Opinion: NFL expanding season to 18 games? Not if Titans CB Logan Ryan can help it

Here’s the nice way to put it, the way Titans cornerback Logan Ryan put it Tuesday, at a press conference that was not scheduled for a labor discussion but turned into a really good one anyway: “Adding two games doesn’t seem like it helps the safety side of things.”

Here’s the blunt way to put it, the way someone with less class and tact than Ryan has might say it: Roger Goodell is a pull-string doll that spews duplicitous nonsense.

This is not news, of course. From Ray Rice to Josh Brown to “Deflategate” to the national anthem to concussions and CTE to (fill in your favorite Goodell eye-roller), he has been consistently subpar and overmatched as a leader. Booing professional sports commissioners is a national pastime within a pastime, but Goodell actually deserves it.

He has not blundered away the astounding profits of NFL owners – they split more than $8 billion in revenue in 2017, the most recent numbers available – and so he gets to keep this job at more than $30 million a year, while guys who helped build this league as players get nickels for massive health costs related to playing the game when safety didn’t even warrant lip service. Players who retired before 1993, when a collective-bargaining agreement doubled pensions, are especially neglected. And those are the guys who maybe got smelling salts when their “bells were rung.”

Goodell is good at floating things at the behest of his bosses, though. Maybe he was just placating the more soulless among them when he talked this week at an event in New York about reducing the preseason, which can be translated as such: “We’re in to cut preseason games and add regular-season games.”

The NFL has long wanted an 18-game schedule, and the players aren’t having it and shouldn’t have it. It’s preposterous at this point. The league’s handling of the concussion crisis has been disgusting. There’s no other way to put it. But it has had to settle up legally; it has had to get serious about safety; and it has made progress.

And that’s why so much as an anonymous whisper from a single owner about 18 games under the current conditions is a brazen reminder that safety matters only as long as it doesn’t mess with inventory. There is no comparison between the risks of preseason games – in which coaches are evaluating players and starters appear sparingly if at all – and regular-season games. This idea has to die.

And even if it’s just posturing in advance of negotiations, with the current CBA set to expire after the 2020 season, it’s enough already. I don’t hear NFL fans, who have been consuming 16-game NFL seasons since 1978, clamoring for more. It’s good where it is. Thursday night games are hard enough to watch at times. I don’t know about you, but my brain does not process vicious hits the way it did 20 years ago.

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Ideally, the regular season would stay the same and the preseason still would shrink. But of course, that won’t happen. Owners aren’t going down from 20 total games. No way. That is why Ryan – one of the Titans’ union reps – saw the preseason reduction talk for what it was.

He talked extensively about the stakes at hand for players and said: “You can’t let it be a business on one side; it has to be a business on both sides.”

He also joked a couple of times that coach Mike Vrabel would not be happy that his presser turned into a labor discussion. But I would hope Vrabel, a union rep when he played, would be impressed with Ryan’s perspective on things such as the responsibility of fighting for fellow players.

“There’s people that played this game before me that did what they had to do to get free agency in sports, right?” Ryan said. “Players weren’t allowed to go into free agency. I think Dick LeBeau had to play for the same team for 50 years. So we’re talking about (my) contract year, that’s a blessing, because guys like that had to do what they had to do for us to get free agency. So it’s my job and my right to be able to fight for some of these things for the younger guys. … to get health benefits for life and some of those things we need to take stances on in order to help the game grow from a player perspective.”

Ryan’s understanding and conviction are exactly what NFL players need more of as they prepare to head to the table again. Because in 2011 they got, to put it bluntly, destroyed.

Reach Joe Rexrode at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @joerexrode.

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