In 2014, then Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban made a prediction. He said the NFL would implode within a decade.
‘I think the NFL is 10 years away from an implosion,’ Cuban said then. ‘I’m just telling you: Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. And they’re getting hoggy.
‘Just watch. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. When you try to take it too far, people turn the other way. I’m just telling you, when you’ve got a good thing and you get greedy, it always, always, always, always, always turns on you. That’s rule No. 1 of business.’
Cuban was talking about the then expanding television package, and how he believed playing games on days other than Sunday and Monday was a bad business decision.
‘They’re trying to take over every night of TV,’ Cuban said. ‘Initially, it’ll be, ‘Yeah, they’re the biggest-rating thing that there is.’ OK, Thursday, that’s great, regardless of whether it impacts (the NBA) during that period when we cross over. Then if it gets Saturday, now you’re impacting colleges. Now it’s on four days a week. It’s all football. At some point, the people get sick of it.’
When I reached out to Cuban on Saturday night about what he thinks he got wrong (he was far from alone in believing that), he said, in part, to USA TODAY Sports: ‘I thought that they would saturate every night of the week and that would destabilize their partners. There is still uncertainty when your biggest revenue source is legacy media, but without question they are the number one viewing option.’ (More on this in a story to come later.)
This look into the past leads us to the present, and the NFL’s league meetings this week in Florida. This particular gathering of NFL owners might be the unofficial beginning of the inevitable that’s starting to happen. No, not an implosion, but an expansion. An expansion we knew was coming: the league reportedly is preparing to make a more assertive push for an 18-game season.
While an 18th game could be several years away (maybe), Yahoo is reporting that the NFL wants to intensify those already-existing conversations with the union essentially now.
We need to understand something. Talks or pushes or whatever you want to call them … an 18th game is going to happen. It’s inevitable. Like Thanos. (Talking the first time Thanos made half the population disappear, not the second time he tried and failed … but I digress.)
The league has wanted this for some time. This is a dream of many owners. They see massive dollar signs. They think the current media rights deal isn’t big enough. They see the sport as a giant ATM. Spitting out huge bucks and ratings. The hEaLTHH aND sAFFTy stuff well, whatever. The NFL will pay lip service to it but the money comes first. The money always comes first.
All of this leads to a really important question: Can there ever be such a thing as too much NFL?
That’s what Cuban was basically asking 11 years ago and right now, it seems, the answer would be no. The NFL can do no wrong. This past season NFL games were 72 of the 100 most-watched events. There have been times in recent years when that number was even higher. In 2023 it was 93. But 72 is still staggering. Right now, the league could go to a 20-game season, and people would watch. There are fantasy football championships to win, after all.
But will that hold?
I wrote an entire wrong book about the potential demise of the NFL that was wrong and did I mention wrong? So my predictions stink. We are in the middle of the kind of sports dominance perhaps this country hasn’t seen since baseball captivated the American consciousness. What the NFL is doing seems even more giant than that.
There’s also this human being thing to have everything be linear; a start and a stop. Maybe the NFL has no stop. Just dominance or near-dominance and it stays this way until warp drive is invented.
The NFL, however, keeps doing things that seem contradictory to long-term (or even near-term) success. They are, as the saying goes, high on their own supply. The market is absolutely flooded with the product and maybe people view the product as so good, they’ll keep watching. Yet we all know that in the last week or two of the season playoff teams sit starters, or players on losing teams check out. Some of the games at the end of the year are absolutely unwatchable. That would become a bigger problem with an 18th game.
For now, though, none of that seems to matter. The NFL just keeps churning along. It confounds even brilliant people like Cuban.
Will that popularity continue when the league goes to 18 games? Not if.
When.