SCRAP PRE-SEASON AND ROLL OUT A REAL EXHIBITION
If these musings on cleaning the NFL’s mess seem curt, it’s because our time is a factor
The cinematic equivalent of an NFL pre-season game is a shabbily edited, heavily overdubbed TV version of Pulp Fiction. In both cases, what’s the point? Any Quentin Tarantino classic is a frustrating, drastically diminished, dead-dull experience with all the best bits clumsily cut out or sanitized. Particularly with Pulp Fiction — the best bits are scenes with the rawest language, shockingest violence and coarsest interactions, none of which ever make it to family TV. What’s left is nothing close to the real thing.
It’s the same with any NFL preseason game. Coaches do little to no opponent-specific game-planning, starters play briefly or not at all and everything feels like a forced series of soulless, joyless, deliberately conservative player experiments.
Nothing counts, nothing’s on the line, nothing matters and no one cares but GMs, position coaches, down-roster hopefuls and OCD media and fans.
Thank goodness the NFL’s preseason slate is over for another year. All 32 teams played their fourth and final exhibition games on Thursday. Once the league’s GMs and coaches go and cut more than 1,000 players in total by Saturday afternoon, as they pare down from 90-man rosters to 53, the real NFL season finally begins. Thank goodness.
More than I can ever remember, apathy this summer for pre-season NFL football games flatlined. Even commissioner Roger Goodell lobbied hard publicly for change.
We’re hearing idea after idea about how to get rid of one, some or all of these grating, never great exhibition games.
For its part, the NFL would prefer to replace two pre-season games with two regular-season games or even just one. More meaningful games mean more sold-out stadiums and more TV viewer eyeballs, and therefore more revenue. But the NFL Players Association won’t ever agree to subject its members to 12.5 per cent more game violence without major concessions from owners. Hence, stalemate.
Let’s be clear: That owners have long charged full price for pre-season tickets constitutes the worst bargain in North American commerce since Bell Canada charged 75 cents a minute for long-distance daytime calls in the ’80s.
But teeter-tottering between the number of exhibition and regular-season games does not address the central problem: Pre-season games must go.
How would owners replace all the lost revenue? Well, they wouldn’t, but maybe they could come close.
My idea is to retain the same 16-game regular season and scrap all pre-season games, with the following wrinkle.
Because more and more teams find it useful to hold joint practices with another team two or three times a week in August, and because most years tumbleweeds blow across our TVs, sports-wise, on the last two weekends in August, how about this?
On the second-last Saturday and Sunday every August, the NFL holds 16 joint practices — stacking eight such 90-minute sessions in a row on Saturday from midday to the middle of the night, then doing it all again with eight more over 12 hours on Sunday.
Then a week later, on the last Saturday and Sunday of August, all teams that joint-practised on the road the weekend before now become hosts, to even it up, with another round of 16 such scrimmages.
What’s more, you template these 90-minute sessions in all matchups.
For instance, each team’s firststring offence goes against the other’s first-string defence for X number of reps. Then the same for second and third strings. Between scrimmaging, you can squeeze in, say, fire-drill fieldgoal kicks from set distances and hash-mark placements for comparative purposes. Hell, you can even have quarterbacks compete in accuracy competitions, like throwing into a moving barrel on a golf cart, or whatever.
It’s like a Battle of the Network Football Stars. Gimmicky yes, but gimmicks sell on TV this century, as you may have noticed.
Once one joint scrimmage’s 90 minutes are up, the next one immediately begins, and so on, for marathon viewing.
The NFL can sell these scrimmages off to the national networks in bundles on the two Saturdays and two Sundays in question. It’s not sizzling TV, I get it, but it’s better than four quarters of Jacksonville versus Miami over three hours on a Thursday night, as we were subjected to last week.
Apathy this summer for pre-season NFL football games flatlined. Even commissioner Roger Goodell lobbied hard publicly for change.
Besides, what else is there sports-wise to watch on weekend afternoons and evenings in late August, other than who-cares golf and dog-days-of-summer baseball? Four days of footballpalooza sounds better to me.
You hold these scrimmages at teams’ stadiums and open up ticketing to anyone. Season ticket holders get no first dibs. Charge only, say, $20 for adults and teens, $10 for seniors and children or whatever, but with assigned seating, like a rock concert — first come, first served. Get all the players to sign autographs for an hour afterward too, to make it fan friendly.
In summary, fans watching on TV win (football-palooza without the charade of these being real games), fans at the game win (shorter, cheaper, more interesting — and autographs!) and players win (fewer chances of getting injured). Coaches still get meaningful chances to see what all 90 players can do against other teams’ NFLers in real competitive settings.
Yeah, the owners take something of a revenue hit, but the commish can always say they’re dropping the idea of more regular-season games for safety’s sake — and get PR points for that.
Look, I’m sure not The Wolf, one of many memorable characters in Pulp Fiction. If you recall, he was the tuxedoed ultimate Mr. Fix-it who screeches to the rescue in a fancy sports car and rattles off rat-a-tat instructions that, if followed quickly and correctly, will tidy up the big, bloody, brain-splattered mess before the homeowner’s wife returns from work.
But something along the line of my suggestion above might work. Pretty please — with sugar on top.