In a sports world where most fans and media members are always quick to judge teams or players as being boom or bust, preseason football has to be viewed as the playground where most of these critics seem to wonder to. You can always set your clock to people over analyzing August football.
Also, don’t start doing scouting reports on the players. I remember during the 2001 preseason, Chuck Dickerson was doing a show on WGR and he was giving scouting reports about the players he saw during the exhibitions. If memory serves me (and it always does), “The Coach” was going off about Aaron Schobel’s (Rookie at the time) technique as a pass rusher. I swear, you would’ve thought he was dissecting the Super Bowl. It was nothing more than a radio show host trying to fill airtime. I assure you, Dickerson wasn’t the only person in the media guilty of trying to make the preseason into a big deal. It makes sense for the media to go off about preseason football, because it gives them more material to write about. It would be pretty hard to sit there and write about the preseason if the games are meaningless and that fans shouldn’t read into them.
Now, it should be noted that I was one of the few fans who didn’t go off the deep end after the Bills preseason performance from last year. In case you forgot, the Bills went 1-3 and the offense looked completely out of sync, which ended up costing Turk Schonert his job. I pretty much drew the line in the sand, saying that “preseason was a scam,” kind of like what I’m doing now.
Of course, I was more wrong than right. We all know the Bills offense was terrible last year, but if you think about it, the Bills put on nice back-to-back offensive performances against New England and Tampa Bay at the start of the season. So, it could be a case where the Bills ignored using their best plays in the preseason and used them against Tampa Bay, and then the rest of the NFL caught up to their primitive game planning. Not to mention, NFL teams are very cautious in running their A-List plays during the preseason, especially when the opposition can use those particular games to study film.
In a nut shell, even if the Bills were all about playing well in the preseason and broke out Super Bowl like game plans, there’s no way you can tell if the opposition feels the same way. And that’s the problem. The Bills could put up 30 points against the Redskins, but the Skins may just be looking to get out of the preseason without getting injuries and may not be concerned with executing their plays. I remember two years ago, Trent Edwards had a career game (Well, two series) against the Steelers (Connecting on 9 of 11 passes for 104 yards and 2 touchdowns) during the preseason. Fans were going ape sh#t about his performance. Can you imagine if Edwards played like that against Pittsburgh in the regular season? Yeah, not going to happen. Something tells me that Pittsburgh didn’t really care about winning that game and were just there to pick up a paycheck.
Again, teams have different philosophies when it comes to preseason football. I’m sure we will all see that when the Bills face the Colts in Toronto in two weeks.
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