For Pederson, camp is no time for games
In a normal NFL preseason, if that’s what any of them could have been called, Doug Pederson would have done the usual in the past few days.
He would have cut practice early Tuesday to point the Eagles toward a game that would have so little relevance that there wouldn’t even be a sophisticated betting line.
He would have shepherded his players onto a plane to Indianapolis Wednesday, dozens and dozens of them, a sizable portion barely ready for the XFL.
By Thursday morning, he would have mentioned once, twice, six dozen times how it was important to give his quarterback a load-management night.
He would have executed the normal game-night skit, which is to say he would have coached a football game with exactly zero concern for whether it was won or lost.
By Friday, he would have given his players off. Saturday would have been a light day. Who knows about Sunday?
Yes, that’s what Doug Pederson would have had planned for this week, and for a preseason that was to begin Thursday in front of 60,000 Indianapolis-ians made to pay to have their football senses insulted. Instead? Instead, the Eagles’ coach will continue to prepare a football team to win regular-season games. By Monday, he will be running real practices. Because of the way a health scare fractured the normal offseason, he will give most of the reps to the starters. Then he’ll do the same the next day.
He’ll make it work, emphasis on work.
“I don’t think the practices will be any more intense than they usually are,” Pederson was saying Wednesday. “Training camp practices are grueling anyway. The one thing you have when you are not playing games is you actually don’t have as many days off. Usually, they have a game when the starters play a series or two, then have the next day off, then we go back to work.
“So it’s a little more of a fluid schedule, I would say, in the next couple of weeks. We’re going to have a lot of good answers because of the amount of days that we will have stacked, back to back.”
Pro football, true story, is a money-making endeavor. For that, its curators haven’t cared for decades that offseason preparation was disrupted by madefor-TV slapstick. Once, preseason games were used for an honest purpose, which was to ready the best football players in the world for meaningful games. No more. Yet unlike other stunts imposed to allow sports to continue through all the relentless fear-mongering, including the goofy seven-inning major-league baseball game, the disintegration of the NFL preseason is a welcome side effect.
When camp begins at normal speed next week, Pederson will be ready. He was cleared by the grownups-in-charge to live his life after failing a test they made him take even though he wasn’t ill, and he assures that he continued to coach the Eagles from home during a forced quarantine. With minor exceptions, whatever restrictions the Eagles have had during the slow-down were the same as every other team in their league. If that meant there was a prohibition on OTAs in the spring, well, what is coaching anyway if not a challenge to adapt?
“It starts Monday, and obviously I am looking forward to that,” Pederson said. “I typically have two days where it is a live, controlled practice, with tackle to the ground. And I am going to stick to that schedule.”
According to Pederson, not only are the Eagles about where they should be less than a month from traveling to their season opener against Washington FT, but their base offenses and defenses already have been firmly taught and grasped. With that, he already has moved toward seeing that his players are ready for situational football.
Pederson has been in charge since 2016, a relatively long time in his industry. While the Eagles had some reasonable offseason turnover, they are basically a veteran team with a veteran coach and defensive coordinator and a starting quarterback heading into his fifth season and, thus, into the belly of his career. All of that left them in better position than most teams to deal with whatever limits were imposed during the recess.
“It’s a fine line,” Pederson said. “We’ve got to get answers on these players. All 32 teams are in the same boat, the same situation, the same scenario. So it’s a matter of putting these players in practice situations, to show what they can do. And, really, once the pads come on, you’ll really see again and how they will suit what we need as an offense, defense and obviously special teams.”
At some point in the normal mess of preseason games, there might have been a total of 30 minutes of meaningful football. Maybe one young walk-on could have used the exhibition games to win a career. Maybe.
For that, it’s better to have serious practices and controlled scrimmages, the kind without the halftime marching bands.
“I remember back when I was a young player, getting those reps with the starters gets your juices flowing a little bit,” Pederson said. “It’s exciting. It’s a game rep for them. It’s a true feeling of what game day is like.
“I am still going to do that. The coordinators are still going to do that, to have our guys prepared to go and, at the same time, find answers about some of these young players.”
That can be done without preseason games. In fact, it will be done even better.