Why does the NFL play way less games than other sports?
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It’s an incredibly physical game, with higher probabilities for injuries than most other organized sporting events. This has been negotiated through collective bargaining between the league and the players union.
Football is a violent sport. It takes days to recover after a game. More games and more frequently played games would result in more injuries and more severe injuries.
The NFL is a business, but it also has to protect its assets — the players.
Let’s look at the nature of the sport. Big guys, the bigger the better, get a running head start and smash into each other. More often than not, they get hit by more than one guy. Now, take the size differentials between the guys running into each other. In my playing days, high school and community college, I was 5′ 8″ and 195# and played linebacker. I was supposed to tackle running backs that were 6′ 2′ and 220#. How about a wide receiver that was 6′ 4″, 180# getting hit by a defensive back that was 6′ 1″ but 210#? That 30# can make a big difference.
I wrestled at the 167# weight class. Every guy I ever wrestled weighed 167# or maybe a little less. It was an even match up. On the mat, height didn’t make a difference. Well it did a little. Since I was shorter than most of my opponents, I had a lower center of gravity so they had a little harder time taking me down. There are very strict rules as to the holds and how hard you can take down your opponent. Body slams, like in that phony WWE, are absolutely forbidden.
In baseball, size makes absolutely no difference. Our “*shortstop*” was 6′ 0″! I played catcher. Our 3rd baseman was 5′ 6″. Our left fielder was 6′ 6″. In baseball it’s speed, for baserunning, and technique, for batting. Most contact of opposing player in accidental, except for runners coming home and having played linebacker, they usually got the worst of the encounter. Now there are rules against severe contact when the runner is coming home! Sissy la-las!?!
So, the reason football has way fewer games is because of the injuries involved during the regular course of the game. A tight end is doing a crossing pass pattern and I get a free shot at him when he catches the ball. A 6′ 0″, 200# running back runs a swing pattern to catch a flare pass, he catches the ball and gets leveled by a 6′ 4″, 220# cornerback. He gets knocked goofy, NOT by any malintent by the cornerback, it’s just the nature of the game.
The answer to that question is the same reason so many more NFL players get addicted to painkillers than athletes from other sports.
The violence from all the full speed hitting from a full NFL game leaves many players in so much pain that they have trouble even walking the next day. If players didn’t have an average of a week between games, you would not have enough healthy players to play in many of those games.
How many fights do MMA athletes have in a year?
The physical toll of an NFL game is much closer to that of an MMA match than it is to basically every other sport.
Muhammad Ali said he quit football and went into boxing because he didn’t like getting hit in football. Think about that…
[Football is a physically damaging sport that is doing what it can to remain legal while avoiding the full consequences of the Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy it engenders in its players.](https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2778)
Every single play is a car accident worth of force. When you get hit, it hurts, regardless of how tough or strong you are.
Conceivably a quarterback could play more games. Kickers too and maybe receivers. The offensive and defensive lines however would have to be on a rotation like pitchers in baseball.
I once asked a college athlete a similar question: “Why do football players wear so much protective equipment, while soccer and basketball players seem perfectly fine in T-short and shorts?”
He explained that football is unique, in that it a game of irregular bursts of intense violence, rather than extended continuous activity.
Soccer and basketball players are constantly on the move and continuously “warmed up,” so they wear very little protective equipment and yet have fewer and less intense injuries.
Football players, on the other hand, suit up like Knights of the Round Table and still sustain some of the most severe and frightening injuries.
80 game seasons would end up killing every player in the NFL. The Super Bowl would be played by the janitors that still have a pulse after week 30.
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