SCOTT on:

   Too Much of a Good Thing

There’s a big difference between what you want and what you think you want.

You think you want to date young girls. What you actually want is to date lively, energetic, attractive girls without a lot of baggage.

Young girls tend to fit that criteria more often than older women, but plenty of older women are lively and energetic and attractive and dating them is much more desirable than dating 20-somethings because older women have greater maturity, more stories to tell, aren’t into all the dating nonsense and share a common experience with you.

It’s an unsettling feeling to drop a “Star Wars” or “Motley Crue” reference on a date and get a blank stare back as if you just asked your gal what her thoughts were on the Eisenhower presidency or Lend-Lease.

The NFL is kicking around the idea of expanding its regular season by two games to 18 and most fans’ initial reaction to this is, “YES! More football!”

You think you want more regular season NFL games, but you don’t.

What you really want are more great, dramatic, ultra-competitive NFL games where urgency reins, the best athletes in the world risk injury to push for the playoffs, and you get to hang out with buddies instead of doing yard work.

Expanding the regular season would give you less of that, not more.

If the NFL regular season expanded, more of the top players would get hurt, bringing down the caliber of play. With a longer regular season, teams would clinch playoff spots earlier and sit their stars longer lowering the quality of play and significantly reducing the from-the-first-kickoff-of-game-one urgency that makes the NFL so much better than the NBA or MLB with their eternal and largely meaningless regular seasons. A longer regular season would encourage players with tweaks, and dings, and strains to sit out in order to come back fully healed later in the year instead of pushing themselves this week because the sands are so rapidly running through the hour glass of the 16-game season.

Expanding the NFL’s regular season would diminish everything about the current regular season that makes it great. It would take away the urgency, it would chew up the players, it would turn a sprint into a marathon. Sprints are exciting. Marathons are boring.

The NFL, like a great entertainer, leaves you wanting just a little bit more. One more game, one more week, one more song, one more joke.

The minute after the Super Bowl, you’re satisfied, but just a little depressed that there isn’t a game the following week and you’re already excited about the coming season. Likewise, when you see a great band, at the end of the show you’ve seen a great concert, but you wish there were one more song and you can’t wait until the next tour is announced.

High-end businesses like the NFL need to build some scarcity into their product to keep demand high. Why do you think NFL stadiums are so small compared to college stadiums? NFL teams understand that 75,000 fans in attendance with a 25,000 fan waiting list allows them to jack the price up and have people clamoring for seats because there is more scarcity than if the stadium seated 110,000 and you could get a ticket whenever you wanted.

NFL football is great. NFL Sundays are great. But when it comes to NFL football, more is not better, better is better and increasing the amount of NFL football would not result in a simultaneous improvement of the product or fan experience.

You think you want it, but you don’t.

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