I'm Ready for Some Real NFL Football

By LES EAST

The NFL exhibition season should be over by now. The NFL prefers the term preseason, but that lends excessive credibility to these glorified, full-priced scrimmages.

Enough is enough. Everybody plays at least four of these things, and a couple of teams have to play five. I can remember when everybody used to play six.

Length does matter, and the NFL exhibition season is too long.

It’s time to shorten it to two games for each team. As it is, most teams rest their key players for most if not all of the fourth game, making it a de facto three-game preseason for the best players.

Coaches have figured out there’s nothing to be gained by exposing important players to potential injuries when they could be using the latter exhibitions as final auditions for the guys competing for the final roster spots.

I’ve seen the New Orleans Saints play two exhibition games, and I can say that they are ready for the start of the regular season. OK, maybe that’s not the best example because they get to open with the Lions.

But the Saints are 2-0, opening with a pedestrian victory against the Bengals, then winning impressively against the Texans.

After two games, I know this much:

Quarterback Drew Brees is ready to open against anyone even though he missed a scrimmage and a few practices in the wake of his mother’s recent death.

Reggie Bush has missed numerous practices because it doesn’t make sense to put a surgically repaired knee through two-a-days. He missed the game against the Texans because of a calf strain. The only thing more exhibition action can do for him is expose to him to potentially further injury.

All across the NFL, regular season-ending injuries, exhibition season-ending injuries, and injuries that put players’ availability in doubt for their teams’ season openers have occurred. Unfortunately, more are bound to come, and worst of all, one or more could claim someone on my fantasy roster.

Coaches will be using the last two exhibitions to make final decisions on roster cuts, but if they had two games instead of four, they would easily adjust playing time to get a sufficient look at the competing fringe players.

They’d also cut back on the time played by their starters, and probably find themselves with fewer unavailable players due to injury come September. Speaking of players unavailable for the start of the season, at last count a dozen or so were going to miss up to four games because they tested positive for a banned substance.

And that doesn’t include the more severe cases of suspension involving Michael Vick, Donte Stallworth, and Plaxico Burress.

So much for Commissioner Roger Goodell’s crackdown on bad behavior. Hopefully, Goodell’s consideration of shortening the exhibition season (sorry, Roger, preseason) to two games and perhaps expanding the regular season from 16 to 18 games yields better results than the behavior crackdown.

Another problem with the lengthy exhibition season is that in the absence of real football news, the void gets filled up with coverage of the foolishness of Terrell Owens and the wide receiver formerly known as Chad Johnson, as well as the annual Brett Favre self-absorption tour.

(In case you haven’t heard, Favre opted against the obvious career move – just get it over with and head straight to Dancing With The Stars – and decided to join the Vikings in hopes of rubbing the Packers’ nose in something.)

Are you ready for some football? Given the news that’s been coming out of the NFL all summer long, my guess is you’re way past that point.

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