People love NFL football: it routinely gets the highest ratings of all sports on television. Sure, it’s racist, and yes, it’s had its issue with cheating and credibility over the last few decades, but unlike other sports, this doesn’t seem to affect the TV ratings for whatever reasons. Thus, the NFL should start its own minor-league spring season as soon as possible for the benefit of itself—more money!—and society as a whole (fact).

First reason this makes sense is that there are other “pro football” products out there in the spring that are terrible. With the “new” United States Football League and the “new” XFL merging into the “United Football League” for 2024, no one cares. No one ever has. The biggest reason these 21st-century attempts have failed to catch on even as well as the original USFL did (for three seasons) is that no one is interested in nobodies.

By taking away the thunder from NCAA football’s annual signing periods and turning those known commodities into the new NFL Draft classes, officially sanctioned-and-run minor leagues by the NFL definitely would get people watching—not only local prospects playing nationwide but also the minor-league teams of their favorite NFL teams, too, to see which players are excelling and should be promoted.

There a lot of high-school players who want to get paid right away, and the college system should not be doing that. So, like baseball and hockey, the time has come for the NFL teams to be paying those who want to go pro at age 18 after playing in high school. We can remove academics from the equation altogether and just get to the sports performance as a career. This has worked for decades with MLB and the NHL, after all.

It needs to work for the NFL, too: yes, it might cost a little more money upfront to develop a farm system from scratch, but the long-term benefit to the sport itself and the league is immense—especially when you factor in new TV contracts for spring-league action … and new revenue streams for minor-league franchise merchandise and stadium ticket/concessions sales during a spring season that takes up three months.

That’s our final point, too: year-round football in the same stadiums that often sit empty in the offseason would really help enrich NFL franchises, most of which own their own stadiums already. Yeah, hosting concerts and monster-truck rallies every so often is nice, but packing the house for months at a time in the “offseason” would be even better. Again, an upfront infrastructure investment pays for itself quickly.

It also could give the NFL teams extended reach into other potentially untapped pro football markets: if the Seattle Seahawks don’t want to use their own stadium for spring minor-league ball, they can extend their footprint more firmly into the Pacific Northwest by having their farm team play in Portland, for example. This can help a lot of smaller TV markets get a taste for NFL football by bringing in a minor-league team.

None of this affects the popularity of college football, as kids still will go play NCAA ball—just like baseball and hockey players have been doing. The quality of play won’t suffer, really, as the best of the kids who choose the college route to enhance their skills to be pro-ball worthy still will provide a lot of thrills and excitement for alumni and local fans. College football is about pride and tribalism; that won’t change ever.

The time has come, NFL. Make it happen—please.