On Frozen Blog

I confess I’ve never understood the length, breadth, and brutality of the NFL preseason. With athletes in all sports — including intercollegiate ones — now training year-round, the practice by pro football of spending a month-and-a-half-plus in helmets and pads, beating each other’s brains out, out in summer’s worst heat, strikes me as nothing short of insane.

The topic is salient as the Redskins, already underwhelming most observers with their 2008 prospects, and guided by a new coach who’s never coached before — (they may well finish last in their division) — lost one of their most important players on defense on the very first play of practice on the very first day of training camp yesterday. For the season. Later in the day, they lost another defensive end, also for the season, a reserve, who ruptured his achilles tendon. One might be inclined to chalk this up to really bad luck, except that as NFL preseasons have lengthened and intensified most especially in the last 10 years, as players once sized for the defensive line now roam at safety, and as linebackers now run not much slower than wideouts, the triage has multiplied. More NFL players, including front-liners, are certain to go down over the next six weeks — they always do. And the NFL doesn’t care.

In a very real sense contemporary pro football has become a game of brutal attrition. It’s positively preposterous to try and forecast a season ahead before first figuring out who survives all the way through August.

Phillip Daniels is a 12-year NFL veteran. In taking reps (well, one, anyway) yesterday with the ‘Skins, he was preparing for a season opener more than 45 days away. What in the world are the Redskins — and the rest of the NFL — doing scheduling such stress and duress?

I’m not the only one wondering about this madness.

Indicting the sport most might be its collegiate counterpart: without a single “preseason” game the NCAA pigskinners seem to open up with high-value heart-stoppers each and every Labor Day weekend. Consider too that unlike the collegians, NFLers have no limit on the amount of hours they can put in in a week training, studying film, and participating in offseason “mini-camps” and “voluntary workouts,” which of course are voluntary in name only. I think the Redskins have about a half dozen of those throughout the calendar now. By virtue of the commitment NFLers make around the calendar to their profession, there’s just no defense for the prolonged training camps of today.

One of the reasons the camp injuries are as dire as they annually are is because the camps are contested in extreme conditions — high heat and humidity. You also now have hundreds of three-hundred-plus-pounders competing in them, and you don’t have to be a cardiologist to know that those folks generally don’t prosper exercising in extreme heat. With their heads encased in oven-like shells.

Once upon a time, the NFL started training camps in August, conducted its season, which ended in January, and then spent late winter and spring and early summer healing up. And the football played then was rather good; some, like me, thought it better than today’s.

Today there is no offseason, in the NFL or really in any other sport, so why start the head-bashing, knee-destroying, and tendon-rupturing while embers from the 4th of July are still aglow?

All teams play a minimum of four preseason games, and starters are expected to play nearly a half of each game because . . . teams charge regular season prices for the ghoulish meat grinder-slaughterfests. I don’t doubt that a healthy majority of NFL clubs have lobbied the league office over the years to try and get the preseason shortened — motivated by a basic sense of survival. But now we’re getting to the heart of the matter: season tickets owners in Washington don’t have the option of not spending hundreds more on the meaningless slate of exhibitions. And the hundreds more on parking.

And always the games are atrocious to watch. Even if you hate baseball you should watch it instead of the NFL’s July and August dreck.

I’m not ignorant about football players needing their “reps.” And I realize that a handful of rookies need to be evaluated in game-like situations. But given the gazillions the NFL spends evaluating college players year-round, and in combines and such, you can’t make the argument that teams need half a summer to evaluate their new personnel. Or that grizzled vets need months’ worth of reps in triple-digit temps.

The NHL with its preseason has actually taken an alternative strategy with that of the NFL, and shortened it in recent years. Teams will commence camp in mid-September and have just three weeks of training and exhibitions before the arrival of opening week. Talk to any NHL manager and he’ll tell you that his players will show up in mid-September in shape and ready to skate. We can quibble over whether the preseason should extend more than 5 games, but it’s clear that the NHL, unlike the NFL, isn’t motivated by negligent and malicious greed, for hardly anyone attends NHL exhibition games. And by virtue of having a viable feeder development league in the ‘A,’ with annual promotions for virtually every club from it, hockey’s exhibitions are defensible events as auditions of the up-and coming.

Moreover, hockey clubs aren’t obligated to dress their stars — Ovechkin might skate two of the September games, for instance.

It’s really striking when you consider how relatively blessed the NHL is when it comes to being able to dress, durably, its stars from opening night on through the postseason. It’s a fierce and rugged sport to be sure, but it’s managed by men who care about the welfare of their charges and enact training schedules to protect them.