As the Pro Football Hall of Fame noted earlier today, NFL owners voted 36 years ago Friday to expand the regular season to 16 games.
At that same league meeting, owners also agreed to add a second wild-card team.
Whether the NFL ever adds games to the regular-season slate again remains to be seen. It is surely a more complex issue now that it was in the past, with our increased knowledge of the toll the game can take on those who play it one key issue. In the past, the league far more frequently changed the number of regular-season games, sometimes even removing dates from the schedule, as this Hall of Fame chart shows.
For now, the schedule holds at 16 games -- a number that has held up longer than any regular-season game quota in league history.