The NFL’s long-anticipated move to an 18-game regular season is once again gathering momentum — at least from the league’s side — with fresh reporting suggesting the timeline may already be taking shape behind the scenes.

According to PFT’s Mike Florio, the absence of a confirmed date for Super Bowl LXII is no coincidence, suggesting that the league is deliberately keeping its calendar flexible in anticipation of a structural shift that would push the Super Bowl back by a week or two and fundamentally reshape the season.

Having reported previously on plan to move to the expanded calendar, Florio doubled down on his views during an interview with The Rich Eisen Show this week.

“We reported in the days after the Super Bowl that Super Bowl LXII in Atlanta, [in] February of 2028, [doesn’t] have a date yet,” he confirmed. “And it’s unheard of to be less than 23 months away from a Super Bowl and not know when it’s going to be played. You’ve got to have a convention centre for the whole week. You’ve got to have how many thousand hotel rooms? They usually know by now.

“The reason they don’t have a date, I’m told, [is that] they’re holding it open in case they get to 18 games by 2027 and need to slip [the Super Bowl] back a week or so. You throw in two byes and then it gets even more complicated. So that’s why there isn’t a date.”

Having begun his conversation addressing the return of J.C. Tretter as the head of the NFL Players Association, Florio seems convinced that the unexpected appointment could play a key role in getting the longer schedule over the line.

“It tells me that, now that J.C Tretter has been installed, I think they’re going to move quickly to try to get a deal that would include 18 regular season games, 16 annual international games — and get it done now,” he reasoned. “We see the NFL moving on the broadcast deals. I think this is a time of aggressive business deal making by the NFL.”

Any move to 18 games would almost certainly be tied to negotiations with the NFLPA over a new Collective Bargaining Agreement. Team owners are expected to push for the additional game as part of a wider bargaining framework, with the likelihood that players would seek meaningful concessions in return, whether through revenue adjustments, roster expansion or changes to the offseason structure. The move to 17 regular season games came with agreement to shelve a preseason fixture.

“We’re going to push like the dickens now to make international [games] more important with us,” Kraft told the Zolak & Bertrand show in February. “Every team will go 18 [regular season games] and two [preseason games] — and every team every year will play one game overseas.”

The current CBA, which runs through 2030, caps the regular season at 17 games, meaning any expansion would require union approval. That alone makes the issue less about scheduling mechanics and more about leverage. The league may want an 18th game, but it cannot impose one. And, until recently, the players’ position remains emphatically opposed.

“Our members have no appetite for a regular season 18th game,” NFLPA interim executive director — and Tretter’s predecessor — David White said at the union’s news conference during Super Bowl week in February. “The 18th game is not casual for us. It’s a very serious issue. It’s something that comes out of negotiations, and nothing will move forward until players have the opportunity to account for all of those factors, take that into consideration and then through negotiations, agree or not to the 18th game. But as it stands right now, players have been very clear they don’t have any appetite for it.”

White’s comments reflect a widely-held view among players that the physical toll of the current schedule is already at or beyond acceptable limits. Even with incremental improvements in safety and recovery protocols, the addition of a 17th game in 2021 continues to be a point of contention, let alone the prospect of another.

“It’s punishing, and we can see that on the teams that have deep postseason runs,” White continued. “And we saw it this year. Those injuries cost players pay, they can shorten careers, they can diminish lifetime earnings. And when your average career is already three to four years, that becomes something that is existential.”

Publicly, commissioner Roger Goodell has struck a more measured tone, acknowledging the league’s interest while stopping short of committing to a timeline. He has emphasised that expansion is ‘not something we assume will happen’, a recognition of both the complexity of negotiations and the resistance on the other side of the table.

Yet the broader direction of travel is difficult to ignore. The NFL’s ambitions are increasingly global, and the concept of an 18-game schedule is closely tied to that vision. More games would not simply mean more domestic inventory, but greater flexibility to stage fixtures in international markets — a key pillar of the league’s long-term growth strategy.

“You can think of expansion as the number of teams, or you can think of expansion as us playing in international markets,” Goodell explained recently, underlining that rather than follow the path of traditional franchise expansion, the NFL is effectively expanding its footprint through games played abroad, with the UK and Germany already established and new venues including Spain, Australia and France already being added to the roster.

An additional regular season game would make that model significantly easier to execute. It would allow the league to increase its international presence without reducing the number of home games for individual franchises, a balance that has historically been difficult to strike.

For that reason, the 18-game season has become as much a commercial and strategic objective as a competitive one. The financial upside is clear: more broadcast windows, more content for media partners and more opportunities to monetise global interest in the sport, even if the timeline remains uncertain. The current CBA provides no immediate pathway, and any change would require formal negotiation rather than unilateral action. While Florio’s reporting suggests the league may already be planning with 2027 in mind, that remains contingent on whether common ground can be found with the players. Florio, however, suggests that there may already be a compromise under consideration.

“There’s an idea floating around [with] every player limited to 17 games,” he explained. “Maybe you can get enough guys to vote for that CBA that J.C. Tretter may soon negotiate with the league. That’s what we should be keeping an eye on. How quickly do these talks move and do we get to 18? And will there be this caveat that the players are limited to 17 games and suddenly you have to decide which is the game that you’re playing your back-up quarterback?

“And here’s the other side of it. A lot of guys don’t play every game anyway because of injury, right? So, it’s not like you’re going to have to bench all your starters when you get down to Week 18 or Week 19, Week 20… I guess if somebody has to miss a game in Week 3 that checks a box of the one game that they’re not playing…”

For now, the situation sits in a familiar holding pattern. The league continues to edge forward, laying the groundwork and aligning its long-term strategy, while the players hold firm on issues of workload and welfare. An 18-game season feels increasingly inevitable in principle, but until the NFL can reconcile its ambitions with the realities of player consent, it remains just out of reach.