Goddell wants more playoff teams

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So now, Goodell and the owners are trying a different tack, one that might be more attractive to NFL fans — the idea of expanding the playoffs with two more teams in each conference.

“That is under serious consideration,” Goodell said in a Tuesday interview at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. “One of the great things about the NFL other than it’s unscripted is that every team starts the season with hope.”

Well, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones certainly thinks so. His team has finished each of the last three seasons at 8-8 and hasn’t made a postseason since 2009, so that’s a lot of residual embarrassment and missed ancillary income.

“From the standpoint of looking at how exciting it is for a city or a community to be involved in the playoffs and the fact that you can have a team that might have literally operated at .500 or in that area … you can have that team win the Super Bowl,” Jones said last Friday on Dallas radio station 105.3 The Fan. “That makes a big case for adding a couple of more cities or communities that have NFL teams to the playoffs.”

Goodell mentioned that 13 of 16 games had playoff implications in the final week of the regular season, which was partially the result of the league’s wise decision to point the last few weeks of every season’s schedule in a more divisional direction. The next step, he said, will be to keep that competition compelling, even if more teams would wrap up playoff berths and first-round byes earlier.

“It’s something that the competition committee looked at last year and thinks there are some real benefits from a competitive standpoint. They’re going to study some aspects of that because when would those games occur and one team would get a bye in each conference and you’d have six games on the weekend. So would you have three on Saturday, and three on Sunday? Or do you get one on Friday and two on Saturday and two on Sunday and one on Monday? I think those are the kinds of things we want to evaluate.”

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