NFL continues to push for expanded Playoffs

With the NFL Owners Meetings concluding in Orlando on Wednesday, the topic of expanding the NFL playoffs has been gaining steam for the past year. Owners are looking for more ways to add more teams to the field of 12 in order to provide more games, and thus, more money.

"We had a good discussion on it on several fronts," Goodell said Wednesday. "As you know, the Competition Committee has been looking at this for a couple of years. We have discussed it in various committees, including broadcasting. We had a full discussion on the floor with the owners and other executives this week.

"I think there’s a tremendous amount of interest in this, possibly even to the point of support, but there are also things we still want to make sure we do it right. We’ve been very incremental in trying to do this, but we believe competitively it could make even our races toward the end of our season even more exciting with more teams vying for playoff positions, which is great for our fans.

"We still want to do some additional work, including talking with the players association. We have a scheduled meeting set for April 8. This will be one of the things we’ll probably discuss and then we’ll also have to talk to broadcast partners and there are some scheduling issues that we still need to work through."

The addition of one more teams in both leagues is likely to happen in the 2015 season. The NFLwill likely add two playoff teams in time for the 2015 season, meaning 14 playoff teams (instead of the current 12) out of 32. That means just one team in each conference getting a first-week bye in the postseason, while the No. 2 seed would play the extra playoff team, who would be the No. 7 seed.

That would mean matchups of 2 versus 7 seeds, 3 versus 6 and 4 versus 5 in the Wild Card round.