I only noticed this year for some reason that there is a full two weeks between the conference(?) games and the Superbowl. Wondering why that is?
In all the other football codes I follow (the four in Australia at least) the Grand Final is played the next week after the semi finals (ie the finals round with the last four teams).
Some extra hype time? Is there a game played in between I’ve missed?
Yes to both. The hype machine loves the extra time to kick into overdrive. Also, today is the Pro-Bowl.
It’s been that way for quite a while. This year isn’t special. Used to be that it was a dead weekend but now they play the Pro Bowl at that time instead of the week after the Super Bowl.
It’s also for the players to rest up a bit. The Giants played 13 games in a row, including a couple tough post-season games. As much as I hate the Giants and want them to lose, it wouldn’t be fair to have them play in the Superbowl against the Patriots, who’ve only had two games in a row since a bye-week.
The 2 week break helps the teams prepare because the NFL requires the teams to be at the site of the game a week early in order for them to participate in the endless media hype. The teams use the first week to prepare game plans because they won’t necessarily have the time to prepare them during SB hype week.
So, some dudes are in the Super Bowl and Pro Bowl? Can they opt out of the Pro Bowl? Do they?
Oh yeah. No one who makes the Super Bowl is taking that trip to Hawaii. That’s why they have alternate pro-bowlers.
Up through 2008, the Pro Bowl was the week after the Super Bowl. The move to make it take place on the dead week between the Conference Finals and the Super Bowl was an attempt to revive lagging TV ratings for the game. So now no one from the Super Bowl teams participates, but that isn’t a huge difference from the past when it the week after, most Super Bowl Pro Bowlers would chose not to make the trip to Hawaii and play another game.
The bye week also allows players, especially starters to heal. The NFL wants its best foot put forward in the Superbowl, and the extra time to heal allows the players to elevate their game.
The Pro Bowl is a waste of a game. Other than a decent paycheck, especially nice for younger players chose in the later rounds, the most important thing about the game is “don’t get hurt, don’t hurt anybody”. It softer than a pickup game between octogenarians.
I’ve always thought that the two week interval made for some lousy Super Bowls, since it often seemed like one team had the other really figured out using that extra week of preparation.
A related and definitely stupid question. Mind you, I know very little about football, which I intend to reveal to you now.
Why does football only have 16 games a season instead of…let’s say, 40 or so? Is football that much more tiring than basketball or hockey? Or is there some other reason they only play on the weekends(and Monday)? Couldn’t they have a best of 5(or 7) style playoff?
Yes, football is a lot more violent than those sports- especially baseball, which isn’t a contact sport. But there’s also the supply and demand factor: the game is very popular the way it is now and the limited number of games helps build anticipation. It makes almost all of the games seem important. If they played a lot of games, that wouldn’t happen.
Not so much “tiring” as “injuring.”
It is a collision-centered sport, and players routinely take the field with sprained ankles, broken fingers, cracked ribs etc. It’s not uncommon to see guys forced to wear casts or slings for days after a game, and even players who have no injuries per se will say that they are so sore after a game that they can’t move properly for several days.
And even with all that, by the end of the season most teams are missing 5-10 players who have gone down for the year with severe or chronic injuries. A 40 game season would mean that by the end of the season you’d be seeing one team’s second string vs. the other team’s third string.
At least. The Jaguars ended the season with over 20 players on injured reserve (a status which means that the player is sufficiently injured that he’s not expected to be able to contribute again during the season, as once a player goes on the injured reserve list, he’s finished for the season). Part of what made the Packers’ run to the Super Bowl last year so remarkable is that they made it with a roster which had been severely depleted due to injury (I believe they had something like 15 or 18 players on injured reserve).
When the league and the players began negotiations last year on the new collective bargaining agreement, the league wanted to go to an 18-game regular season schedule. The players fought against it vociferously, due largely to the injury issue. When the league realized that there wasn’t a lot of fan support for 18 games, they quietly dropped the proposal.
It takes pretty much a full week to recover from one game and be ready for the next. A 40 games season would be the whole year. Most teams would need 3-4 players at each position just to be able to field 1 good starter. Players’ careers would be 2-3 seasons long; no would last 10 years. Lots and lots of injuries, some pretty gruesome as you have more mismatched all-stars vs 3rd stringers. You’d have to play games in the heat of the summer which would lead to exhausted and dehydrated players.
Before every weekend, all the teams put out injury reports about how badly their player are hurt and their chances of playing. These can list nine or ten players who, though not injured enough to be out for the season, may miss the game due to injuries. I’m not sure there was ever a time that a team put out a report like this without listing players. An extra week allows the two teams to recover from the smaller injuries (e.g., those listed as “questionable,” may be upgraded to “probable”), so both teams have rested players.
That list often has names on it even before the first pre-season game. Football is rough on the players.
Does anyone remember what filled the “dead week” before the very earliest Super Bowls?
It was . . . yes . . . the NFL Playoff Bowl!
It was almost as exciting as the Pro Bowl, but not quite.
They have tried playing the Super Bowl the week after the conference championships (usually because the season started late because the first Sunday in September (which is when the season started) was September 7, but they also did this during the second strike season to give the teams back one of the games they missed); what usually happens is, instead of getting rid of the “dead week,” they got rid of most of the buildup.
This might be a dumb response, but could the extra time be to help organise transport for the teams involved in the Superbowl (until the respective finals, no team knows if they are going to the Superbowl or not)? There is also longer for fans to organise travel to the final, as once again fans won’t know if their team will be represented until their respective final is won.
I’m from the other side of The Atlantic, so I might be talking a load of crap, but it was the first thing that came into my head when I saw the question. As a comparison, the English FA Cup, played at Wembley stadium, is several weeks after the semi-finals for fans to organise transport and also for police to work out what manpower they will need and where to station them, based on where the two sets of fans will be travelling to London from.