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Next year's NFL playoffs may include 7 teams per conference
The NFL is reportedly getting ready to make some big changes.
Under a new collective bargaining agreement that NFL owners are pushing for, each team would reportedly add another game to its annual schedule to make a 17-game regular season. And at the end of the season, seven teams would make the playoffs from each conference, up from the usual six that make it right now, ESPN's Adam Schefter reports.
NFL owners and players have been meeting this week to discuss changes that, if agreed upon, would take effect in the next couple years. To start, a seventh team from each conference would make the playoffs, meaning only one team from each conference would get a first-round bye. "That's been agreed to for a long time," one source familiar with the CBS talks told ESPN regarding the playoff change. If the new CBA is ratified in time, that change would go into effect for the upcoming 2020-21 season.
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Still reportedly being negotiated is the 17-game regular season that owners are proposing, while one game would be subtracted from the preseason, leaving each team with three warmup games, Schefter reports. That change reportedly wouldn't take effect until at least the 2021-22 season.
A vote on the CBA isn't expected during Thursday's continuation of the meeting, but it could happen at next week's NFL combine, CBS Sports reports. The 12-team playoff format has been around for 30 years. If there were 14 teams around this year, the eventual champion Kansas City Chiefs would've played the Pittsburgh Steelers in the opening round, while the Los Angeles Rams would've faced the Green Bay Packers.
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Kathryn is a graduate of Syracuse University, with degrees in magazine journalism and information technology, along with hours to earn another degree after working at SU's independent paper The Daily Orange. She's currently recovering from a horse addiction while living in New York City, and likes to share her extremely dry sense of humor on Twitter.
