Via Ben Domenech, I found this piece by NRO sportswriter Geoffrey Norman that makes a curious claim:
There are a lot of things that go on way too long, and one of them is the professional football season. There are too many games, between too many teams, over too many weeks. It is hard for the prudent fan to keep up or even truly care. Spend twelve hours in front of the television on a lovely September weekend, watching football, and the least you will feel is slothful.
Actually, I'm afraid Mr. Norman has this wrong. If there is any league that understands the need for fans to miss it in order to ensure its continued popularity, it's the NFL, with Major League Baseball a close second. For me, the most miserable time of the year is the gap in the calendar between the day after the Super Bowl and MLB's Opening Day (with the exception of the NCAA Basketball Tourney that makes March tolerable). By the time the Fall comes around again, millions of Americans are literally salivating over the return of college and pro football.
As for keeping up with what's going on, with only 16 games over 17 weeks, the NFL is far easier for fans to follow than the 162-game long baseball season, or the 82-game NBA season. And with the addition of the silly "overtime loss" (or "regulation tie" as the NHL propagandists term it) to professional hockey, the NHL is the most difficult of all sports to follow. In addition, both the NBA and the NHL are hardly gone from the calendar at all before making a premature return to North America's sports pages.
Hockey is going to have this problem in spades after the 2004 season. After finishing off the Stanley Cup Finals sometime in June, the sport will return to television in September for the second edition of the World Cup of Hockey. Then, barring a potential lockout or player's strike, we'll be back to regular season hockey sometime in October. The sport is hardly gone before it's back again. Absence really does make the heart grow fonder, something that makes me wish the NHL could trim itself down to a 60 game schedule that would allow it to finish off the playoffs well before the Spring thaw melts all the ice in Canada.
The real danger for the NFL is that someone might get the idea to further expand the regular season or the playoffs, or even have another premature round of franchise expansion. In actuality, however, there's little risk of this happening, as the NFL has to be one of the most conservative businesses in the world. Change for its own sake has never been a problem in the NFL, and I don't think that's going to change anytime soon.
In any case, the only reason I can find why someone might think the NFL season is too long, is that they don't like football all that much.
