Detroit Lions: We don’t need to watch the preseason
Preseason is a good way for NFL coaches to assess and advise their players in game-like scenarios. We don’t need to watch it, but we will anyway.
When I was a kid, I had a ravenous appetite for the preseason. Football had been gone for six months and I was ready to watch games again, even meaningless ones. I remember taking careful notes on players during games, straining to hear the online radio call on vacations and camping trips and staying up all night to watch re-broadcasts.
I don’t have the preseason schedule memorized anymore, nor do I count down the days until kickoff in my head. When I looked up the Detroit Lions‘ preseason opener and saw that it kicks off at 10:30 Eastern, I groaned at the prospect of sitting in a sports bar until 2 a.m. watching Jake Rudock handoff to Dwayne Washington on third-and-nine. It’s not that I don’t like football, it’s that I don’t really care for preseason football—which is football only in the broadest sense of the term—and here’s why:
1. It’s bad football
NFL teams start the preseason with 90 guys on their rosters. That means that almost half of the players we’ll see play in August won’t be on an NFL field in September. Nothing against these folks, they should get their opportunity to impress on an actual field, but it doesn’t mean I need to watch them.
We watch preseason football in part because it’s the only game in town and football has been effectively gone for half a year, but we wouldn’t watch it if we were subjected to it during a real season. The starters play their two drives or whatever, running simple route combinations designed to ease them back into the flow of playing at game speed, and then the scrubs come in and the level of play drops significantly.
One of the main reasons that the NFL’s post-AFL competition has fizzled out is because the talent disparity is real between the Sunday starters and the practice squad. Players who do succeed in the preseason oftentimes can’t hang when they get their opportunities in the regular season because football is very difficult.
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2. We don’t learn as much as we think we do
To be clear, I am not anti-preseason football as a thing that exists. I am anti-me-being-subjected-to-four-weeks-of-scrimmages. Preseason football is a valuable thing for coaches trying to watch players in a real-game setting. But those coaches also watch those same players for several hours every day performing rep after rep after rep that even the best press pass doesn’t give an outsider access to.
The games also give young players a chance to hit some folks who aren’t each other so the coaches can see how they react to looks and players they don’t see in practice every day. This information is extremely helpful for coaches, but not nearly as much for fans and writers who get to see only a fraction of practice time and don’t have as much of a sample size to go off of.
When pundits wonder if an undrafted rookie’s fumble or dropped pass in the third quarter of the Hall of Fame game will affect his stock, the answer is “probably not.” The coaches and managers making those decisions know everything about these players, down to the hundredth of a percentile. If someone has a turnover problem or gives up too many pressures or is too slow to track a receiver in deep man coverage, the coaches know this before the games tell them. What they learn in the games serves to complement and complete the picture they get in camp.
3. The camp darling trap
Every year, we are inundated with roster projections, bubble watches and long biopics on camp darlings. All of the tags on those articles will then go unused again until next year when that same player is on the bubble again, only this time he’s going up against a fancy new rookie.
Camp darlings rarely make an impact. Remember Ricardo Silva? Matt Willis? George Winn? Kellen Moore? All of them were huge hits in camp, making headlines calling for them to make the team or even be a significant contributor. Of course, none of them were. (Moore, for what it’s worth, is a brilliant person and is now the Dallas Cowboys’ quarterbacks coach). There are dozens of players like them every year all of the league that get cut or maybe make the practice squad only to get an occasional healthy scratch on gameday.
Very rarely does a camp darling have a real impact on a team during the regular season, but even when they do (Joique Bell, Joseph Fauria, Zach Zenner), that impact is usually limited to a supplementary role for a season or two until a better player comes around. These players are almost never permanent solutions to roster holes, but rather stop-gaps until the team can draft or sign someone better to take over the position.
All of this being said, I’m not saying “don’t watch the preseason.” I’m just saying you don’t need to. Feel free to watch a movie or play a game or something. Football will be here when you get back after Labor Day.
NEXT: Three early candidates for Lions preseason darling
I also know that I’ll be here on Thursday, August 10 at two in the freaking morning watching Jake Rudock handoff to Dwayne Washington on third-and-nine. I will argue with my friends—who will also suffer through it—that the Lions don’t need to carry three quarterbacks on their roster and I will read (and probably even write) those roster projection articles because football is going to suck me in once again like it always does.