Packers President & CEO Mark Murphy yesterday spoke out "against adding to the 16-game regular-season format," according to Rob Demovsky of the GREEN BAY PRESS-GAZETTE. If Murphy is "against expanding the regular season, it’s a safe bet he’s echoing the sentiments of other team owners and league officials." Murphy: "With the focus on player safety, it would be really hard to support that." Demovsky writes the change of team owners' stance on an expanded regular season "could be a by-product of the litigation by more than 2,000 former players who claim the league concealed the risk associated with concussions." Murphy also "came out in favor of cutting back from four preseason games to two, although that would create some potential problems." He said, "The challenge would be you’d lose revenue, and could you develop your younger players?" (GREEN BAY PRESS-GAZETTE, 7/25). Murphy said, "Unfortunately, the reality is as a league we're successful, profitable and you've got a lot of people looking at it saying, `Maybe there's a chance to get some money or to change things'" (AP, 7/24).
TAKING A STAND: CBSSPORTS.com's Mike Freeman noted, "This was the first time anyone in a current ownership position publicly came out against the 18-game season." Publicly, owners have been "unified about the 18-game season as much as they have about almost anything." Murphy is not "technically an owner since the Packers are a publicly owned franchise but he has all the responsibilities of one." NFL owners "consider Murphy to be one of them." Freeman wrote, "Murphy's words are big and they coincide with what I've heard from a variety of NFL sources during the past few weeks and months." The owners "are backing off their 18-game beachhead. Maybe not publicly. Maybe not loudly. But the support for an 18-game season is definitely eroding." It is "possible Murphy is the lone wolf among the ownership pack," but it makes "no sense he would be the only one thinking this way, particularly since he was a strong advocate for the 18-game season and also one of the owner hawks during the lockout." The concussion lawsuits "continues to scare the hell out of the owners." What once "seemed fairly certain to happen" now seems "much less so" (CBSSPORTS.com, 7/24). ESPN.com's Kevin Seifert wrote, "Mark Murphy doesn't strike me as a rogue NFL executive. So when he expresses an opinion on league matters, I'm inclined to believe it could reflect current thinking." The NFL has "boxed itself into a corner on the issue." The league's emphasis on "player safety makes it awfully difficult, if not impossible, to justify a longer season and thus more opportunities for players to be injured and/or worn down." Seifert: "I have to believe this is a dead or near-dead issue" (ESPN.com, 7/24).
TEAMING UP: In Buffalo, Jerry Zremski noted U.S. Rep. Brian Higgins (D-New York) is teaming with two U.S. senators to try to persuade the NFL "to ease its television blackout policy yet again." Just three weeks after the league "announced its new policy -- and 10 days after the Buffalo Bills opted out of it, saying it would cost the team too much to air games that are not sold out -- Higgins and his colleagues offered the league two other alternatives in a letter released Monday." In a letter to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, the lawmakers "suggested that the league drop part of the eased blackout policy." If the league "does not want to drop that part of the policy, the lawmakers suggested that for two games per year, teams be allowed to waive the blackout once 85 percent of their nonpremium tickets are sold, without having to turn over that extra ticket revenue." Higgins: "We're saying they need to take a more serious look at how to make this thing work" (BUFFALO NEWS, 7/24).
