The NFL Wants Full Stadiums Next Fall. Will It Happen? – The Wall Street Journal

“It just strikes me as odd,” said Justice Clarence Thomas.

The NCAA’s case is, effectively, doomsday: This is the way college sports work, and it’s our product, and if you change the way things have always been, it’s no longer the product, and we are going to be toast. While that may be an explanation of the NCAA’s “amateurism” model, it’s not really a convincing antitrust defense, a distinction the justices leapt on:

“It doesn’t move me all that much that there is a history to this, if what is going on now is that competitors—as to labor—are combining to fix prices,” said Justice Elena Kagan.

“Antitrust laws should not be a cover for exploitation of the student athletes,” said Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

The whole thing felt a little bit like watching the NCAA march into court and say, Hey, look at this duck, and the Supreme Court justices saying, Wait, that’s not a duck—that’s very clearly a squirrel and the NCAA’s defense being, basically: Well, we really need it to be a duck. 

As others have noted, pointed questions from justices don’t necessarily indicate the direction of a ruling. The case here is limited, pertaining to education-related benefits, and whether the NCAA is entitled to set stringent caps on them without violating antitrust laws. It’s unclear if the court would want to issue a sweeping challenge to the structure of the NCAA—Justice Stephen Breyer signaled his concern, saying he worried about “judges getting into the business of deciding how amateur sports should be run.” 

Still, Wednesday felt like a long day coming. 

OK, so the couple thoughts about the NFL and 17 games and full stadiums:

1. It’s a testament to the NFL’s modern popularity that it’s the only sports league in the U.S. that could possibly get away with expanding its regular season right now. Imagine the public groaning if baseball came out and said: Hey, check it out, everyone, we also want to increase our regular-season schedule by 6%, so we’re going to go from 162 to 172 games. People would act like they were getting served an extra helping of math homework and asparagus mash! Baseball is under pressure to chop down its season, play speedier games, lock batters in the box and ban managers from loitering on the pitcher’s mound. Basketball and hockey, too—no one’s asking for more regular-season action there, either. The fact that football can lard itself, and the public reaction is more or less a shrug—eh, what am I doing on Sundays, anyway—speaks to its unique place in the cultural diet. If the NFL came out and said the 17th games would all be played on Friday mornings at 4 a.m. ET, in a stadium under the sea, the reply would likely be: Yeah, fine, I guess that makes sense. 

2. The NFL is getting to 17 by eliminating a preseason contest, and that’s good, because mostly everyone despises preseason games, but as the Journal’s Andrew Beaton noted earlier this week, the additional regular season game doesn’t exactly square with the scrutiny football’s been getting over health and safety. The NFL maintains that preseason football, played early in the year, with less experienced players, is a bigger magnet for injury than regular-season games, but presumably, these 17th games are going to be intensely-contested affairs. This is more football, and given the physical, collision-based nature of the game, and the growing science around head injuries, and it’s hard to argue that more football is better from a physical standpoint. Money is driving this, and players are on board—the 17th game was agreed to with the players association—but there’s a difference between agreeing to something in the abstract, and what it will be like to put on the helmet for one more game. Whether this manifests into a player issue will be fascinating to see. 

3. Let me be the latest person to point out that the end of the 16-game regular season means the sad, anticlimactic end of the 8-8 season, which was a sad, anticlimactic event itself, a mark of running-in-place mediocrity that nearly every football fan experiences at one point. Are we good? Are we bad? Or are we just…8-8? I suppose it’s possible that you’ll now get a team that finishes 8-8-1, or 7-7-3, but that’s just weird.

4. The NFL says it is planning on having its stadiums at full capacity for the 2021 season. It may sound like stubborn magical thinking from a powerful sport, but I believe this sort of goal-setting is fine. The final call isn’t going be the NFL’s anyway—that will be up to state and local health officials, as the San Francisco 49ers learned last season—and as the vaccination rollout continues, there should be upbeat incentives for the public to do its part to get the pandemic under control and accelerate a return to normal. For some people, the return to normal will be a much-delayed hug with a parent. For others, it may be the opportunity to stand shirtless in the upper deck with three other shirtless individuals, collectively spelling J-E-T-S, or a tipsy E-S-T-J, on a frigid December Sunday. Whatever gets people motivated, I support. Here’s hoping we get there.

Write to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com