NFL owners want a 17-game schedule. Here’s why that’s a labor concern.
by C.M. Lewis and Kevin Reuning
Credit: Wikicommons
Sports unions have been in the news. WNBA players recently settled a landmark contract dramatically increasing compensation and benefits, while MLS players recently settled a new and reportedly player-friendly contract. The round of labor negotiations comes on the heels of years of unrest, particularly within women’s sports, over pay and compensation.
So it’s not surprising that NFL negotiations over a successor to their ten year long collective bargaining agreement are drawing attention—and concerns about the potential for a work stoppage. Right now, ongoing bargaining between the National Football Association Players’ Association, or NFLPA—the AFL-CIO affiliated labor union representing NFL players—and the NFL hinges on a key question: whether to move from a 16 to a 17 game schedule.
Last week, owners and the NFLPA Executive Committee reached a potential deal—one which includes many player-friendly concessions, while also tying them to a move to a 17-game schedule. Houston Texans star defensive end J.J. Watt immediately grabbed attention tweeting his opposition to the proposed deal; ultimately, the NFLPA Executive Committee voted 6-5 against recommending the deal to the players and postponed a vote of the 32 team representatives, making a ratification unlikely.
The upside to an expanded schedule is clear for owners: profit. Annual NFL revenue is measured in the tens of billions; Super Bowl LIV raked in millions of dollars through ticket sales and advertisements. Extending the schedule by just one week stands to make the league and NFL owners significantly more money. It’s an issue where owners can appeal to the desire of fans to see more product on the field, too, making it a potentially winning proposal.
One game might not seem like a lot to most fans, especially when measured against other sports. Professional football players can play a potential maximum of 20 regular and postseason games if their team doesn’t earn a first-round bye in the playoffs and makes the Super Bowl. In contrast, hockey players and basketball players can play a potential maximum of 110 games if they make a deep playoff run and each round goes a full seven games; baseball players top out at the most games played with a potential 182 games.
But increased attention to player safety—particularly the long-term impacts for players well after their careers are over—cautions against brushing off schedule concerns. Studies show that football is measurably one of the most injury-prone professional sports in North America: something most sports fans can intuitively see. Significant injury risk exists on every down in a football game; in contrast, even hockey—a high contact and notoriously violent sport with a slowly increasing player safety discussion—has significant variability between high risk and low risk situations depending on role (such as first line “skill” forwards vs. fourth line “grinding” forwards or “enforcers”) and the game circumstances (such as a power play vs. a penalty kill).
In other words, for NFL players playing another game means greater risk of injury—including catastrophic injury.
All injuries impact players, but major injuries—namely, concussions, anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) tears, and medial collateral ligament (MCL) tears—are key, both from the perspective of long-term health and long-term earning power. Major injuries, especially repeated major injuries or injuries early in a career, can tag a player as “injury prone” or derail development and significantly decrease their potential earning power (notable exception Sam Bradford notwithstanding). The consequences can be significant and players and fans are right to be concerned; the NFL, under pressure from players and the public, has increased publicly available reporting of major injuries well beyond most professional leagues.
So far, most discussion of player safety has focused on chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a neurodegenerative disease caused primarily by repeated head trauma (such as concussions). CTE has allegedly contributed to the premature deaths of several professional athletes like Atlanta Falcons safety Ray Easterling, Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher, New York Rangers winger Derek Boogaard, Winnipeg Jets winger Rick Rypien, and retired Nashville Predators winger Wade Belak. In spite of vicious owner pushback—the NHL has been particularly aggressive in fighting allegations of league neglect and has vehemently denied any connection between concussions and CTE—doctors and scientists have done crucial work: understanding the science and medicine behind less visible injuries, like neurodegenerative illnesses, helps better address player safety.
But player safety—and particularly, player safety and scheduling—isn’t just a medical question. It’s a labor question.
Professional athletes are workers, albeit extraordinarily skilled workers operating in a tight labor market. Competitive drive aside, they need to balance many of the same concerns other workers do: figuring out how to exist and thrive in the world based on their ability to earn a wage. The nature of their work adds additional complications; NFL players have a very short window of earning potential. According to NFL data compiled by Statista, the average career length is a scant 3 years, and even elite players only average a little under 12 years.
Credit: Statista.com
That means there is a tiny window to maximize potential career earnings. It’s all the more important given that a majority of NFL players come from high-poverty areas, and NCAA Division I college football programs place extraordinary pressure on athletes to neglect academics and long-term career considerations in favor of short-term on-the-field performance. In other words, the reality is that many NFL players find themselves out of the league in a few short years without a safety net with long-term and potentially life-threatening chronic injuries, thin long-term earning prospects, and not enough money (even with a player pension) to live on.
Credit: Burkmont Analytics
Given those considerations, what does it actually mean to ask players to add a game (and the practices that come with it) to the schedule?
We looked at reported injuries over Games 1 through 16 for the 2016-17, 2017-18, 2018-19, and 2019-20 seasons, utilizing a dataset created from aggregated single team injury reports from Pro-Football-Reference.com, and measured every occurrence of a weekly report of a player as Questionable, Doubtful, Out, and on Injured Reserve, whether or not the player ultimately played. What we found is that the longer the season goes on, the higher the rate of players on injured reserve with serious, season-ending injuries.
Rates of reported injuries fluctuate throughout the season within a fairly predictable range. Long-term and serious injuries—in other words, measured by players placed on injured reserve, preventing their return for the remainder of the season (with some exceptions)—increase steadily throughout the entire season, with a late-season spike.
Most observers will know that teams out of the playoff race tend to place players on injured reserve and players tend to get season-ending surgery when playoffs aren’t on the line. So we decided to control that by showing the rates of players on injured reserve for playoff teams, vs. teams that missed the playoffs.
There’s a clear difference, largely beginning around Game 12 when the playoff picture becomes clearer—but also one that can’t be explained as predicting playoff success, given that playoff teams in 2018 had more players on injured reserve for the majority of the season. Teams in playoff contention have injury rates relatively comparable to non-playoff teams—and rates that increase over the course of the season—but the pressure to win now means playing through injuries and deferring season-ending surgeries. In fact, one could look at the widening gap as the season progresses a different way: that as teams enter into playoff contention and as teams leave it, the incentive to play through or to err on the side of caution increases, accounting for the discrepancy.
So what does this mean?
A longer season—even by one game—is a major concern for players. Each game carries a risk of season-ending injuries, some of which can have long-term ramifications for player performance and career earnings. Although it means more profit for owners, there’s very little upside for players. More concerningly, it signals that the NFL’s newfound concern for player safety is more show than substance: if player safety were a top priority, the league wouldn’t propose increasing the length of schedule and the risk to players.
For players weighing the league’s proposal, adding a game is a major concern and would represent a significant concession to owners. After years of player unrest and unhappiness with soaring owner profit, and with a seeming growing social conscience among star athletes following Colin Kaepernick’s high-profile clash with the NFL, it’s unclear whether players will accept it. Moreover, the NFLPA is signalling that they’re not interested in settling for less than they think players deserve—their vote against recommending the deal is a sign that their very publicly strike manual release over the summer wasn’t a bluff.
It could be that league concessions in other areas make a longer schedule palatable—but for now, players seem skeptical and willing to hold out for a better deal. Their current collective bargaining agreement has lasted a decade; hundreds of players may retire, and even enter the league and leave it again, before the next one expires. Too much is at stake to settle easily.
For players and prospects eyeing NFL careers, the question of “just” one more game—at the cost of their health and safety—may be one of the most critical questions faced as the players’ union and the league return to the bargaining table.
C.M. Lewis is an editor of Strikewave and a union activist in Pennsylvania.
Kevin Reuning (@KevinReuning) is an assistant professor of political science at Miami University.