Keith Strudler: The Pain Of Preseason Football

If you are so inclined to pay attention to the NFL right now, beyond Tom Brady and deflated balls, you know that this is the league’s preseason. Which basically means that these games don’t count. At least not in any standings that determine who goes to the playoffs and who goes home at season’s end. These first four games, while a full 25% the length of the 16 game regular season, really serve two purposes, neither of which have anything to do with winning and losing. First, this allows teams to cut their rosters from 90 to 53 players, essentially Survivor played out over four grueling episodes. That means young and marginal players compete against their teammates as much as any opponent. In fact, we only see star players sparingly during this stretch, since they’ve already cemented their spots. Second, the league and its teams use the preseason as a way of making more money. It’s four filled stadiums using largely marginal talent for games that have no particular significance. It’s like paying full price for preview shows on Broadway, oh, and they only used understudies. That’s the NFL preseason, half the sound and fury that means pretty much nothing.

That said, it doesn’t come without peril. Even pre-season football is still football, which comes with all the inherent physical trauma of the game. That can be especially dangerous for star players, for whom the risk-reward is an unseemly ratio. It’s tough when a team loses a top athlete, like say a starting quarterback or top wide receiver, during the regular season. But that’s an expectation of the sport, where sometimes the spoils go simply to those that can still walk. It’s far more soul crushing when a team loses a top player in a game that simply didn’t matter, at least not to them.

That’s exactly what more than a few NFL franchises are facing, as several notables are literally out for the season before it technically ever begins. That includes the Green Bay Packers top receiver Jordy Nelson, who hurt his knee against the Steelers last weekend. And the Steelers lost starting center Maurkice Pouncey in the same game, as he now heads for ankle surgery. These are on top of the approximately 20 other guys who can pack it in for the year, a majority who seem to have torn their ACL, which apparently is the actual Achilles heel of the NFL.  This isn’t an entirely uncommon situation, although this pre-season seems particularly costly, which could be bad luck, bad policy, or a cocktail of the two.

Regardless, this turn of events has revived the oft-discussed idea of reducing, changing, or even eliminating the NFL preseason, something that would reduce risk while maintaining the integrity of the season itself. Certainly, teams could prepare for the upcoming slate of games though practice, which inherently requires less contact and abandon, two recipes for carnage in any football situation. Of course, that decision is unlikely because of its fiscal repercussions. In fact, the next time any professional sports league reduces its revenue potential will be exactly the first. In fact, the only league proposal to reduce the preseason to two games came with a provision to lengthen the regular season to 18 games, which actually means more injuries along with fatter TV money for the league. Yet another case of more money, more problems to come.

In this recurrent discussion of injuries and preseason, finances and team success are the two dominant topics. But what’s less debated is the true toll this takes on the individual athletes that play the game, some of whose income potential will be forever changed by what happens in a meaningless, preseason contest. You can recover from an ACL tear – in fact, ESPN created an all-ACL team, football players who have recovered fully from this very damaging injury. But this clubs mere existence reminds us that a whole lot of athletes are never the same. And less than 100% is hardly going to work in a job where thousands of younger, hungrier, and healthier athletes desperately want your job and the perks that come with it. In a league that offers no guaranteed contracts, where any year can be your last despite the length of your deal, that’s a risk that goes far beyond knees and ankles. It’s the difference between retirement and bankruptcy, a far too common ailment of ex-NFL athletes.

That’s perhaps the real story of the NFL preseason. Not the cost to a team, nor the meaning of the games. But rather the toll on human lives and their families for something that, outside of making a few dollars, really doesn’t count.

 
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