Super
Bowl Week generates all sorts of stories, like increasing the number of regular
season games from 16 to 18. My father’s
Chicago Cardinals played a 12-game season.
When I sat in the back seat of the car listening to the Bears-Giants’
championship game during a family drive one December Sunday in 1963, both teams
were in their third year of playing a 14-game season. The current 16-game schedule dates to 1978.
I’m
a big fan of playing with numbers, though more from an actuarial than
sabermetric viewpoint. What might be
fun—and something the players’ association should already have done—would be to
calculate the average player lifespan based on a minimum five-season career
starting in the 1950s for each of the different-length season eras. Even better would be comparing those numbers
to the average lifespan of players in similar time periods for the other major
pro sports, viz., baseball, basketball and hockey. I wonder what the numbers would say.
Are
you ready for some football?
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