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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

> by cutting down the number of games from 162 to 100

Since coming to North America I've always felt one of the problems with Baseball and Hockey is they just play too many games, so no game is significant enough. When your team loses to a certain team, you don't care enough because you know they'll play them multiple times more.

Baseball is 162, Hockey is 82 games in "regular season"

NFL is only 16 games, which to me, makes it much more exciting because each win or loss really matters, and as a spectator I actually care.

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You just haven't followed baseball closely enough. When it's September and you're in a close divisional or wildcard race, there is nothing more exciting in sports: every pitch counts and every at-bat counts -- and there are ~5-6 games per week. (And that only counts your team! Part of the terror of a close race is that you're also watching every pitch and every at-bat of your rivals.) If anything, it's almost exciting to a fault...

It was recently explained to me that Professional sports is watching other people have the time of their lives....

If you're at a bar drinking, or at the game, you're literally paying to watch other people have the time of their lives.

Worth thinking about

In my opinion, the lockout-shortened 2012-13 NHL season (started in January, 48 game regular season) was the best thing ever.

Particularly in a country where NFL football reigns supreme, the NHL starting an 82 game season in October is just a loser. Starting the compressed season in January, with the NFL regular season over, made so much more sense.

I agree fully, although IMO there's another factor at work here (albeit a side effect of your point anyways).

Not only are there so many games, but they're all on TV. The NFL mostly stacks their games on Sunday so "football sunday" has become a social event for people. Leagues like the MLB, NBA and NHL spread their games all over the week and with modern cable packages on pretty much any given day you can find a game to watch - the specialness is lost.

This is one reason why I think it's a bad idea for the NFL to start spreading games around - sure there was always MNF but they've had TNF now for a while and there's always talk about adding more. They want those primetime slots but all it does is weaken The Event effect of sundays.

The long season not only fits baseball's cultural niche as the lazy Summer, lose-today-but-lick-'em-tomorrow sport, it also has the nice effect of reducing the significance of lucky breaks and hot streaks. The season's long enough to have a long run: Better teams win and worse teams lose. Players' individual statistics are at least stable enough to usefully model and predict overall team wins.

I love the excitement and unpredictability of NFL football as much as the next red blooded American, but there's something a little bit unsatisfying about a team's entire season routinely hanging in the balance of a single referee's call or a ball bouncing right instead of left.

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