Sensless Slo-Mo
Mike Leitao ~ 08/26/2024
NFL preseason wrapped up this past weekend and now teams get to decide which players make the final roster and who has their dreams crushed. Real shit, this is when 32 teams have to trim their teams from 70ish players to 53, it’s safe to estimate roughly 650 people will end up jobless within the next week. There’s a level of sadness to it, but everyone knows the NFL is a business first, and this is simply a part of the professional sports industry. But now that preseason is done, can we all just admit preseason football is objectively pointless and a huge waste of time? I get it, it’s 3 weeks of football to allow bench players to show they belong, while also allowing teams to hold position battles for spots they are not sure about. As much sense as that all makes, preseason football has to be the most boring sports experience.
This past Saturday, myself and some friends went down into Philly to watch the Eagles vs Vikings game. The seats were great and the atmosphere was pretty solid too, but the game was so incredibly boring. Yes, I know the eagles got spanked which is partially why the game was ass (scoring 3 whole points really gets the fans going… said no one ever) but even when the Vikings were on offense everything was just monotonous. Standard running plays that picked up solid yardage or quick passes that picked up went some distance, but nothing that got people excited. Now of course, the fact that no starters were playing was a huge reason for the boringness.
Watching a bunch of backups play is certainly less than ideal, I mean, would I rather watch Justin Jefferson, Jalen Hurts, and AJ Brown, OR Myles Gaskin, Tanner McKee, and Jaren Hall? The answer seems clear to anyone with eyes, hell it’s clear even to blind people. But watching backups play isn’t all bad, right? In reality, you’d expect it to actually be pretty fun, expecting players to be playing at 110% since they are fighting for their spot on the roster and to make the team and basically keep a job. Nope. Instead it looked like a bunch of bench players who had no interest in competing and were just trying to collect a paycheck. The game looked and felt like it was moving in slow motion. Now, does this one preseason game really speak for all other preseason games? No, of course not. But you are lying to yourself if you think the preseason is exciting or fun to watch.
There are exciting plays during the games, but for the most part they serve no real purpose. There is no reason to sit through a 3 hour game for the potential of one highlight that you can just go back and watch online after the game and save yourself all that time. I always find it so odd that preseason games aren’t more intense. I understand that when the definitive starters are playing their one or two drives of the game, they are operating quickly and with no intent to go out and make game breaking plays. That makes sense to me, they know their position is secure on the roster and that the most important thing for them is to get some game reps in and be healthy for when the regular season comes and the games actually matter. But for the bench players and players fighting for starting spots, the fact that they play with the same level of intensity (which as a reminder, is not much) is shocking.
These guys are playing for their livelihoods. Imagine every year at your random finance job they brought in new fresh college graduates and some other people from different finance jobs, then you had a month to show that you do better work than them or otherwise you’re cut, and since every major finance company in the country is doing this, if you fail and get fired, you would end up broke, homeless, and unemployed. You bet your ass everyone reading this would be grinding and putting in as much work as possible to show they belong and should keep or earn their job. So I want someone to explain to me why the NFL is so different. Instead of 3 weeks of intense football games that will get fans hyped for the upcoming season, we get 3 weeks of shit football with no intensity or care and a bunch of bad fantasy football takes.
The truth is, the want for intensity and competitiveness would be lower if there was something else at stake during these games, but the truth is there isn’t. Whether a team goes 3-0 or 0-3 it has no impact on what happens once the regular season starts. Sure, a team that goes 0-3 might have some random football analysts saying the team is set to underperform and disappoint and vice versa when a team goes 3-0 the same analysts will say this team is primed to take the next step forward and be contenders. Of course these are never taken seriously by fans because they are normally pretty inaccurate. In 2023, Washington went 3-0 in the preseason just to finish with the second worst record in the league. On the flip side, the Rams went 0-3 and then went on to actually be a competitive team that made the wildcard and almost beat the Lions. All of this is to say that’s it’s obvious that the scores and records of preseason games have no real merit for the regular season, so if the players playing for their livelihoods and futures don’t even seem to give a fuck, why should fans be expected to give up their weekends four weeks early to watch shit football that will mean nothing the next day?
