The NFL is always trying to find ways to expand and evolve. Whether it’s adding a game to the regular season, tweaking the schedule, or playing international games, the league looks different now than it did five years ago and will surely look different five years from now. It’s no surprise, then, that when polled, fans of the NFL support a few pretty substantial changes to how football works now.
NFL fans like moving Super Bowl to holiday weekend
The day after the Super Bowl is not a holiday, but it probably should be. Most of the country is up till almost midnight ET to see the conclusion of the biggest sporting event of the year. Yet, for many, work waits just a few hours later. It’s an unfortunate situation, but making the Monday after a holiday is not really feasible. But moving the Super Bowl around is.
A Quinnipiac University poll found that “most” respondents, according to ESPN, support moving the game to Presidents Day Weekend, that way the game would be followed by a holiday and a day off for many.
Regardless of whether a fan’s team plays in the Super Bowl, the experience is exhausting. It’s the final football game for months, and it lasts from about 6:30 pm ET to 11:30 or later. Including pre and postgame ceremonies makes it an endurance test that requires people to stay up fairly late depending on their time zone. Fans have begged for years for the Monday after to be a day off from work, but to no avail. It remains to be seen if this proposed idea will come to fruition, but it’s so much more realistic since the holiday already exists. It would change the NFL’s postseason schedule, which might be a difficult thing to manage logistically.
NFL fans want longer schedules
Speaking of the NFL’s schedule, fans also overwhelmingly support adding an 18th game to the regular season. It was not too long ago that the NFL controversially added a 17th game. The safety risk is major for every football game, and adding more in a season only adds to the risk, but the results have been mostly positive from the 17-game season. 18 games, in the eyes of so many, would be nothing. The NFL has stated that it wants to expand to 18 games and reduce the preseason by a game, so there would still be 20 total games played before the playoffs, but starters play every single game in the regular season, making that 20th game much more important and risky to their health. Nevertheless, roughly 60% of fans support this idea. For the NFL, it’s going to come down to the NFLPA. If players are fine with it, then there’s no reason not to do this. Fans clearly like the idea and it would bring in more money. It would also even up records, so there’d be no more awkward 8-9 finishes. .500 teams would happen once more!
As for the safety risk, fans in general are not terribly concerned with that, and they believe the NFL is doing enough to mitigate injuries. 40% of voters believe the NFL is doing enough, and only 30% believe it’s not doing enough. Very few, but some think it’s too much, which is a little alarming, and 20% have no opinion. When split into just NFL fans, 50% believe the NFL is doing enough. Only 30% of diehard fans think the league needs to continue to do more to protect players. That probably means that the NFL isn’t going to continue making changes along these lines, especially since they’ve done so several times over the last few years.
