The Wild-Card Blowouts Were a Bore, but the NFL Schedule Always Wins – The Ringer

One of the NFL’s greatest features (along with high scoring, the college football pipeline, and Andy Reid food metaphors) is scarcity. Teams play only 17 games a season, so every game is a big deal. The league owns a day of the week in part because, most days, there is no football. But scarcity drives up the price of any commodity and the league will always have an incentive to try to sell more games, as long as they don’t become so abundant that it curbs fan appetite. For example, the league just held its first three-day wild-card weekend. It’s been two years since the NFL altered its playoff format to introduce an additional team in each conference to the postseason. These changes eliminated the first-round bye traditionally enjoyed by the no. 2 seed and added two more games to the first round. This year, instead of splitting the games between Saturday and Sunday, the NFL stretched the schedule to put the final game of the slate, Rams-Cardinals, on Monday, when fans were treated to a 34-11 Rams blowout win. It was a fittingly lopsided end to a weekend of games that were, um, not very good or very competitive.…
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