be draft picks, rookie free agents, players with under 2 years of NFL experience, etc. Heck, they could even be old guys trying to make a comeback.

I think NFL fans would support it, especially if ticket prices were family friendly. Teams would have their own uniforms but wear the helmet of the NFL team they represent (think: Pro Bowl).

Having more experienced players will enhance the game, offer teams more depth to compensate for injuries, etc. Moreover NFL fans would have at least some type of football to look forward to rather than the emotional black hole we all experience after the SB ends.

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Brady_to_Moss

even if they had a 32 team playoff..i would still be at every pats game i could go to and buy all the gear...but please don't ruin the playoff system NFL

mgteich

How many low information patriot fans would tune in if we were a wildcard team?