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?

This is shaping up to be an tremendous season.

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

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.

Pictures from an earlier, less fiery accident on the Pike

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.

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

The king-size bed.

The desk.

The wet bar.

Dining table.

Sitting area.

View of Central Park.