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The NFL players’ union has demanded work conditions that include limits on contact practices, a mandatory day off each week during the season and mandatory months off during the offseason. But for NFL coaches, it’s another story.

Coaches work extremely long hours — Bill Belichick tells entry-level staffers to be ready to work 20 hours a day — and they work seven days a week during the offseason and 12 months a year. Few people in any walk of life work the hours that NFL coaches work.

Jets receiver Brandon Marshall thinks that’s a problem. Marshall said on Inside the NFL that the coaches should collectively bargain for shorter hours and a better work/life balance.

“It’s time for our coaches to unionize,” Marshall said, via TheMMQB.com. “We’ve had four coaches in the hospital this year. If people understood how many hours, and what it takes to be a head coach, how many hours they put in, it would be an issue.”

One of the hospitalized coaches was Todd Bowles, Marshall’s coach. And yet Bowles got out of the hospital and went straight back to work. That’s what football coaches do.

And that points to the problem with Marshall’s idea: The mentality of football coaches is such that they don’t want a union that limits their hours. They want to work non-stop. Todd Bowles doesn’t go straight from a hospital bed to the sideline because Woody Johnson is forcing him. Bowles does it because that’s the kind of football-obsessed competitor Bowles is.

So maybe it shouldn’t come from a union. Maybe it should come from the 32 owners, agreeing to an NFL rule mandating that coaches can’t be at the facility for a certain number of days in the offseason. The owners should care about the coaches’ health, and Marshall is right that coaches’ hours aren’t healthy.