The time has come. The NFL has officially announced that it will be moving to a 17-game, 18-week season in 2021, which is great news for fans, frustrating news for players and something in between for those of us who need to update all of our data for a 17-game campaign. We're going to need to get used to teams that finish 3-14, 6-11 and 12-5. Those of you who cherish Week 4 of the preseason will be sorely disappointed, but the future is here.
What happens next? How will football in 2021 and beyond look different from what we've seen in the 16-game era? I'm here to help or -- at the very least -- wildly speculate. I've given the 17-game season some thought and have identified three ways the NFL is about to change.
Records will be broken
This one seems straightforward: More games means more records will fall. The players who suited up in the 14-game era -- which ended in 1978 -- have mostly been erased from the top of the NFL's season-long record books. Only two major single-season records from 14-game seasons are still on the books, and they both include interceptions:
George Blanda threw 42 picks in the AFL in 1962 (for a Houston Oilers team that went 11-3).
Dick "Night Train" Lane intercepted 14 passes as a rookie for the 1952 Rams.
The move from 16 to 17 isn't as significant as the one from 14 to 16, but every single-season record is going to be under more threat than it was before. The difference might be dramatic, and we could see some of the most significant ones fall as early as the 2021 season. Let's take a look at one example by using a simulation to evaluate a quarterback who is going to hold all kinds of records by the time he's done playing:
What are the chances Patrick Mahomes will set the passing yardage record?
Mahomes already has a 5,000-50 season under his belt, but even during his breakout campaign in 2018, the Chiefs star came up 380 yards short of Peyton Manning's single-season passing record. Manning threw for 5,477 yards in 16 games for the 2013 Broncos, topping Drew Brees' 2011 season by a lone yard. No other quarterback has come within 240 yards of Manning's legendary campaign, but Mahomes seems more likely to break that record than any other player.
To estimate Mahomes' chances of setting the record, I built a quick Monte Carlo simulation to run through 1,000 possible Mahomes seasons. For each week of each individual season, the simulation selected a random game from the 49 regular-season weeks he has been through as the Chiefs starter, going back to Week 17 of the 2017 season. Those 49 possibilities include three games in which he was inactive and a fourth in which he left the game with an injury, which we'll use as a simple baseline for his chances of missing a game injured.
Naturally, with the possibility of a 17th game, Mahomes' numbers are staggering. His average performance goes from 4,647 passing yards per season in a 16-game run to 4,938 passing yards per campaign with the 17th game attached. Even after accounting for the possibility of injury, his average season in these simulations comes close to what he did during his MVP campaign in 2018.
As for his chances of topping 5,477 yards? Chiefs fans might want to get excited. In a 16-game season, his chances of topping that total in a given season were 2.3%. With the extra 17th game -- if his 2021 performance looks anything like his past play -- his chances of setting the passing yards record increase to 10.4% in our Monte Carlo simulation over a 17-game season.
Put another way, we can use those percentages to estimate his chances of topping the record over the next few years. In a 16-game season, given his past performance, Mahomes would have expected to have at least one season out of five breaking that Manning passing total just under 11% of the time. Expand it out to 10 years and he would have a record-setting season at least once 20.8% of the time.
Moving it to 17 games, Mahomes is closer to a 50-50 shot to top Manning's mark. Given five seasons under the new schedule, he would have at least one season with that sort of yardage total 42.3% of the time. Give him 10 tries and his chances increase to two-thirds at 66.7%. Of course, given how everyone else's chances are going to improve, Mahomes could very well top Manning's mark and find that the record has already jumped even higher.
As for a 6,000-passing-yard season, well, that might take 18 games. Mahomes had a 9.4% chance of producing a 5,500-yard season in any given 17-game campaign by this simulation, but he topped the 6,000 mark just four times in 1,000 tries. The peak was Simulation No. 301, when he threw for 6,263 yards, including 15 games with 300-plus yards and five 400-plus yard performances.
That might be an outlier season, but with 17 games to work with, Mahomes is going to be a perennial threat to set passing records. The only thing that might be able to stop him is the need to get some rest ...
Players will need to be rested
The workload for just about every significant player in the NFL is going to go up. There was no preseason in 2020, and when we last had exhibition games in 2019, teams were getting more aggressive about sitting their starters for the entire month of August. The Packers, just to pick a random team, gave their first-team offense two series in preseason Week 2 while sitting Aaron Rodgers for the entire preseason. The Seahawks had Russell Wilson & Co. in for two possessions in the second week and three the next week.
Those guys are going to be in line to play more snaps with a regular-season game in Week 18 as opposed to the mild, football-like substance that is an exhibition game. Instead of those snaps coming in the middle of August with relatively fresh bodies, they'll come instead at the end of December after 16 games of meaningful football. In 2009, I found that the league misled owners in reporting the injury rates of players, suggesting that injuries tapered off as the season goes along. Naturally, as you might expect, injuries continue at a steady rate throughout the year.
Smart teams are going to need to change the way they think about using their players with the hopes of keeping them fresh as the season goes along. I'm not sure the days of a player taking 100% of the snaps on offense or defense are over, but teams routinely miss layups when it comes to protecting some of their best players. They would be foolish to stick with that plan in the 17-game era.
As an example, let's take running backs. With Christian McCaffrey hurt for most of the year and Ezekiel Elliott missing a game, running back workloads were generally down last season. The most carries recorded by any back who played all 16 games came from bruising Titans star Derrick Henry, who played 705 offensive snaps. That's "only" 66% of Tennessee's snaps, but if the Titans want to maintain that sort of workload for him in 2021, they're going to have to save a few snaps along the way.
Here's how they might have saved some sorts of the work on Henry in 2020, which are situations teams might try to target for rest next season:
Blowouts (95%-plus win expectancy)
Henry took 52 snaps across six games while the Titans had at least a 95% chance of winning, according to ESPN's win expectancy model. Those included an eight-play series against the Bills in which he ran the ball seven times in a row, pushing the game further out of reach. He carried the ball on 37 of those 52 snaps for a total of 195 yards and eight first downs.
These snaps are probably fun for Henry, who gets to run on a worn-down defense. Tennessee coach Mike Vrabel might consider it a reward for his star back. At the same time, though, these are hits Henry doesn't need to be taking. The Titans won all six of these games; the only one that got meaningfully close was the win over the Texans in Week 17, and the Titans had a 95% win expectancy for only one snap with Henry on the field in that game. The Titans would probably prefer to have him fresher for Week 18 (and the postseason) than for these snaps in games they've all but won.
Getting blown out (sub-5% win expectancy)
What about the other side of the coin? Henry was on the field for 53 snaps when the Titans' win expectancy was less than 5%. He carried the ball 24 times for 126 yards and eight first downs and caught one pass on 23 routes. The Titans used him to pass block only four times in those situations, so it wasn't as if he was an essential part of their passing attack in those situations.
Interestingly, though, the Titans did come back to create meaningful games in at least one of these situations. They were down 27-7 to the Steelers before launching a comeback that fell narrowly short at 27-24. The final score was close in their loss to the 41-35 Browns, when Henry played most of the game, but that score took two late touchdowns with him on the sideline. He couldn't do much in a blowout loss to the Packers.
I think it'll be tougher for coaches like Vrabel to sit their stars in these situations, in part because the possibility of a comeback seems more hopeful than the chances of blowing a big lead. Coaches probably overestimate their odds of coming back after going down multiple scores in the second and third quarter, where Henry saw plenty of action, but they're also more likely to be criticized for taking their starter out early in those situations than they would be deep in the fourth quarter with a large lead.
The simple way to think about it is to throw 50 out there as a nice round number. Coaches will play quarterbacks, offensive linemen and their star defensive backs for just about every single snap. When it comes to players who rotate in and out of the game, though, teams will want to find about 50 snaps over the course of the first 16 games when they can rest players who would otherwise be on the field and leave those reps aside for Week 18. It's not a direct substitution, of course -- one extra game will feel worse than a few snaps per game -- but coaches will want to save their players' bodies during the first 16 more than they have in years past.
Of course, as significant as the real-life implications are for using Henry, there would also seemingly be fantasy implications with any change in workload. A team like the Titans might give him fewer snaps while still maximizing his goal-line touches, but they might also follow their more common path and just take him out for an extra series or possession per half or game. If they take Henry out more frequently throughout the first 16 games of the season to save some of his workload for Week 18, the likelihood of fantasy leagues ending their seasons before Week 18 seemingly suggests that top backs would become less valuable than they were under the prior schedule.
The schedule change will likely lead to more parity
I have to admit that I'll miss the NFL's 16-game schedule. It's easy to explain: Teams played the two teams in their division twice each, got four games against one division in the NFC, four against one in the AFC, and the last two games are against the teams in their conference that finished in the same spot as them in their respective divisions. The divisions all rotated, so nobody got a major advantage over an extended period of time.
To fill out the schedule's newest game, the NFL has added a game against a team in the other conference that finished in the same place as each team in question. The Chiefs won the AFC West, so they're getting an extra game against a first-place team in the NFC, which happens to be the Packers. The Eagles finished in last in the NFC East, so they got a matchup against a last-place team in the AFC, which ended up being the Jets. This all makes sense.
The league isn't disturbing things too much by adding a 17th game, but there's going to be a more subtle impact on the standings. The first-place teams, who already typically have the toughest schedules relative to the rest of the league, are getting another game against the best teams in football. The last-place teams -- whose schedules were already supposed to be easy -- get another game against their fellow cellar dwellers.
This extra game is likely to push the teams at the top and bottom of the standings toward the middle. The league's best teams are more likely to lose against other great teams, and the bottom-feeders are more likely to come up with a win when they're up against similar competition. As a result, we're less likely to see extreme performances than we were during the 16-game schedule. It'll be much tougher for a team to go 17-0 in the regular season than it was for the Patriots to go 16-0 there. Browns and Lions fans will be heartened to hear that there's probably not going to be an 0-17 team on the horizon.
Perhaps more importantly, the symmetry of the 16-game season is gone. Teams will no longer have an equal number of home and road games, which is a more significant distinction than you might think. There's a meaningful advantage to being at home, and while that value has decreased some in recent years, the act of traveling and not getting a fair shake has cost teams in the past. From 1989 to 2019, teams that had fewer than eight "true" home games in a typical season won an average of just 5.8 games. Teams that have lost at least one home game from the prior season have declined over that time frame by an average of one win.
The NFL has established that the 2021 season will see the AFC teams host the extra home game, with the NFC teams getting the advantage next year. It's the fairest way to do things in terms of not giving teams within a division an unfair edge, but keep that in mind when you're looking at team over-unders or trying to guesstimate win totals before the season. The AFC won 131 games to the NFC's 124 last season; the extra home game should give the AFC the edge again in 2021.