I hate the two week layoff--I think they should just go with the flow and play the damn game. This is football. Just do it. The focus of players, coaches and fans would be so much more intense and spontaneous. Not only two weeks of sitting on one's hands but all those super bowl ads disrupting the game.
And who wants to be watching football in Feb? The final college bowl game should be around 5 of January and the final pro a week or two later. The over-lapping takes away from all sports, including the NFL.
And yeah, once your team is out--like about 28 teams pretty immediately, it's all draft focus, so more reason to keep the flow and the interest in the games in the forefront. The stories about both teams become so stale, like yesterday's news.
the worst thing in football today IMO, is how they've staggered out the college bowl games to one a day after new years day
it's stupid IMO, it used to be much cooler when they had a crapload of games on one day
but about your not taking any week off before the superbowl, how about college football, why do they take over a month off between the end of the season and bowl games, that seems even worse....
also a bad thing IMO, which some will argue against, is the wildcard format
it's like when the sports decided on wildcards it was to counter how multiple teams made it in the nhl and nba
baseball and the nfl followed suit and facilitated the soccer moms who cried that their team had a good season and shouldn't be left out of the playoffs just because they weren't quite good enough.
expansion and wildcards ruined alot of the pureness of the nfl and mlb for me , now so many teams make the playoffs in every sport that it's made regular seasons not as meaningful.
expansion, necessitated wildcards because the product was so over saturated and all these whiners complained about how their 12-4 team shouldn't miss the playoffs becasue a team went 13-3 , so what happened? expansion, splitting of divisions into even more divisions....wildcards added
i'm all for bringing every major sport back to two conferences, two divisions each, and killing off some of the weaker teams to strengthen the overall product
but of course now it's too late, the product expanded, you can't just strip a city of a team unless they're financially unable to sustain it, and the product is vastly watered down.