The Slippery Slope of the 18-Game Season: Why Saints Fans Should Fear the NFL's Endless Expansion

Listen, I am going to tell you something that nobody in the mainstream media wants to admit because they are too busy high-fiving Roger Goodell at their cocktail parties. The expansion of the NFL regular season from 16 games to 18 games is not about competitive integrity or fairness or any of that nonsense they feed you. It is about money, pure and simple, and Saints fans should be absolutely terrified about what this means for a franchise that has already been chewed up and spit out by the injury gods more times than any organization deserves.

Joe Flacco said something recently that actually cut through all the noise and corporate doublespeak. He understands what nobody wants to talk about in the gleaming skyscrapers of Manhattan where the league office sits. Once you go to 18 games, once you crack that door open and let the financial incentive start flowing like cheap beer at the Superdome, where does it stop? Are we really supposed to believe that Roger Goodell and the owners are going to look at the revenue from 18 games and say "that is plenty, we have enough money now, let us stop here." Of course not. This is the beginning of a slippery slope that will eventually have us watching 20 games, then 22 games, then who knows what. The NFL will keep squeezing and squeezing until every ounce of flesh has been extracted from the players and the competitive integrity of the game has been completely destroyed.

But here is what bothers me even more than the philosophical argument about greed and excess. What really grinds my gears is what this means specifically for a Saints organization that has been absolutely decimated by injuries year after year after year. New Orleans has spent the better part of a decade trying to compete in the worst division in football with a franchise quarterback in his twilight years, and we have had our playoff hopes crushed more often by the injury report than by actual football. When you have to navigate the NFC South with Atlanta, Carolina, and Tampa Bay, the last thing you need is the league making your players play two extra games a year, two extra chances for your key contributors to end up on the injured reserve list.

Think about what the Saints have gone through. Drew Brees spent his entire career fighting off injuries that could have derailed his legacy. Michael Thomas, who was supposed to be a generational talent at receiver, has spent more time in the trainer's room than on the field. The secondary has been a revolving door of hurt bodies and comebacks. The defensive line, which was supposed to be a strength, has been plagued by ankle problems and nagging injuries. Now Dennis Allen is trying to rebuild this roster with a younger quarterback, and the front office is trying to make intelligent decisions about who to draft and how to construct a competitive roster.

The last thing you need in that scenario is the league forcing you to play 18 games instead of 16. Do the math on this. You go from 16 games to 18 games, that is a 12.5 percent increase in the number of games played. A 12.5 percent increase in the total workload on human bodies that are already being pushed to the absolute limit. For a Saints team that is trying to contend in the short term while also building for the future, that is a catastrophic change. You cannot build sustainably when the league is demanding that you run your players into the ground with two extra games that did not exist before.

Flacco gets it because he has been around long enough to understand how the NFL operates. The league does not care about player health beyond the point where it affects short-term revenue. If they cared about player health, they would never have pushed for 18 games in the first place. They would have looked at the injury data and said "these athletes are already facing unprecedented physical demands." Instead, they looked at their spreadsheets and saw additional game revenue and that was all the justification they needed. For Saints fans, this is a particularly bitter pill to swallow because our team has been a case study in how injuries can destroy a franchise.

Look at what the Saints have accomplished despite the injuries. They have won division titles with rosters held together with duct tape and prayer. They have made playoff runs with backup players who had no business being in the uniform. They have competed in a division with better-funded, better-staffed franchises because Dennis Allen and Mickey Loomis have been incredibly sharp with personnel decisions and draft capital. Now imagine trying to do that same level of organizational excellence with your players getting two extra games of punishment every single year. It becomes exponentially harder. Your injury prevention department, which is already working overtime in New Orleans, gets overwhelmed. Your player development suffers because guys are not getting proper recovery time. Your draft strategy has to shift because you need more depth, which means fewer premium picks at positions of greater need.

The thing that really gets me fired up is that the players agreed to this. The players' union agreed to 18 games because they negotiated a bigger piece of the financial pie. They got more money, the owners got more revenue, and the fans got screwed because the product on the field deteriorates when you force human beings to play 12.5 percent more football. The Saints organization got screwed because they are now operating under a different set of constraints than they were before. The draft position matters differently. The cap implications are different. The injury projections are different. Everything that was true about roster construction and competitive dynamics in 2023 is now obsolete.

And here is the part that should really make Saints fans angry. Once this becomes the new normal, once 18 games is the baseline, the owners are going to come back and ask for 20. Flacco is absolutely right about this. The financial model works the same way it did when they went from 14 to 16 games. The owners will show up to the next negotiation and say "we are all making more money with 18 games, imagine what we could do with 20." The players will negotiate and eventually agree because they are going to get paid more again. And the cycle continues until you have a 22-game season where the NFL is basically running a second season in January and February that determines who gets into the playoffs.

At that point, competitive integrity goes out the window entirely. Your draft class in April is competing against teams that have already had four extra months of injury recovery. Your organizational planning becomes a nightmare because you do not know who is going to be healthy by the time the second season starts in mid-January. For a franchise like the Saints that relies on smart decision-making and efficient resource allocation to compete against better-funded franchises, this is a disaster.

I am going to give you my verdict clearly. The expansion to 18 games is a mistake that will have particular negative ramifications for the Saints franchise. It is a short-sighted decision by an ownership class that is addicted to revenue growth, a decision that players' union representatives agreed to because they wanted immediate financial gain without thinking about the long-term consequences. For Saints fans, this is not theoretical. This is going to directly impact whether Dennis Allen and Mickey Loomis can build a competitive roster over the next five years. It is going to impact draft strategy and roster construction and everything about how the organization operates. Joe Flacco sees the long-term trajectory clearly. The Saints organization needs to start thinking about how to adapt to this new reality before the league goes even further and completely destroys what made football special.