The Long Off-Season
Preseason football is to regular football like vegan cheese is to real cheese: lacking flavor — and bloodshed.
Football season is here, and it’s a great relief.
It’s not so much because I want to see the games. I mean, I do want to see some of the
games. But what I want, most of all, is for the lists to end.
If you’ve followed the offseason before, then you know what I mean. But if you’ve never
followed watched football when it’s not on, then today’s post is for you.
During the NFL offseason, there are only three important times: the free agent period
(March 13 to July 22), where teams try to fill gaps in their rosters by purchasing the
services of veteran players; the draft (April 25-27), where organizations try to figure out
which rookies coming from college will make the best additions to their teams; and the
preseason (August 1 to August 25), where teams figure out which of the ninety players
they have in their training camps will make it to their final, fifty-three men rosters.
If you didn’t know any better, you’d think that, actually, there’s a lot of football
happening, even when no real games are being played. After all, it looks like important
stuff is going on from March 13 to July 22, and then from August 1 to August 25.
But that is extremely untrue. It’s like saying that I had dinner from 6 PM until 3 PM the
next day, because 6 PM is when I sat down to start eating the Clams Casino, and 3 PM
is when my body expelled them.
Even though the free agent period technically lasts for four months, the only interesting
part of it is the first three days, because that’s when all the big free agents get signed.
After that, teams are just looking for their fifth kickers and third long snappers. Similarly,
although the draft takes place over three days, the portion that sets imaginations sailing
is the first hour, because that’s when the rookies you’ve heard of get sent to the teams
you hate. Finally, no part of the preseason is interesting: there is no correlation between
how you do in the preseason and how you do in the regular season. Pretty much the
only reason to watch is to see if a player has his season ended because he fell over
wrong on the way to the locker room and now has four fewer bones.
Despite all this, professional football is such a popular sport in America that the ratings
even for these events are massive. Day 1 of the NFL draft was watched by 12.1 million
households, more than the average for the NBA Finals. In other words, people are
thirsty for football even when there’s no football to drink. Not surprisingly, websites,
YouTube channels, TV shows, and books are only too happy to sell fake drinks.
I regret to say that I contributed to this phenomenon. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying
I regret because I helped to keep these things alive; the army of Frankenstein’s
monsters will keep on going even if they don’t get any of my brain. No, I regret
contributing to the phenomenon because all this content is fucking terrible.
Before the free agent period, what these shows do is tell you who they think will go to
which team, and then offering a top ten list of which projected free agent signings were
the best, even though these projections are wholly imaginary. After the free agent
period, you get grades for which team did the best job of drafting free agents, even
though none of the agents have played a single snap yet. And the same thing happens
for the draft. And the same thing happens for preseason.
The entirety of the NFL offseason is people yelling at each other for disagreeing with
each other about their fake lists and baseless rankings. And this is what I spent time on.
All summer. For at least an hour a day, and on many days, several hours.
The deeper I got into this, the more it affected how I thought and felt about the
Cincinnati Bengals. If The Athletic gave them a B on their free agent signings, I felt
crestfallen. If Pro Football Focus gave them an A on their draft, I was on top of the
world. When they lost a preseason game to the Bears 27-3, I felt like they’d have a
losing record on the season, despite the fact that for the first half they were playing their
second stringers against the Bears’ starting lineup.
I want to emphasize that I knew, the whole time, that all of this was made up. When
Nick Wright predicted that the Bengals would lose the 2025 AFC championship game to
the Chiefs, this was heavy, but it should have had as much weight as Robby Mook
predicting who would be the Democratic presidential candidate in 2044.
As the offseason went on, I found myself saying stuff like “Joe Burrow’s record against
Patrick Mahomes was 3-1,” even though Burrow plays against the Kansas City Chiefs’
defense, and Mahomes plays against the Cincinnati Bengals’ defense. I was also
exercising more; I noticed more definition in my arms and legs. Moreover, I started to
suffer from increased desire to play video games, rather than, say, reading books.
I realized: I was becoming a bro.
I decided I had to do something about it. And what I decided I had to do was stop
watching these shows, stop reading these websites, and start finding something else to
occupy my time.
And I did. I started playing fantasy football.
Sometimes, the only way out is through.
