PRESEASON, PRESEASON, WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?

By mhblatt • August 21, 2007

Guest Post: S2NBlog

Preseason May Be Annoying, But It’s Necessary

Pre-season football serves a purpose. Or so we think. Well, actually, if you’re watching Hard Knocks on HBO, you see that it does serve one: teams really have to distinguish what their needs are, whom they have on their depth charts, and which picks and free agents aren’t panning out.

But everything about the pre-season from a fan’s point of view stinks, except for the fact that after a summer full of baseball, most of us are ready for Sundays as we know them to return with a vengeance. The return of football in some form doesn’t quite make up for what we get in August. If you’re a season ticket holder, you’re getting fleeced for the exhibitions as well as the eight home games, and when your team winds up with injuries that either put a scare into the coaching staff (say, Redskins QB Jason Campbell’s bruised knee), wreak havoc on depth charts ( the four players the Giants lost against the Ravens on Sunday night, although only the ruptured Achilles of receiver Michael Jennings appears to be the big one), or nearly destroy your season before it begins (the Broncos lose Ebenezer Ekuban on the D-line and get a scare from Travis Henry’s knee), you could be convinced that the number of games before the season starts does more harm than good. There’s a reason players with secure roster spots hate these games; some even negotiate not playing in pre-season games into their contracts (I believe LaDainian Tomlinson is the latest to do this.)

However, what’s the alternative? Every year someone will write a column or a blog post about the futility of pre-season games, propose playing fewer of them, and it will be lost in the ether for one specific reason: there’s really no other way to evaluate the non-secured folks reliably than to simulate game conditions. Practice and training camp can only tell you so much. If you have to play for your life as a professional, you’ve gotta show it in some form in game action. Sadly, there is no easy fix here, and this is why personnel guys at camps have a Rolodex filled with player names to call up for a tryout at any time (evidenced by the last episode of the aforementioned Hard Knocks, where the Chiefs personnel pro is dialing up four wideouts to replace one who’s likely out for the season.) Truthfully, the futility is part and parcel of football: the risk is great, but the risk of not playing those games and being able to separate the wheat from the chaff is greater, possibly even fatal, to the careers of the coaching staff, the front office, and the players with secure positions.

The least the teams could do to compensate for this is sell the pre-season game tickets for a quarter to half price. If you’re only going to see the first team for about a half or so at most, adjust the costs accordingly. But, this is professional sport, and the owner of your rooting interest is only interested in doing something for you when you can do something for him (like going halfsies on that new stadium by asking you to voluntarily up your property tax rates.) Altruism in the boardrooms of NFL teams is in short supply. Thing is, we’re all just as addicted for evidence that this is the year for our team, even though exhibitions have no relationship to actual regular season performance (Oakland only lost one pre-season game last year before proceeding to go 2-14), and the cycle continues, unmolested.