Gregory Hunter

NFL players get exactly one week off during the season. Aaron Rodgers says there was a plan to make it two, and the owners traded it away for a 17th game and about $110 billion in TV money. He said it at the podium in Paris after Sunday's win. The idea that got floated was an international week, where all 32 teams play overseas on the same weekend and then everybody gets an extra bye. Owners went with a 17th game instead, "for the extra revenue and because they care so much about player safety," as Rodgers put it. Look at what that 17th game actually changed back in 2021. The season got a week longer, and the number of byes stayed at one. So players got one more game of getting hit with no extra rest, and the networks got a whole extra week of football to sell ads against. The TV deals signed that year came in close to double the old ones. Now the owners want to go further. Robert Kraft said in January that every team is going to 18 games and will play one game overseas every year. Roger Goodell keeps saying 16 international games is the goal, and he's said the league would think about selling those games as their own TV package to a streamer. An 18th game for 32 teams works out to 16 new matchups, which happens to be the exact number of overseas games Goodell keeps saying he wants. The overseas games Rodgers described would've come with a week of rest attached. In the version the owners are talking about, they come with an extra game, and the league gets to sell them to a streamer on top of it. And the guys doing the flying are the ones who pay for it. I broke down the flight math on Jalen Hurts last week. Doctors found a clot in his calf after the Eagles landed in London, cleared him to play, and he crossed the Atlantic twice in a few days. About a week later the clots had reached both of his lungs and his season was done. The league says the Eagles handled it appropriately, and the players union is asking for a full investigation the league told them it wasn't planning to do. Right now the labor deal caps international games at 10 a year. This season already has a record 9, including one in Melbourne, which is a 16-hour flight from LA. That deal runs out after 2030, and that's when the 18th game is expected to hit the table. Rodgers is 42, he'd just thrown his 540th touchdown pass to move past Peyton Manning for third all-time, and the thing he wanted to talk about at the podium was bye weeks.