NFL season expands to 17 games, adding Washington to Bills schedule

[zanthrax54 9,197]

Jasen Vinlove-USA TODAY Sports

In a virtual meeting Tuesday, NFL owners approved the motion we knew was coming once the new Collective Bargaining Agreement was confirmed; the NFL is moving to a 17-game regular season.

More to come...

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[zanthrax54 9,197]

JAMIE GERMANO/ROCHESTER DEMOCRAT AND CHRONICLE, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle via Imagn Content Services, LLC

The end of the 16-game era.

It’s the end of an era for the National Football League, as franchise owners officially approved the addition of a seventeenth game to the annual season on Tuesday. It’s the first schedule expansion since the league expanded to a 16-game season in 1978. In a corresponding move, the preseason schedule dropped a game, and will now only feature three games.

The 17th game features a rotation of teams from opposing conferences, matching first-place to first-place, last-place to last-place, and so on. In 2021, that means the AFC East and the NFC East will be matched together, pitting the Buffalo Bills against the Washington Football Team. It’s a reunion match for Sean McDermott and Ron Rivera; the last time these two coaches met head-to-head in the regular season, Buffalo lost 9-3 to the Carolina Panthers. Rivera’s team finished 7-9 in 2020, but that record still led the woeful NFC East.

Another quirk of the 17th-game rotation will be where the game is played. Though the NFL is probably envisioning a future slate of international neutral sites from Mexico to England or Germany or China, this game will follow a simpler formula in the short term. In 2021, the AFC teams (that is, the Bills) will host the game, and the NFC will have the home teams in 2022.

The Bills just finished a record-breaking offensive season in 2020, but a seventeenth game will create more opportunities for Josh Allen and Stefon Diggs to break their own records in the future. One team record that won’t be broken any time soon, though is the single-season rushing record. O.J. Simpson ran for 2,003 yards in fourteen games in the 1973 season, and none of the Bills ever came close to matching him in the 16-game era.

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[Topas 5,525]

Fitz again ...

[seandelevan 17,587]

This whole thing is dumb

[Psycho79 4,964]

2 hours ago, seandelevan said:

This whole thing is dumb

Indeed. The NFL was great before Goodell took over and started tinkering with EVERYTHING.

[seandelevan 17,587]

59 minutes ago, Psycho79 said:

Indeed. The NFL was great before Goodell took over and started tinkering with EVERYTHING.

He still despises the Bills. For years he jerked off thinking about moving the Bills to Toronto, then LA, then London. Fuck him.

[bcw 24,566]

We lucked out.

As the team that won our division we certainly could have gotten a tougher match up.