Roger Goodell on NFL Playoffs Expansion not Happening

The NFL isn't expanding the playoff field to seven teams per conference, at least not this coming season.

At one time, it looked like a foregone conclusion to playoffs would be expanded to 14 total teams, featuring the No. 7 seed added into take on the No. 2 seed in the Wild-Card Round. That would leave the No. 1 seed as the only team to get a bye week, but this plan appear on the backburner for the time being.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell put an end to it happening in 2015 during Wednesday's NFL Owners Meeting. Here's all of what he had to say regarding expanded playoffs:

We had a healthy discussion on that. This is something we’ve been evaluating over the last couple of years and several factors went into the decision to at least postpone the expanded playoffs. Some of them would be on the competitive side.

The last two years, interestingly enough, it’s been inconsistent with our experience in the past in that the last two weeks we actually would have had five less teams that would have qualified for the playoffs under the 14-team format than the 12. And that’s a little bit counterintuitive due to the experience we had.

So whenever we make a change like this we want to look at what are the positives and negatives? What are the unintended consequences? We want to make the regular season more important, more exciting and have more teams in the race.

If we’re not doing that, we want to make sure that we understand why and what else we can do to affect that. We also have scheduling issues, as far as when we could play the games – Saturday, Sunday. We’ve looked at a Monday night but college football has the National Championship on Monday night and we certainly don’t want to conflict with that.

So there are a number of factors that are going on that we just felt the right thing for us to do was to take another year, evaluate all this, and make the right decision long term.