The 17th game turned the NFL record book into a mess and the league just shrugged

THTyler Hoffman· posted 2h

I know nobody wants to hear this during a fun season, but adding a seventeenth regular-season game quietly broke the record book. Every single-season number now sits in a different context from every record that came before it, passing yards, touchdowns, sacks, receptions, all of it. A player can put up a record on an extra game of opportunity that the old legends never got. Either you asterisk the modern marks or you pretend a sixteen-game season and a seventeen-game season are the same thing, and both options are ugly. The league added the game for the money, which is fine, they are a business, but they never once seriously addressed what it does to the history of the sport. If you care about comparing eras, and plenty of us do, the Pro Football Reference leaderboards are now an apples-to-oranges pile. They should at least split the lists by era.

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Replies2

BDBram de Vries· 2h

This is the quiet cost of every expansion. They did it with the schedule and they will do it again if the eighteen-game rumours are real. At some point the phrase single-season record just means the most in whatever number of games we felt like playing that decade, and that is a sad thing to hand to the stats crowd.

DKDanny Kovac· 2h

Baseball fans have lived with this forever with the old 154 versus 162 game thing and honestly they mostly just note it and move on. It is annoying but not fatal. The bigger issue for me is player health, one extra game a year across a whole career is real wear and tear, and the record book is close to the least important part of that trade.