Daylight Unnecessary Risk Time

 A quiz for you this Sunday morn, and, yes, the Blob knows it's Sunday, and therefore quizzes are unfair, and, well, life's a tough old haul all around, idn't it?

Anyway, here's your quiz: What is more useless than NFL preseason games?

A) Attempting an ocean crossing in a Ferrari.

B) Talking sense to Trumpazoid groupies.

C) Talking sense to elected representatives who are Trumpazoid groupies.

D) Every preseason game in every sport.

The corrects answer, of course, is "E," which is either "all of the above," or "absolutely nothing is more useless." 

This is an argument the Blob has made before, and it's an argument fresh in the mind today because the Blob actually watched bits and pieces of the Bears-Bills preseason tilt yesterday. No, I don't know why.

Maybe I was wondering what would happen if the Bears' prize rookie, Justin Fields, got hit so hard his head came off.

OK, that didn't happen. Fields only got hit so hard his helmet flew three feet in the air, which prompted this response from Jesse Spector on Deadspin.

Spector's absolutely correct, of course. Preseason games are stupid and unnecessary, and have been for some time. All they are is Daylight Unnecessary Risk Time in what should be a Daylight Saving-The-Body-For-Real-Games world.

Fields apparently emerged unscathed from his big knock, but you can put that down to dumb luck. More likely would have been a turn in concussion protocol, or an injury that would have him cost him down time and the Bears the services of a guy for whom they paid goo-gobs of dough.

That didn't happen this time, but it has in the past. So why does the NFL insist on continuing with these games?

Easy off-the-top-of-the-head answer: Tradition.

Or, more properly, the inertia of tradition, which dictates one must continue to do something a certain way because it's always been done that way. There seems to be no other rational explanation for the NFL clinging to preseason games, other than money: The NFL gets to squeeze the customers for a few extra dimes, and the players want the extra dimes they get for them. 

Otherwise, they make zero sense.  Especially now that the regular season is expanding to 17 games, which means yet another opportunity for players to get hurt in a game whose attrition rate is already critical.

And yet NFL teams will again play three and in some cases four preseason games. Why?

The standard answer always has been that preseason games give marginal players the opportunity to win jobs. But that answer is decades out of date.

In this era of OTAs and minicamps and controlled scrimmages, marginal players get plenty of opportunities to impress without preseason games. And it's not as if their coaches don't already have a handle on them before they even show up; the sometimes comically exhaustive analytics available to them in 2021 ensure that.

So again we're back to the question: Why?

Take your time. I'll wait.