The NFL Should Add Preseason Games After the Draft Like NBA Summer League
Welcome to Bad Takes Week, where MMQB staffers have been asked to expand upon some of their worst football takes. Keep an eye out for more of these throughout the week, and every story is posted here.
Here’s an idea so lucrative, and so disadvantageous to player health and safety that I’m shocked the NFL hasn’t come up with it yet on its own: We need to double the NFL preseason, not cut it in half.
Welcome to The MMQB’s Bad Takes Week. I’m your opening act, Conor Orr.
To have a truly bad take, you have to feel it a little bit in your soul. You have to fight for it like an undersized child. You have to see something in nothing. And after watching a half decade of could-be-better play on the field, I’m ready to get creatively Parcells-ian with my thoughts on offseason practice limitations. We saw the trade-off players made during collective bargaining negotiations. In exchange for less wear and tear on their bodies, less forced obsession with their craft, and less time listening to coaches summarize the 30% of a Malcolm Gladwell book they digested on Audible for motivational purposes, they submitted to seasons with less preparation time. As someone who actively tries to prevent his workplace from occupying too much of his headspace, I’m all for it (the physical worries with sportswriters are more relative to doughnut consumption than head-on collisions). But as someone who believes in the majesty and the potential of the preseason, I’m here to propose a bit of an alternative.
Let’s have teams play three games right after the draft in addition to the three games they currently play in the immediate lead-up to the season. Let’s put them in a few centralized venues like the NBA does in Las Vegas with its Summer League. If a team doesn’t want to play its guys and would rather trot out an army of soon-to-be-cut hangers-on, that’s their prerogative. If a team would rather test the limits of its roster’s collective endurance and start Week 1 with a group that’s basically been playing together since early May and then clean up over the first half of the season, it’s more than welcome to.
Imagine a world in which Bryce Young has already played three preseason games for the Panthers.
Jim Dedmon/USA TODAY Sports
The reasons why the league wouldn’t do such a thing are obvious. But have we considered the benefits?
• Teams are loading up on joint practices anyway. Centralizing an early preseason schedule would be a faster way to acclimate the rookie class and a better way for coaches to gauge talent before independent practice sessions.
• The increased number of games would give coaches a longer runway to be creative schematically. At the moment, the truncated preseason is a de facto eliminator of the NFL’s lower class. Players who slip through the draft industrial complex are hosed after being treated like tackling dummies throughout the course of a long training camp. This limits what coaches can do and almost always benefits offenses that can take advantage of defenses that are bound to a few vanilla concepts. Most really talented offensive gurus are simply exploring the limitations of a defense via various pokes and prods, then majoring in that defense’s greatest deficiencies.
• The atmosphere in, say, Minnesota during the early summer with eight NFL teams in town for scrimmages would be electric. The NBA Summer League is its own separate peace, and the NFL would be able to tap into the convergence of fans in one space. You could create a small round-robin tournament (and of course broadcast partners would line up to pay money to put it on television). Imagine the possibilities, all of which John Harbaugh would be obsessed with becoming undefeated in.
• It could extend the life of our favorite college-only players and create the space for more Victor Cruz–type stories to exist. Whenever we hear about a player emerging after a few years in Canada or the XFL, our immediate reaction is wonder and inspiration when it should be frustration. All of these players were good before, but through one pitfall or the next, they were disallowed to grow into their bodies, into their schemes or into their adult brains. Elongating the preseason would foster more legitimate chances for those players to surface and, even if they’re not a fit on a roster at the time, help them more easily get called up and plugged in during the season.
• It would negate a horrifying trend of quarterback mediocrity. The hardest position to play in professional sports is in dire straights. Or, perhaps, in comparison to Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen and a handful of other players, the largest part of the talent pool pales in comparison to its top one percent. Providing more showcases within NFL offenses could stabilize the pool of quarterbacks and help uncover more Brock Purdy–type players. We could have an entire spring of Holton Ahlers, the Seahawks’ undrafted free agent and certified Norse god. We could have an entire spring of Dane Sanzenbacher.
• We could have the wonderful moments, currently exclusive to the NBA Summer League or sometimes events like the World Baseball Classic, where legitimate professionals are punked by athletes with résumé items like undrafted tight end out of Memphis State. Wouldn’t you love to see some linebacker from the Carolina Computer Coding Academy rumble into a Derrick Henry iso handoff and knock the biggest running back in the NFL on his bike seat?
Look, the NFL is already ridiculous. It’s already incredibly unsafe. And so, like other workforces when confronted with the same problem, the league should try the only suitable solution. Make more of it.
