Football is a game of injury. It is not if you will get hurt, but when. We love this collision sport for modern day gladiators more than life itself sometimes. Yet, I often find the nature of NFL preseason games to be rather silly. Fewer and fewer teams are taking them seriously, preferring to get more of their thoughts and analysis on their teams in the form of joint practices. Are they the sport's future?
For as long as mom-and-pop franchises like the Cincinnati Bengals exist, preseason games are going to continue. Making whatever money you can get at the gate is still really important for franchises run by second and third-generation owners who have never even bothered to diversify their portfolios. Factor in teams like Cincinnati getting off to a slow start a season ago, and this is a recipe for disaster.
Because Cincinnati played so poorly to start last season, it was important to Bengals head coach Zac Taylor to get off to a fast one this year. His methodology for fixing this is to play his starters far more than his contemporaries ever would. It resulted in one particularly reckless play in which Bengals star quarterback Joe Burrow had to scramble for his life, only to be dragged for huge loss vs. Washington.
Had he have gotten hurt, I wonder if the NFL would have done anything at all, unlike with Michael Vick.
NFL preseason games are diminishing the league's product exponentially
I do not know if the NFL is ever going to get this right. It is very hard to simulate game speed without playing in a game. Doing that can, and will, result in injuries. The last thing you want is for the face of your franchise's season to be over before the calendar even flips to September. By adding a 17th regular-season game, it has caused the NFL preseason to shrink down from four games to only three.
In the day and age of more joint practices, maybe that could serve as a solution to the potential downside of preseason games? For the most part, very few teams are playing their starters hardly at all in these preseason games because the risk is not worth the reward. Teams like the Bengals may still exist, but this was only being done to prove a point in Taylor's eyes. He is on the hot seat, too...
I think my big point in all this is less may actually be more for the NFL. We have seen over the last several decades that there are not 32 quality quarterbacks to be had in the world at any given point in time. A few teams do not have one. Losing a top-five quarterback in the world in Burrow would be devastating for the NFL's overall product. There are already enough bad games being played weekly...
The other thing that I keep going back to mentally is we like the NFL because is it weekly appointment television. People want the best of the best going at it every week, and always on Sunday. Unless you have team-rooting interest, nobody wants to watch bad NFL football. There are not levels to this like college football, where it is easier to derive joy from watching two teams who are never winning it all.
In the end, the NFL needs to continue prioritizing one clash of the titans after another. Outside of growing the financial pie, a 17th regular-season game was not necessary. Neither was adding a seventh playoff team to each conference. We do not need more exposure, we actually need less of it. It should be a treat to watch Burrow play, not in some glorified exhibition that is never going to matter.
I would be in favor of every team having three or four joint-practice sessions than a preseason game.