I love the NFL. You love the NFL. We all love the NFL. That’s why we make our brunch reservations for 11 a.m. on Sunday, make sure we’re up early enough to get some greasy food in us to shake off the — uh — cobwebs from Saturday night and spend 11 hours making dents into our couch from 1 p.m. ET to midnight for the the final 17 weeks of the year. But morning football? I’m sorry; morning football is terrible.

The allure of adding a game at 9:30 a.m. ET once a year is obvious. We’re a culture of excess, of super-sizing. More is always more. People watch football by the millions all day Sunday and on Monday night. Why not give them more opportunity to do so? This is the same kind of thinking that leads to Thursday Night Football and playoff expansion (which is likely coming soon). And it’s not a good thing for the NFL.

Oh, Sunday morning games in London aren’t going to kill the league, but they advance the problem started by the full-season slate of Thursday games. Less is actually more. Football has always been a treat. One full Sunday of games, a Monday night and then you spend all week waiting for the next slate. Unlike the NBA and NHL with their 82-game schedules or MLB with its summer-long 162-game slate, the NFL prides itself of being unmissable. It was truly must-see TV.

But when you put the Jets and Dolphins on from a Sunday morning in London, you’re basically inviting people not to watch. The west coast is out, it’s too early. Oh, maybe some guys at a bachelor party in Vegas are getting out of the club at 6:30 a.m. PT to watch the game in a sports book, but normal fans are completely left out. Even in the Eastern and Central time zones, you have people who are either sleeping in (because it was either a long week or a long night), getting errands done before settling in for the real game or actually doing something outdoors before becoming chained to their television sets for the next 11 hours.

The NFL is basically telling people to ignore its product. They’ve turned their biggest asset — exclusivity — into a relic. Morning football was a cool novelty last year. It lost a bit of its luster this year. But the NFL never puts the genie back in the bottle, so expect more and more of these as the years progress, particularly if that long-discussed London franchise ever happens.

Are Sunday morning games the worst thing in sports? No. They’re a trivial frivolity. But, come on, no one wants to watch the Jets and Dolphins in the morning. It’s too early for that kind of heartburn.