[Senator Clay Davis]

Gotta love it when you spend months bored out of your mind at work and then get hit with it "Must be done in 72 hours" task. Fun times.

Anyway, I wanted to flesh out my thoughts on a developmental league a bit more. It starts with kneecapping the NCAA: Get rid of the three year rule and let players join the NFL right out of high school. You could draft them and send them to your developmental team instead of them wasting time in college playing 80% of their games against severely over-matched opponents. Or, for those rare players who are good enough to make the leap right away, do that. And make it so that going back and forth between the D-League and the NFL is simple. Set the standard that after three years they either join their drafted team or if the drafted team gives up on them they re-enter the draft.

There might have been a time I wouldn't think that's a good idea, but with NIL and the portal free for all it's actually semi-pro ball instead of the old days of getting paid under the table. It's led to way more instability and that affects development. This way you can develop players to a better standard than college football, have them compete against a more level group of other players, and instead of wasting valuable CTE years taking hits in college, start that NFL career and taking brain damage for more money. Also take the career ending risk out of play. The fact a Jeremiah Smith has to play next year and risk a career altering/ending injury because he's not three years removed is dumb. He'd be a sure fire top three pick if he could come out now.

I don't think you need to go crazy with it when it comes to number of teams. When the NBA started the D-League they only had eight teams. I think that's about the right number of teams in an NFL D-League. Every team having a 40-50 player D-League team doesn't make sense. I get the notion of every team having a D-League team would allow for development "our way", but coaches change often in the NFL so today's way will be someone else's way tomorrow. And then new systems need to be learned. More than anything, getting guys playing and learning at a level of NFL scheme would be huge, college schemes are comically easy.

For the season set up, set it up like baseball does. Maybe run the season late August to Thanksgiving, and then allow for expanded rosters for the last month so guys can be brought up for real game action to see where their development is. Obviously things like time served and playoff eligibility would need to be figured out. And yeah you could run a 10 game season and give guys a 10 days break between games. From the NFL perspective, this would satisfy their #1 goal in life, opening up more TV windows to show football. Now you can have Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday night D-League games. And you know that #### would outrate most other sports.

I realise this is pretty ambitious, and will likely never happen, but we all watch football, we're all honest enough to see the decline in quality the past few years. What scares me is this is the beginning of a decline, so all I can think is how bad things will be in 5, 10, 15, 20 years. It's kind of ugly to think about. So I guess I just hope that steps can be taken to improve the product that aren't just rule changes. And this idea, while ambitious, also checks the single most important box for the NFL, it will make it more money, but it will also give us better football. Dare to dream and all that.