One of the biggest power brokers in the NFL, besides Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, is New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft. On Tuesday, he sat down with 98.5 The Sports Hub in Boston to talk about the future of the league. In the interview, he claimed that the league is expecting to move to an 18-game regular season with two bye weeks, a game for every team overseas each year and the elimination of one preseason game.
“I want to tell you guys that we’re going to push like the dickens now to make international more important with us. Every team will go to 18 and 2, you know, and eliminate one of the preseason games. Every team, every year will play one game overseas. And part of the reason is so we can continue to grow the gap and keep our labor happy because we’re short of getting near the top here with the coverage. What, 93 of the top 100 programs on television are NFL games? Think about that. It’s really amazing. And you look at the size of our crowds versus the other sports and you know we had that Amazon game on Thursday a couple of weeks ago. 31 million people stream. So, as long as we can keep growing revenue, we can continue to keep long-term labor peace.”
What is unclear here is whether the shortening of the preseason by a week would also mean shortening training camp, held during the preseason, too. The NFL’s owners have always been willing to sacrifice practice time for other concessions in collective bargaining agreements, a general trend since the 2011 CBA. Two-a-day practices are outlawed, there are limited opportunities for contact practices throughout the year (only 3 contact practices are allowed over the final 6 weeks of the regular season, 11 total are allowed in the first 11 weeks of the year) and the offseason program is slimmed up compared to the pre-2011 schedule.
At the moment, the NFL has broadcast contracts that technically run through the 2033 season, but the league has an opt-out clause that they can use for the final year of those agreements. That clause can be triggered as soon as 2029, which the NFL is expected to use — as the rights to broadcast sports games have only increased since they initially signed these deals in 2021.
The league will attempt to get a new set of broadcast deals done before the upcoming collective bargaining agreement runs out in March of 2031. Considering all of the recent drama around the NFLPA and some owners questioning the “integrity” of the NFL’s current cap system, with the huge differences in cash spend between teams that are or are not manipulating the salary cap, you should expect a ton of talk about what the future of the league will look like this offseason. It’s negotiating time for the NFL, on both the player front and the broadcast rights front.
