Preseason Football: How Much are the Injuries Worth? by Gabe Grossman
Written by Foresight
Monday, 27 August 2007
Last weekend the Falcons saw their quarterback depth-chart take another hit losing DJ Shockley for the season to an ACL injury on Friday night. The Redskins were more fortunate with Jason Campbell only taking a bruised knee out of the injury he suffered. The Giants and Ravens combined for 6 injuries in their Sunday game and there were a host of other sprains, strains, tears, pulls and breaks during the first two weeks of preseason action.
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With the importance of entering the grueling 16-game regular season with a healthy roster, it’s hard not to see the preseason as a serious risk to any teams’ fortunes. Some see this as a reason to shorten the preseason, but to me taking away even one game from the schedule is an evil that outweighs the harm it’s meant to prevent. The importance of developing younger players in the preseason can’t be taken lightly. When coaches stress how a multi-day holdout from training camp can set a rookie back months, you’ve got to appreciate how much of a difference each preseason game makes in the growth of recent draftees. It normally takes more than a full season to adjust to playing in the pros, and a fourth game before anything counts can be crucial in trying to adjust. That single game represents the equivalent of 5.5% of a regular season and even more when realizing that these younger players get far more playing time then they enjoy in regular season games when almost every down matters.
Beyond rookies, players trying to make a roster and get playing time during the season use every minute of preseason playing time available to prove their value to a team. One extra down where a defensive lineman executes a perfect swim move to beat out a tackle and sack the QB could mean the difference between a roster spot and looking for a new career, and one less game eliminates 60+ downs per team on offense and defense. That one more game before rosters get trimmed for the regular season represents a myriad of opportunities for players on the fringe to establish themselves as an asset to their team. With the starters and immediate back-ups normally entrenched on the roster, the remaining players have roughly a 50/50 chance of making the team from the cut of 70 down to 53 for the regular season, and those players definitely deserve every possibility to show they can make the cut.
Furthermore, teams need time to adjust to each other and work cohesively. As many heard Madden say last week on the Sunday night game, it takes well into the regular season till a defense will be able to defend the bootleg correctly as a unit. With the large amount of roster upheaval and player movement each off-season, the 4th game can provide opportunities to evaluate a teams progress after another week of practice, even for the starting players who only play the first few series of each preseason game. Though a team can try and evaluate itself during the week, adjusting to playing a real opponent better displays a team’s weakness than the drills and scrimmages run in practice every week.
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Finally, as you may have realized by now if you’ve read my previous posts, I am a huge fan of sports and almost always think from that perspective first, and the seven months between the SuperBowl and the beginning of preseason is simply torture for me. Don’t get me wrong, I love college basketball and March Madness, and the NBA has its moments, like watching LeBron and Boobie dismantle the Pistons in the playoffs, but nothing touches football in my mind. With the college football season layoff lasting even longer, the first NFL preseason game feels like that first day of spring after a long bitterly cold winter; sure it’s not summer, but even a little sun beats the freezing cold. Granted the NFL will likely switch to a 17-game season soon to incorporate one game played overseas, meaning one less preseason game wouldn’t change the overall length of the layoff; but I’d just rather see that “winter” end a week early when the season is lengthened.
Compared to these benefits, the chance of injury is outweighed, if only in my mind. Players face injury every week of the regular season and are just as likely to be injured in weeks 1-4 and have the same affect on their team as they do in the preseason. It’s not like the risk of a season ending injury disappears once the season begins. Players get injured in training camp as well, just look at Frank Gore’s hand, and no one would suggest the potential for injury in those circumstances outweighs the value to their team. If a team is really worried about a key player whose value to the team outweighs the worth of playing in the preseason, they should place the player on the bench, like the Chargers have done with LT. It prevents the team from being killed by the preseason injury, and if it’s not worth sitting the player then the benefits of the preseason clearly outweigh the risk of harm. And that way I don’t have to sit through an extra week without football.
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