Michael Wilbon dares NFL executives to say they care about player safety to his face

The NFL loves to talk about player safety. Michael Wilbon would like them to stop.

Appearing on First Take this week, Wilbon was asked about NIL and whether prospects like Ty Simpson — who turned down a $6.5 million offer from Miami to enter the draft — are making the right call by leaving college money on the table for the NFL. He had thoughts on that, but he had bigger thoughts about what that premise reveals about the league those prospects are rushing to join. The NFL has spent years telling the public it cares about player safety, Wilbon argued, and the push for an 18th regular-season game is where that facade completely falls apart.

“No league lies publicly like the NFL,” he said. “No entity in this country lies as thoroughly, as convincingly, and as successfully as the NFL to try to sell, ‘We care about health and player safety.’ They do not … It’s a lie. It’s a fraud. It’s the NFL, and people aren’t going to call them out on it. Usually, people just want their football, and whatever the NFL is selling, we as a culture will buy it.”

“Don’t ever say to my face if you’re an NFL executive or a club executive, ‘We care about health and player safety.’ You do not.” – Michael Wilbon pic.twitter.com/IelZamqOZ7

— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) April 21, 2026

The NFL moved to 17 games in 2021, and the push for an 18th has never really stopped. Roger Goodell played it down at his Super Bowl press conference in February, calling it far from certain, but the league and NFLPA have already been in formal discussions about expansion, and the prevailing belief inside the building is that it is coming. One proposed framework would cap most players at 17 of the 18 games as a concession to the union, which is a revealing way to frame a player safety argument. The then-NFLPA’s own executive director said last year that not a single player he had spoken to supported an extra game — “17 games, for many of the guys, is too long” — and Chris Berman argued earlier this year that the only thing that temporarily slowed the push at all was the optics of Damar Hamlin’s cardiac arrest in 2023.

Wilbon’s point about college football is that it has stopped being a meaningful counterpoint to any of this. Seasons are longer, the College Football Playoff has grown, and year-round workouts have made the offseason a fiction. By the time a prospect actually gets to the league, he has already absorbed years of high-level contact, which makes the NFL’s stated concern for the players it inherits feel even less credible.

“There is no off time,” Wilbon said. “There is no recovery time.”

The union will eventually say yes to the 18th game because the money will be too large to refuse, and Wilbon acknowledged as much. That’s not really what he is arguing about. What he wants is for the league to drop the pretense.

“Don’t ever say to my face if you’re an NFL executive or a club executive, ‘Oh, we care about health and player safety. You do not,” Wilbon said.

“Just be honest about it,” the Pardon the Interruption co-host continued. “I had a journalism professor that said, ‘Say what you mean and mean what you say.’ The NFL doesn’t care about player safety. So half those things people pointed out are just like, OK, this is a great shock to the system. And so the NFL should make all the money in the world for every network, streaming service, everything else, but NIL is the devil? Stop.”