This column is about the NFL’s pointless, worthless, meaningless exhibition games.
If I haven’t already clearly stated my position on these ridiculous games, perhaps I should elaborate: Exhibition football games are about as exhilarating to watch as PBS’s Antiques Roadshow.
What’s that commemorative Revolutionary War cup worth? I don’t know and I don’t want to guess. But I do, and I’m wrong, then surprised, and then find myself wondering regretfully if Grandma’s pretty little tea cups the kids are banging around on the floor are possibly worth a buck or two.
Similarly, I watch the exhibitions, albeit the Bears exhibitions only. But win, lose or snooze, at the conclusion I’m left unfulfilled, unsatisfied and undeniably unconscious. The games have no bearing on the regular season whatsoever, yet stadiums are packed full of spectators overpaying for tickets, parking, beer and hotdogs, all to see nothing more than a mere scrimmage.
You don’t watch an exhibition hoping the Bears win. You watch hoping none of the main starters get injured. It was after the first play of the game on Saturday night that I yelled for Jay Cutler to just stop, drop and fold up into a thumb-sucking fetal position. He had been leveled after completing a pass to Roy Williams. Matt Forte limped off the field in the first half. Desmond Clarke was carted off the field in the fourth quarter.
Last year’s fourth-round draft pick Corey Wootton, who is somewhat of a local boy — he played at Northwestern — was injured on the opening kickoff of the first Bears exhibition game. The defensive end is said to be out four or so weeks.
Seattle Seahawks left tackle Russell Okung, Oakland Raiders quarterback Jason Campbell, and Detroit Lions running back Jahvid Best are just a few players who have suffered injuries in preseason games thus far.
If the starters come through an exhibition game unscathed, the headline the next morning shouldn’t tell you who won, but who survived: Cutler, Hester finish game healthy.
It has to be money fueling these otherwise futile games. Why else would the Giants-Jets game not simply be cancelled due to an approaching hurricane? Instead, it was moved up from a night game to an afternoon game. No matter the time it begins, it still doesn’t count toward anything.
Perhaps it’s the need to get rookies in front of a large crowd, facing off against pro caliber players in order to better evaluate them. But the stadiums at such high-profile football colleges like Penn State, Notre Dame and Ohio State hold over 100,000 people, so that doesn’t really fly.
I realize that if the Cubs were in the hunt for a division crown, I probably wouldn’t be complaining about these insignificant exhibition football games. They’d be secondary to everything else, irrelevant, maybe even inconsequential in my life.
They’d for sure be what they already are, which is unimportant to my well being as a sports fan.