The NFL is hastening toward an 18-game regular season as soon as possible, and players like DeShon Elliott know themselves. The NFLPA is too disparate to offer a united front, so the league gets its way on the big-ticket items. He might not play long enough to see an 18-game season, but he knows it’s coming. Unfortunately.
In the locker room with fellow Pittsburgh Steelers safety Damontae Kazee, Elliott interjected when the 18-game season subject arose. Kazee took a fatalistic approach and offered that he wouldn’t complain. “I would. They don’t pay us enough”, Elliott said, via ESPN.
The article is filled with Steelers players (among others) sharing their thoughts about the prospects of an 18-game season. Most of them are negative, like Elliott’s, virtually none positive. “You just got to adjust to everything and go on from there”, Kazee offered, for example. That is not exactly a ringing endorsement, is it?
“Why do we keep adding games?”, Minkah Fitzpatrick asked, for example. The article notes that both he and Elliott confirmed they were among 19 percent of players who were “completely against” the NFL’s proposed 18-game schedule. “The dudes that play a hundred percent of the snaps in the regular season are probably barely playing in the [removed] preseason game, so it doesn’t really do too much”.
Elliott, too, lambasted the greediness of the NFL at the expense of players’ bodies. “They’re not here running around putting their bodies on the line. They don’t care. All they care about is making money”, he said.
Steelers G James Daniels echoed the thoughts of Fitzpatrick and Elliott. “You’re talking about player safety, but how do you have player safety when you add a game?”, he asked. Because of course it’s not about player safety when the NFL is making the players do more of the thing that you’re trying to make safer.
The NFL tries to reason, of course, that it’s the same number of football hours. The league removes one week of the preseason and adds one regular-season game, as though the two are equivalent. Guys like Fitzpatrick, Daniels, and Elliott won’t be playing in that missing preseason game anyway. And those who are won’t be playing at regular-season speeds.
The NFL has been actively pushing for an 18-game season for more than a decade. It finally got a 17th game in 2021, under which guise players have already played three years. The league also added two additional playoff games for that good, good primetime money.
Players, of course, profit from playing more regular-season games. “Money moves it forward”, as Miles Killebrew sad. They receive an extra game check equivalent to the percentage increase they play, since they are doing more. But that varies wildly based on salaries. DeShon Elliott knows that an 18-game season is inevitable, and if he has to, he’ll play it. But it’s another game a year to put your body through. Players are thinking about things like that more and more, especially as they earn more. What price do you put on your physical well-being, and when do you have enough?
