Pays your money ...

 ... and takes your chance.

That's how it goes, right?

And so here I am sitting in a local establishment the other day, and the guy next to me is playing Texas Hold-Em or something on his phone, and the guy on the other side of me is cruising some FanDrool betting site on his phone, and up there on the TV behind the bar I see something FanDrool guy might be interested in.

It's a betting line on the crawl at the bottom of the screen.

It's telling me the Ravens are a 1.5-point favorite to beat the Cowboys in their preseason game Saturday.

In their preseason game.

And right away I'm wondering what kind of sad cases bet NFL preseason games, and then I stop wondering. A guy who scrolls FanDrool at 5:45 on a weekday afternoon, that's who. Or some other guy who bets, I don't know, professional cornhole or NBA summer league games or the Little League World Series, which is happening right now in Williamsport, Pa.

Don't laugh. I mean, you just know there's a line for the latter somewhere, Panama vs. the field or some such thing. And someone's dropping some coin on it as we speak.

Look. I know the country's completely lost what little mind it had, what with Training Wheels Mussolini sending troops to occupy American cities because he saw some homeless folk on the way to the golf course. And don't even get me started on the Great And Terrible Oz's plan to turn the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts into the Kennedy Center for Eighties Hair Bands.

But a betting line on preseason NFL football?

Well, I never. 

I never, because, seriously, is there anything in the wide, wide world of sports more mortally lame than the NFL preseason? Sure, we've heard all the stories about the down-roster rook from Directional Hyphen State who made the club with a big day in the Hall of Fame game. But those stories are as old as cave drawings.

With the preseason down to three games, and with all the mini-camps and controlled scrimmages and reams of data available on players these days, NFL coaching staffs pretty much know who can play and who can't by the time they step on the field for that first preseason game. Or at least the good coaching staffs do. Heck, it's not even a shake-off-the-rust deal anymore.

So if you're betting on preseason games, you're mainly betting on a bunch of guys who won't be on the roster come Monday morning. And what's the point of that?

"Who says there has to be a point?" replies FanDrool guy, going all-in on the Cowboys to beat the spread, and on Jimmy Jerome from Waydown Home to rush for at least 70 yards. 

Well. Alrighty then.