Peter King calls for NFL to stop expanding schedule: ‘Be happy with what you have’

The expansion of the NFL schedule can sometimes feel inevitable.

The league has already shifted from 16 to 17 games in recent years, and the move to 18 at this point feels like a matter of when, not if.

Still, plenty of football minds are against the idea of adding even more games to the schedule, including longtime writer Peter King. Speaking as a guest on CBS Sports’ We Need to Talk while promoting his new book The Game, King called for the league to keep things where they are.

“I fired a little bit of a warning shot across the bow in this book, in which I said the NFL has got to stop trying to expand the product with the number of games,” King said. “If you really care about the health and safety of your players, just stop expanding the schedule and be happy with what you have.”

While King doesn’t want the league adding more games to the schedule any time soon, he’s not against all forms of expansion.

“But I also think that there will be a time where every team, every year plays an international game. I’m one of the few people in the media who really, really loves international football,” King said. “I was in Munich for the Brady game in ’22 against Seattle. Tampa and Seattle. That was one of the great events. Afterwards, Tom Brady walked off the field, and he goes, ‘When I retire, that will go down as one of the great games, great events that I have ever been involved in.'”

“The NFL has got to stop trying to expand the product with the number of games.”@peter_king spoke on how he thinks the NFL could grow in the next 40 years 👀 pic.twitter.com/E0R8o5yBwA

— We Need To Talk (@WeNeedToTalk) September 16, 2026

The NFL’s international footprint is only continuing to grow. The league has already been to Australia this year, and in Week 3 will send the Dallas Cowboys and Baltimore Ravens to Rio de Janeiro, marking three straight years with a game in Brazil.

In total, the league will have nine international games this year, and with the Jacksonville Jaguars the only team pulling double-duty with two games in London, it means that we’re actually already at a point where more than half of the league is playing an international game every year if things continue at their current rate.

International games were once, well, foreign, for lack of a better term. But as the league has added more and more international games to the schedule and it has expanded past being a novelty for the Jaguars and one or two other teams, having your favorite team play an international game once every few years has become the new normal. While the adjustment to having an international game every season would still be a change, it’s hardly as big a shift as it would have felt a decade ago.