Pretreason

When you do a dumb thing long enough, you get all kinds of apologies for it. Such is the story of the NFL's preseason, which has been with us for decades now, mostly to drive up the costs for season ticket holders and add to the comfort level of NFL coaches.

I get why the league does this. They have a monopoly, for the moment, on football played by adults in their prime in this country, so they can call their shots with the strongest brand in the sports marketplace. And as the NFL is something like the most popular ten sports in the country right now, they get to call the tune. But that doesn't mean it's right, or should be defended.

NFL apologists say that you need the preseason to avoid sloppy play in Week One, and cite some ugly college football play as a precedent. Which fails to recognize the following points.

1) Other pro football leagues, such as the CFL, USFL, NFL Europe and Arena Ball, never had preseason games, and didn't have noticeably awful Week Ones. Pro leagues, with players in their primes, longer training times and much more stable rosters, are a much better corollary than college ball.

2) People do, actually, get hurt. Maybe not so many as to be season-changing, and this year has been helpful in terms of not having a notable fantasy guy go down... but if you are, say, in the immediate family of Chicago running back Kevin Jones or New Orleans tight end Billy Miller, you're wondering just what deity your man cheesed off. Having a career end via injury is tragic; having it end in a game that doesn't even count is just inexcusable.

3) You Learn Nothing. My Eagles might have a defensive problem this year. With MLB Stewart Bradley out and defensive coordinator Jim Johnson coming up with schemes in the next world, combined with the team's usual worries about stopping the run, and I'm concerned enough to have avoided the Eagles defense in every roto league I've been in this year. In Week 4, they gave up a ton of yards to some Jets smurf (Danny Woodhead, a 5'-9" back from Chadron State) that got cut anyway. They've given up over 100 points in four preseason games.

But the preseason isn't the place to determine it.

After a decade of the Andy Reid Experience, I've learned a few things. The team isn't going to manage the clock or timeouts as well as it should, it does not give a damn what the media or public thinks about anything, and what you think you might know from the preseason means nothing. Brian Westbrook hasn't gotten work in the preseason since he was a fantasy league sleeper. Fourth-string wideouts will look good, then never be heard from again. Guys making big defensive plays aren't long for the world. And kicker or punter competitions are in name only. The best a preseason hero (like this year's, Danny Amendola) can hope for in Philadelphia is a practice squad spot.

I'm pretty sure that nothing will stop the preseason, short of a class-action lawsuit from the season ticket holders of America, and probably not even then. And in the escalating information war that is fantasy football, there's also no avoiding the fact that the ratings for it will continue to climb. It's been going on for so long now, it has its own momentum.

But in a better world, it wouldn't happen, and if the league ever goes to what the world really wants -- more regular season games -- it'll go away. And when it does, no one will shed a tear.