Like an old friend that had not been seen in several months, the NFL returned four days too late on Thursday August 11th. Traditionally, the NFL's preseason begins with the Hall of Fame game that is played the night following the induction of a new group of honorees inducted into pro football's Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. The game was cancelled this year due to problems with the field that created an unsafe surface for the players to play on. In the absolutely correct decision, the NFL and the Hall of Fame organizers decided not to play the game and protect the safety of the players. This being the case, the games played on the 11th of August became the return of football for the 2016-2017 season.
There are people in the country that appreciate what is going on in the preseason. Those that do are the most die hard of the die hard fans. Count me as one of those numbers, as it was wonderful to be able to see those players taking to the field these last few days. Over the course of the last three days, every team has played or is about to play their first preseason game. Over the next month, young players will get their chance to prove their worth to teams and make rosters filled with veteran football players. These first two weeks of preseason represent for some players the only opportunity that some players will ever have to get meaningful playing time in the NFL. Before the end of this month of preseason football, rosters will be pared down from 90 players to 53 meaning that over a thousand players will no longer have jobs. The NFL is a cut-throat business, and those that do not make the cut are discarded like yesterday's newspapers. As sad an event as these cuts are for all of those players and their families, the next month still represents a happy time for all fans of football.
So it is with great excitement and joy that I settle in for what has become an annual rite of Summer. As much as those that run baseball would like you to believe that their sport owns the Summer, even the most die hard of baseball fans have to admit that there are many baseball games that will fail to draw less of a TV audience than many preseason football games. These games may not matter in the grand scheme of things, but they represent the return of an old friend that we will get to have fun with for the next six to seven months.
