The NFL regular season will officially begin in nine days when the Future Super Bowl Champion Bills face off with the Reigning Super Bowl Champion Rams. Before we get to that point, however, let’s talk about the absurdity of the current incarnation of the NFL preseason and how the advent of the 17 game schedule has royally screwed up everything for everyone.
The meat of this article isn’t going to take long to explain. By adding a regular season game and subsequently removing a preseason game, the NFL has destroyed the established order of the preseason. Previously, everyone knew that Game 3 was the “dress rehearsal” and that the starters would play a half and maybe a little of the third quarter to get some meaningful practice in. Sure, you’d see teams with especially bitchy QBs sit them all preseason (not mentioning any names), but the vast majority played their games this way. Game 4 would then be the last gasp for the bubble players to try to get on a roster or practice squad somewhere in the league.
The three game preseason schedule screws this up completely. For some reason, coaches aren’t talking to their counterparts about who is going to play in what game, so we see completely useless garbage where the 1s may go against 2s and 3s in Game 2, but the next week the same team is playing their 2s and 3s against the opponent’s 1s and nobody is getting any useful practice or evaluation of players out of it.
Now, sure, teams could actually coordinate if they cared about this enough, and their unwillingness to do so baffles me, but the root cause is that the NFL pushed to get a 17th game purely because of greed. There’s just no point in a 17th game, in my opinion; it ruins record keeping, adds additional chances for injury before the playoffs, and uneven numbers bother me.
Additional rambling thoughts:
- The Bills OL is going to be a problem all year. Why the hell we don’t prioritize protecting Allen is beyond me.
- Skylar Thompson is clearly superior to Tua. Controversy!
- The Jets are a dumpster fire.
- Somehow the Patriots are an even larger dumpster fire.
- I maintain that it would not shock me if the Patriots finished behind the Jets in the standings.
- I am thrilled that the NFL ranked Allen 13th after the 13 second debacle. As if Allen needed another reason to rain down an ungodly firestorm of destruction upon opposing defenses this year.
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