Like in any other game, injuries occur in the preseason, and this year has seen what seems like an abnormally large amount of them. For example, Spencer Ware, Julian Edelman, Ryan Tannehill, and Cameron Meredith, four superstars in the NFL, have all endured season-ending injuries without even getting to play in a regular season game. Odell Beckham Jr, too, one of the most talented and popular players in the NFL, took a hard hit to hit to the leg and suffered an injury on August 21st.
If the NFL really wants to start demonstrate that it's willing to make sacrifices that will actually benefit player safety in and of itself, rather than player safety to avoid negative PR or lawsuits, it should consider shortening or even completely eliminating the preseason altogether. You can only take so many hits in the NFL, only play so many games before your body is going to break down. The NFL understand this concept, as both the intensity and frequency of training camp practices has been gradually dulled down in the past decade in order to keep players safe. But having a long preseason just needlessly puts players in dangerous situations. By comparison, the NBA allows a maximum of 8 preseason games for each team, about 10% the amount of games played in the regular season. The NHL allows a maximum of 9 games, a bit over 10% of the regular season schedule. So for the NFL, the highest league of the most violent major sport in the United States, to add an extra 25% with four games to a regular season that is already grueling makes no sense.
Back several decades ago, when some NFL players had other jobs outside of football or when players didn't have the opportunities to stay connected the football that modern technology affords, I can see an argument for having a long preseason to allow players to brush off the cobwebs and get into football shape again. But nowadays, when players workout year round, when it's easy to study the playbook and watch film from your own couch, when there's numerous optional practices in April and May known as organized team activities (OTAs), a lengthy preseason is unnecessary.
The main argument, though, is that preseason games are necessary for evaluating talent and finding your starters, backups, and determining which players will ultimately be traded or released. After all, each team starts with 90 players to start training camp, and their rosters must be whittled down to only 53 active players by the end of the season. While this argument isn't wrong per se, it's just not necessary. I mean, coaches and scouts at this level know how to evaluate talent, and in the grand scheme of things, past performances in important games and in daily practices are much more telling than how a player performs on a random Tuesday night preseason game. The NCAA doesn't have preseason football (besides maybe an intrasquad scrimmage), for example, and I doubt that Jim Harbaugh or Nick Saban struggle to set their opening day depth charts as a result. Plus, NFL teams already do joint practices with other teams, which gives the chance to see different looks and skillsets.
Many proponents of preseason (not that there are many of them) will also argue that football is unique in that players need to experience "live action" and acclimate to the physical contact of a game before the season actually gets going, and I agree to some extent. But this goal can be achieved through just one or two preseason games; it certainly doesn't require four. And plus, so long as every team is playing the same amount of exhibition matches, they'll all be on the same level anyway going into the regular season, so even if less preseason would tarnish the quality of the first regular season game or so (which I highly doubt it would), at least all teams would need to make the same acclimations. Overall, the preseason is just an unnecessary hazard, and whatever minuscule excitement comes from seeing an uncompetitive game is drowned out by a fear of players getting hurt.
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| Odell Beckham, Jr. |
