Less is More: The Case for Shorter Sports Seasons
The modern sports calendar has a quantity problem. Too many games are meaningless, stars are constantly injured, and postseason success increasingly depends on survival instead of greatness.
Every men’s professional league says it cares about player safety and improving the fan experience.
If they actually meant it, they’d shorten their seasons.
For women’s professional sports leagues, they are probably good or should be expanded.
MLB: End the Regular Season on Labor Day
Major League Baseball should reduce the regular season from 162 games to 140 and make Labor Day the final day of the regular season.
Right now, baseball currently spends the final month of the regular season competing with the return of school, the start of college football, and the NFL. The MLB playoffs can compete with that competition, but the regular season can’t, just look at how much attendance drops from August to September.
By shortening the season:
- The World series would finish in early October
- Baseball would avoid the problem of late-October games in freezing Midwest and Northeast weather
- Regular season games would matter more and less teams would be eliminated from contention with a quarter of the season to go
- Pitching staffs would be healthier and fresher entering the postseason
The modern pitcher is basically a Formula 1 car being driven at maximum speed until something explodes. MLB reports pitcher injured-list days have nearly tripled since the late 1990s, and roughly one-third of pitchers have undergone Tommy John surgery at some point in their careers.
The modern baseball calendar has become less about showcasing elite pitching and more about seeing which arms survive the season.
The NBA: Fewer Games, Fewer Injuries, Better Basketball
The NBA season should be reduced from 82 games to 76 and the playoffs reduced to seven teams in each conference.
Here’s the regular season schedule formula:
- Two games against every opposite conference team
- Three games against every non-division team in your conference
- Four games against division rivals
The shortened season coupled with a shorter playoffs would eliminate teams having to play three games in four nights and make players sitting out because of “load management” less common.
Players today are under more physical strain than previous generations. LeBron James has repeatedly said the modern game is harder on the body than it was when he entered the league because of the pace, spacing, and constant movement required.
And the injury numbers support it.
Soft tissue injuries, rest games, and stars missing nationally televised matchups have increased. Teams are constantly trying to survive the schedule instead of competing every night.
And competing every night is less important now because 20 of the NBA’s 30 teams technically make the postseason when you include the play-in tournament. That diminishes the importance of the regular season.
The NBA should reduce the playoffs to seven teams per conference to make regular season games more important, and prevent the playoffs from being a war of attrition.
Proposed Format
- Seeds 1 and 2 receive first-round byes
- Seed 7 vs. Seed 6 in a one-game playoff with the winner earning the 6-seed
- Seed 3 vs. Seed 6 in a best-of-three series
- Seed 4 vs. Seed 5 in a best-of-three series
- From the quarterfinals on, every series becomes best-of-seven just like it is now
This would create urgency immediately. The regular season would matter more. Getting a top two seed would matter more.
The NBA postseason increasingly resembles a survival reality show where the biggest advantage is not talent or coaching, but simply having superstars whose hamstrings and Achilles tendons are still intact by May. Four straight rounds of seven-game series are producing worse basketball because too many stars are either injured, exhausted, or playing at 60 percent. In nine consecutive NBA seasons, at least five All-Stars have missed a playoff game due to injury. Before that stretch, it had happened only five times in the previous 40 years. Last postseason alone saw three players tear their Achilles tendons. This year, Donte DiVincenzo tore his Achilles after playing all 82 regular season games.
How to Prevent Tanking
With fewer playoff teams, the NBA would also need stronger anti-tanking rules.
The easiest solution is flattening lottery odds and preventing the very worst teams from automatically receiving top picks.
The NFL: Stop Expanding a Violent Sport
The NFL should go back to a 16-game regular season and give every team two bye weeks.
Two decades ago, Roger Goodell began publicly discussing an 18-game season.
At the time, the league tried to sell fans on the idea by saying they would remove two preseason games, so it supposedly wouldn’t add more strain to players’ bodies. That argument insulted everyone’s intelligence because preseason reps are controlled and veterans barely play.
Then CTE and brain injuries became front-page news and the NFL stopped publicly pushing for more games. But as soon as the headlines faded, the league added a 17th game in 2021 and is now openly determined to get to 18 games while simultaneously expanding the playoffs.
Football is not a sport designed for “more content.” It’s controlled car crashes with fantasy implications.
An 18-game season plus potentially four playoff games for Super Bowl teams is an absurd amount of punishment on the human body.
And the result isn’t just more injuries, it’s worse football.
Every year the NFL season becomes more about which teams survive physically rather than which teams are actually best. By January, half the league is held together by tape, painkillers, and backup linemen.
A shorter season with two bye weeks would:
- Improve player safety
- Improve quality of play
- Create more urgency around every game
- Lead to healthier stars in the postseason
The NFL already owns the sports calendar and makes enough money. It doesn’t need more games.
What About Hockey?
The NHL might be the one league that doesn’t need major changes.
Hockey’s 82-game season is demanding, but the sport has not developed the same load-management culture as the NBA, and only half of the 32 teams in the league make the playoffs.
If anything, the NHL could consider a small reduction to around 76 games, but it is far lower on the priority list than MLB, the NBA, or the NFL.
What About the Records?
People will argue that shortening seasons would distort all-time stats and historical records. But sports have adjusted before. The NFL played 16-game seasons for 43 years before expanding to 17, so that’s not an issue there. In the NBA, load management has already made the 82-game schedule somewhat artificial. Cutting six games probably wouldn’t reduce how much stars play; it would simply reduce the number of meaningless nights where players sit out. Baseball numbers and records are treated almost as sacred. Dropping from 162 games to 140 would absolutely reshape single-season and career statistics. But baseball history has already survived major statistical distortions, from the steroid era to expansion, integration, changes to the mound, juiced-balls, and wildly different competitive eras. Preserving statistical symmetry alone is not enough of a reason to keep asking players to grind through an excessive number of games.
*Important note: There is no chance any of the changes recommended in this article will ever happen because the number one priority of every professional sports league is maximizing revenue, and fewer games means less television inventory, fewer tickets sold, and less advertising money.