Goodell looking into later Eastern start times for West Coast teams

NFL Commissioner, Roger Goodell appeared on the Sirius XM Radio show "Town Hall" this week and spoke on many of the plans on the docket for the NFL in the near future. One of those things is addressing the unfair advantage East Coast teams have when facing their West Coast counterparts at home.

"Several of our teams on the West Coast have raised that and we have been studying it," said Goodell. "We have tried to put as many of those games on the East Coast at 4 p.m. You can imagine the thousands of different issues you have to put into the schedule. But the 10 o'clock starts are pretty tough."

This issue is especially important to the Raiders this season as they travel to the Eastern time zone a franchise record five times. They have already played two games on the East Coast and have lost both games. The first loss was a blowout in Miami in week two.

They still have three games scheduled in the east-- Baltimore, Cincinnati, and Carolina. All of those games are currently scheduled to start at 1pm Eastern time which on the Raiders players bodily clock is 10am. That formula is a proven advantage to the home team. That advantage doesn't exist for West Coast teams hosting East Coast teams. For them it is the equivalent of a 4pm start.

The hope here is that the commissioner gets on this in the coming weeks as opposed to waiting to address it in the offseason. But either way, it's about time this issue comes to the forefront.