Goodell needs to offer late-season incentives

Here's yet another wrinkle that needs to be ironed out before the NFL expands the regular season to 18 games:

How to make playoff teams with no incentives use their starters and play hard throughout an entire regular season.

If preseason games are bad for the league, then so are late-season games in which playoff teams rest starters. The Colts were the talk of the league at 14-0, but now it's been three weeks since they tried to win. And last night, the Bengals not only rested starters, they seemed to intentionally give up against the Jets so that their wild-card game would be against the Jets instead of a Houston team that had whipped them earlier this season.

Granted, it would take more wins to clinch division titles and home-field advantage in an 18-game season, but the extended season also runs the risk of situations in which teams could be going a full month of games without having to play their starters. I mean we've already seen a 14-0 team that had no interest in going for an undefeated season.

Goodell was in Miami on Sunday. He talked about the need to offer incentives that would encourage teams to play their starters even after they've clinched homefield advantage.

"It is something we'll look at," Goodell said. "We heard the fans loud and clear. It's something our competition committee has looked at in the past, but we're going to ask our competition committee to look at it again in the future. We want every game to be competitive."

Goodell mentioned draft picks as an incentive. While that has merit, it goes against the league's basic draft format that's desiged to help the bad teams catch up to the good teams. So I wonder if the competition committee would be willing to offer draft picks that are high enough to want to play for.