40-YARD M*A*S*H
Despite injuries, NFL wants more games
MMM, mmm, NFL Soup! Just add two cans of water. Throw in more dilution to the solution, and it’s ready to serve. And coming soon: extra lard! If we’re to agree that the quality of NFL games is reflected, first and foremost, by the quality of starting quarterbacks, we’ll note that few teams have, through Week 13, survived without injuries to their first-string QBs.
And then injuries to their backup QBs and so on down the line through practice-squad QBs and desperate signings of QBs who have been relegated to civilian life after lives of backups to injured QBs.
In Houston, the Texans’ star QB Deshaun Watson has been out all season due to, as they say in the NHL, “a lower-body” issue. Then there are the COVID quarterbacks, including the artless dodger, Aaron Rodgers.
The dilution is such that games featuring two Day 1 starting QBs have become novelties, like a Tom Brady sighting in a Subway sandwich shop. “Say, what’s in the tuna, today?”
The Jets this season have replaced Zach Wilson with faded Joe Flacco, Mike White and itinerant Josh Johnson, the last an emergency QB with his fourth NFL team.
Brian Hoyer, now a Patriots’ backup — for a fourth time — had been an emergency QB for the Cards, Colts, Bears, 49ers, Browns and Texans. He has made a fabulous living as a substitute for injured QBs because every team needs at least one.
Case Keenum, now a sub with the Browns, last season played QB for his seventh different team in seven years.
Now add the dozens of injuries that have disabled key players on all teams, and you have a badly diluted product. Those cut after preseason games are suddenly in demand to return.
Friday’s Post carries a full page of players most recently injured and their anticipated status for their team’s next game. And that page appears in agate — small type — in order to fit it all on one page.
Thus, the last thing the NFL needs is to add more regular-season games. Yet this season the league has increased the number of games from 16 to 17, and there have been reports the league intends to make it 18.
The pursuit of money — more and more money — be it by partnering with sports gambling operations, PSLs, bait-and-switch TV scheduling, or by the unneeded and unwanted addition of regular-season games, is the mandate for NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and his salary, estimated to be $42 million per annum.
There was no hue and cry among NFL fans for more regular-season games. The increase to 17 and then 18 is not a response to a populist demand or even a fleeting wish.
It’s pure greed, nothing more, nothing less. And nothing better. Yet, Goodell claims that he represents only the best interests of NFL fans. “It’s all about our fans,” he was heard to say on the NFL Network, no laugh track added — or needed.
Soon a “bye week” will be preface to never returning, as in “Goodbye week.” By Week 18, NFL teams will be stocked with volunteers.