The Preseason Starts Now

It is no secret that the NFL is watering itself down. Especially in the last decade at least. Fewer preseason games sounded good when they agreed with the players union to play 17 games instead of 16. What the league and players didn’t advertise is that practice time decreased and the amount the players would practice in pads would decrease as well. With that what we have seen is practically every team doesn’t even allow their best players to sniff a preseason snap and expect them to be ready to go at 100 percent when the regular season begins. The obvious result is a sloppy set of games with players who haven’t properly ramped up to game speed. If you were expecting the rematch of last year’s Super Bowl between the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks to be compelling you’d be disappointed. It picked up in the second half, but overall it was a terrible game. The first month of the regular season is what the preseason used to be. The NFL has become what the NBA is with players going through ‘load management’. Teams that had high expectations decide that they can just throw away a game or two and they’ll still be okay in the end because of that extra game. Case in point with the Los Angeles Rams who waited nearly until the last minute to fly to Australia to play the San Francisco 49ers, a division rival no less. The result was a one sided affair with the Rams showing little to no interest for most of the contest and sitting QB Matthew Stafford with under five minutes left in the game. With the league wanting 18 regular season games at some point and a determination to have a team that plays in a foreign country this is going to get a lot worse.

Defense Took A Backseat

One game stood out to me this past week. It involved both the Chicago Bears and the Carolina Panthers combing for 1,030 yards of offense. The Bears ran the ball for 291 yards with both running backs going over 100 yards each. The Panthers threw for 353 passing yards and ran for 125 more. Chicago had a solid offense last season, but this first game out of the gate was unexpected. The only thing that wasn’t a surprise was the both teams had a terrible time stopping anyone. They each answered one another’s scoring drives and eventually Chicago pulled away in the second half. Do I expect this to be continue going forward? No I do not. Scoring 59 points will probably not happen again the rest of the season. Will Panthers QB Bryce Young throw for over 350 yards again? Probably not since Chicago’s defense has clearly taken a step back from the turnover causing group they had last year. Carolina clearly has some problems that they need to correct quickly, but for their sake they do play in the worst division in football. This put the rest of the league on notice that the Bears offense won’t be easy to stop.

The Running Back Has Returned

Seven running backs rushed for over 100 yards in the first week of the season. It could have been eight, but Colts RB Jonathan Taylor was two yards shy of 100. Two running backs were on the same team that ran for over 100 yards each. Five of the seven carried the ball over 20 times. Three of them had multiple rushing touchdowns. One of the backs to accomplish this was Ravens RB Derrick Henry which shouldn’t shock anyone. Yet, the one that became the face of this renaissance of the backfield was Kansas City Chiefs RB Kenneth Walker. He was the Super Bowl MVP last season for the Seattle Seahawks. A running back winning that award is extremely rare nowadays as the last one to win it was Terrell Davis in Super Bowl XXXII (32). Before Davis a running back was Super Bowl MVP six times. What I’m getting at is the NFL has been a copycat league and the idea that a game being won in the trenches has been a tale as old as time. With what the Philadelphia Eagles and the Seattle Seahawks have both done in the past two Super Bowls, teams have now decided to pivot to the ground game. Have a solid defense that is kept fresh by controlling the clock with a premier rushing attack and a competent to good quarterback at the helm. The Chiefs going to get Walker was a sign that they were going in this direction. Walker rushing for 173 yards against a very good Denver Broncos defense should alert the rest of the league to the fact that the running back has returned to the forefront of important positions for a team.