Two years ago, it all seemed so simple. Adding an 18th regular season game checked a number of boxes on the NFL's list of long-term priorities: international expansion, the reduction of its awful preseason, turning Super Bowl Sunday into a national holiday, and making as much money as possible.
"I'd rather replace a preseason game with a regular season game any day. If we got to 18 and two (preseason games), that's not an unreasonable thing," NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said. "That ends up on President's Day weekend, which is a 3-day weekend. (The game) is Sunday night, and then you have Monday off."
However, speaking at his annual State of the League press conference on Monday, Goodell turned heads around the league in how non-committal he was on an 18th game.
“We have not had any formal discussions about it and, frankly, very little, if any, informal conversations,” Goodell said. “I’ve heard people talk about it. It is not a given that we’ll do that. It is not something that we assume will happen. It is something we want to talk about with union leadership.”
Why wouldn't the NFL push for an 18th game? Adding an 18th game would require consent from the Players' Union, and both sides would have to compromise to get it done. The owners have typically granted the union's requests for less practice time in exchange for more money, to the point where players are now practicing as little as possible to put out a compelling product. Long story short, to approve an 18th game, the union would ask for more money. Players currently receive around 48 percent of football-related revenue. (The NFL salary cap has grown from roughly $200 million to more than $300 million in four years.)
The current collective bargaining agreement expires after the 2030 season.
How does this affect college football? Quite a bit.
Plans to move the national championship game forward are complicated by the fact the NFL is taking up more January real estate than it used to.
A 17-game season combined with a 14-team playoff bracket meant the NFL played Wild Card games on the second Monday in January over the past two seasons. The BCS and CFP title game was played on that date from the 2006 season through 2023, when the CFP expanded from four teams to 12. That's in part why the championship game for the 2026 college football season won't be played until Jan. 25, 2027.
An 18-game regular season would end on Jan. 17, 2027 -- and that's assuming the NFL still starts the week after Labor Day and does not add a second bye week. The playoffs would begin the following week, which would've allowed the CFP to play its championship game on Monday, Jan. 18 as opposed to the 25th, as it will be next season.
Perhaps the Goodell's newfound reluctance to expand the NFL regular season pushes college football leaders to do what they should've done all along: push the Playoff forward one week, to begin the second weekend of December instead of the third.
For the 2026-27 season, moving the beginning of the CFP forward one week actually shaves two weeks off the end of the season.
2026-27 CFP schedule, current
-- Dec. 4-5: Conference championship games
-- Dec. 6: Selection Sunday
-- Dec. 18-19: First round, campus sites
-- Dec. 30-Jan. 1: Quarterfinals, neutral sites
-- Jan. 7-8: Semifinals, neutral sites
-- Jan. 25(!!!): Championship game
2026-27 CFP schedule, Barnett Plan
-- Dec. 4-5: Conference championship games
-- Dec. 6: Selection Sunday
-- Dec. 11-12: First round, campus sites
-- Dec. 18-19: Quarterfinals, campus sites
-- Jan. 1: Semifinals, neutral sites
-- Jan. 11: Championship game
Regardless of what the NFL does or does not do, this is the schedule the CFP should be working toward.