The 17th game turned the NFL record book into a mess and the league just shrugged
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 Ringer's breakdown of the 17-game season's record-book impact](https://www.theringer.com/2021/03/31/nfl/nfl-17-game-season-single-season-records) shows exactly how apples-to-oranges the leaderboards have become. They should at least split the lists by era.