With how much money there is to be made these days in the National Football League, one of the single biggest points of contention with every new collective bargaining agreement is about how many games there are to be played in an NFL season.
The total has changed over the years, but there are good reasons why NFL owners fight for more games to be played (and there are good reasons why the NFL Player’s Association pushes back). For the owners, the answer is plain and simple: there’s millions of dollars to be made with each game played in a given year.
This year, each NFL franchise will play 17 games during the regular season and as many as 4 more games in the postseason, if a team were to make a deep playoff run from the Wild Card round that opens the postseason to the Super Bowl. That’s a possibility of 21 games from beginning to end. Of course, this doesn’t include the 3 preseason games laid out in August to help get players into shape (and to help coaches make roster decisions at key positions of competition).
Each team plays 17 games during the regular season these days, but each season is actually 18 weeks in total. Each team is also given a week off—referred to as a bye or bye week—somewhere around the season’s midsection.
The move to a 17-game regular season started only two seasons ago after 48 seasons of 16 games in the regular season. The NFL was originally organized around a 14-game schedule for the regular season from its inception through ’78 when the league added two games. It’s quite possible the league will push for an 18th game at some point, but that will be something to debate in the next collective bargaining agreement, which is up in 2030.