While teams have a handful of reasons for pushing for a change to the deadline date, Berry noted that the most obvious logic is because the NFL never adapted the date when switching to an 18-week schedule. The NFL moved the deadline to Week 8 back in 2012, but they kept their deadline the same when they added a week to their schedule in 2021.
“We want to retroactively correct the fact that the trade deadline never moved when the season expanded to 17 games,” Berry told reporters (via Mary Kay Cabot of Cleveland.com). “If, at some point in the future, the regular season expands to 18 games, we wanted to be proactive in terms of the positioning for the trade deadline.”
Further, Berry and rival teams believe that pushing the trade deadline back would only benefit the NFL as a whole. The expanded opportunity to improve a team via trade would assist with the “competitive integrity” of the league, according to the executive.
“We think as a league it makes sense to give teams the most flexibility as long as possible to have the best product down the stretch run of the playoffs,” Berry stated (h/t Spencer German of Browns Digest). “We wanted to make sure we maintained the competitive integrity of the season so you don’t get into player dumping late in the year.”
Berry also simply pointed to rival sports leagues as a reason for pushing back the NFL trade deadline. MLB’s trade deadline checks in around two thirds of the way through the season, while the NBA and NHL come after the half-way point of the campaign. The NFL deadline comes in at about 45% of the way through the season, and Berry noted to reporters that the proposed change would push that mark to about 55% of the way through the season.
There will definitely be more action if more teams believe their season is over, so the later the better in that respect. Don’t want it to the point of baseball sell-offs where the rich team pluck all the good players from the poor ones, but I’m not even sure that’s possible in the NFL.
There will also be additional tanking shenanigans as well with cries from fans of a team chasing seeding or a playoff birth being affected. Oh well. In general it will be a net positive for the league.
Yeah, me too. But baseball and football are structured so different financially and otherwise, I think it would be difficult to pull off.
For instance the ‘star for a bunch of young players’ trades you see all the time in baseball is very difficult to pull off without a farm system. Instead that trade compensation would likely be high draft picks, and in the NFL a bunch of high draft picks can actually let you become elite, whereas in baseball those young players - if they pan out - just get traded again and the whole cycle restarts itself. Maybe you get a one or two year spike, but then it’s back to business as usual.
I also think week 8 of a 17/18 week season is probably still early enough that it’s not too big of a problem.
I kind of wish they would add a 2nd bye week while they are adding things. Makes the Superbowl fall on most President’s Day weekends. It is a win-win for all involved. Unless you hate an extra week of football, then it is is not for you.
But then if they add another week to get to 18 along with a 2nd bye week (which I think is the ultimate outcome), it goes to the weekend beyond President’s Day. Almost March.
Which as a fan, I’m fine with. But as a player I wouldn’t love.
I bet the players would be on board if the bye weeks were mandated to be zero-football for all players. No meetings, no practice. Make it 100% rest and rejuvenation. I bet that in-season break recuperation would be highly-valued.
I bet they’ll be on board no matter what. What the league wants, the league gets. Though they will have to make some concessions and the ones you listed are certainly possible.
All teams do a rotational bye in weeks 5-7.
Week 13, all teams get a second bye. (The league would likely hate this)
Tuesday, 5:00 pm Eastern of Week 13 is the trade deadline.
Players have to report the Monday of Week 14.
Six week rush to the playoffs (assuming 18 game schedule over 20 weeks.
All teams play 5-7 weeks and get a bye. Play another 5-7 weeks and get 2nd bye. Play six final games to get into playoffs. Tie your IR to the second bye week so that rosters are ‘mostly’ set for the six week push.
There are obvious flaws in this starting with a week at the 2/3rds mark of the season where there are no games. Additionally, it would cause teams to pull players off of IR in the 2nd bye week to play in the last part of the season/playoffs. Might also want to have some expanded roster spots for the last 6 weeks like baseball does at end part of season.
Most of this is crazy and wont happen. If I gave it much thought, I probably wouldn’t want it to. But sometime you just throw cr@p out and this would be one of those times.
This, to me, is negligible. They can let Week 17 be the deadline for all I care. There are seldom more than a handful of deals, and they very seldom seem to work out to the hyped impact level for the team receiving the player. In season deals just don’t work out very often, and I think it’s hard to measure the impact of being with your team in camp and preseason and really getting those instinctive reps in as one of the guys on the team. That’s not something you can just transplant.
Nobody in the NFLPA would allow this, because of exactly what you said. It takes time. If they made it week 17 everyone would yell unfairness because “you can’t get acclimated in a week”.
I don’t think anyone is blind to that, moving the deadline might result in one or two more deals as it stands, simply because your bringing the prorated portion of the salary down by a couple weeks, lessening the cap space required to make a deal happen, and things become slightly more defined in some divisions.
