There’s quite a bit of talk about expanding the NFL season from 16 games to 18 games per team. the primary driver for the expansion talk seems to be that the league currently has a pre-season that consists of four games played overwhelmingly scrubs that aren’t going to play much or at all during the regular season. So why not turn two of those games into competitive games that actually have some meaning?

The main counter argument is that two extra games will increase the wear and tear on players and also increase the risk of injury. While I agree with those concerns I have a different objection: I don’t want to spend more time watching games. I want to spend less time. The amount of time required to follow an NFL team can be reduced in two ways: One is to reduce the number of games and the other is to reduce the length of each game. Both are very doable, or would have been had not owners and players been so greedy.

Reducing the regular season to 14 from 16 games would have a couple of benefits besides saving fans time. For one thing it would reduce the risk of injury simply by reducing the number of plays. For another, it would increase the importance of divisional games and most rivalries are of the intra-division kind (for example New England v New York, New England v Miami, Green Bay v Chicago, Cleveland v Cincinnati, Chicago v Minnesota etc).

It is rarely the case that it takes 16 games to figure out which teams deserve to go to the play offs and which don’t. Besides, the expanded wild card format means that almost half of the play off teams have no business playing in the post season, so the risk of a worthy team not making it is quite frankly minimal.

The other way to reduce time sucked up by games is to reduce their length. That can most easily be done by getting rid of challenges, by getting rid of TV timeouts - it’s not as if football doesn’t have enough game breaks as it is - and also by getting rid of the network programming promos and the pompous transitions from live action to commercials and vice versa.

Fewer games means less revenue for the league and its franchises. Isn’t that just too bad?

That’s the New England Patriots record since the last time the team won the Lombardi Trophy in 2004. The Brandon Spikes sex tape has turned the Bill Belichick era, or at least what remains of it (which probably isn’t much) into a farce. Belichick bet the team’s fortune on building a ferocious defensive line to replace the ageing linebacker corps as the heart of the defense and by extension the team. That didn’t work out, in part because defensive linemen just don’t have the all-over-the-field impact that a linebacker corps can have and in part because the defensive linemen have never been able to concurrently approach their potential. With Ty Warren out for the season the line now consists of formidable nose tackle Vince Wilfork and a bunch of could-be-goods and role players. The bet is that the offense can carry the lo… pick up the sla… fill the ga… score… damn it! The hope is that the offense can put up points like it’s 2007 while the defense spends yet another year not putting pressure on opposing quarterbacks.

This is shaping up to be an tremendous season.

Photo shot on Thursday last week from the Hyatt Harborside Hotel at Logan Airport.

The table below shows the change (’000) in total payroll employment, government payroll employment and private sector payroll employment by state in July 2010. The data used in the table was released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on August 20,2010 and is the most recent available.

Here’s a picture I snapped at the Lowe’s store in Westborough in Massachusetts a couple of days ago:

As you can see the New England Patriots-branded 5-gallon bucket is $6.98 while the store-brand 5-gallon bucket is $2.54.

That’s quite a difference in price for two fairly simple products sold next to each other. In the 4 P Marketing Mix jargon the two offers don’t particularly differ in Product and Place which makes the difference in Price all the more eye-brow raising (there probably is more difference in Product than meets the eye. In particular I expect the Patriots-branded bucket to be sturdier than the much cheaper Lowe’s bucket). There is likely no difference in direct Promotion between the two products but it is reasonable to argue that a great deal of Promotion has gone into making the New England Patriots brand worth an almost 200% premium to its followers.

While driving eastbound on the Mass Turnpike on Saturday August 21 we were passed by a Natick firetruck in the right lane. It turned out to be racing towards a car on fire in the westbound lane, more or less halfway between the Weston barracks and the Framingham exit. When we passed the scene, maybe a minute or so after the Engine 4 from the Natick Fire Department on its way to the overpass at the barracks, the Weston Fire Department was already battling the burning car. Below are a few pictures of the scene [Note: The above copy was added on August 22, 2010]:

Pictures from an earlier, less fiery accident on the Pike

The combined population of California, Texas, New York and Florida is about 100 million, or one-third of the population of the United States, so the unemployment rate in those states have a substantial impact on the national unemployment rate (currently 9.5%).

The table below shows the unemployment rate for those four states over the past few years (for June of each year, seasonally adjusted).

Texas’ performance is probably the most impressive given that it has had the fastet population and labor force growth of the four states over the past decade, while New York has had the by far slowest.

The tables below show unemployment rates for Massachusetts, Minnesota, Virginia and Washington 2006 - 2010, from the height of the real estate bubble through the Panic of 2008, the subsequent Great Recession and slow recovery. Since I have a bit of a Mass-centric view on the Republic I have set the tables as head to head matchups between Massachusetts and the other states.

I chose Washington and Virginia because they, like Massachusetts, have substantial information technology industries and are of reasonably comparable size, as is Minnesota.

My wife stayed at The Hilton New York while visiting New York City recently. Her late evening check-in, the availability of rooms and the kindness of front-desk worker all aligned in such a happy way that she was upgraded to a pretty spectacular spacious suite with a grand view of Central Park. Here are some photos of it:

The king-size bed.

The desk.

The wet bar.

Dining table.

Sitting area.

View of Central Park.

It was announced today that 2,556 solar power panels will help supply Patriot Place - the retail and restaurant complex adjacent to New England Patriots home field Gillette Stadium - with electricity. Here’s a picture I took yesterday of some of the panels: