The preseason.  Is it a good thing or a bad thing?  What’s the benefits or negatives behind?  Can it actually be a good thing to have four to five games to figure out what you have as a team in the world of football?

In the world of professional football, you have 16 regular season games.  16 games that decide if your time is actually good enough to compete for the championship that year in the playoffs.  With playoffs, to the championship game, it’s an additional three games to the agenda; 19 total games to win a championship.  For those two teams who made it through the 19 (maybe 20 if you were a wild card team and you made it to the big game), you had to play four games prior to these 19/20 games that have next-no-outcome to what happens during the actual season.

This is called the Pre-Season.  The Pre-Season is defined as the season before the season.  Four games that defined who’s gonna be on your time, how’s your team is looking heading into the season, who’s in shape and who’s isn’t, so on and so forth.

As of 2011, they are four preseason games for the 32 teams to play.  Out of the four games, the predicted “starters” play about a half of a game at full speed at best.  Sometimes more, sometimes less.  On top of that, they are about 80+ players on each team that get’s smaller every week until they get close to 54 players or so by Week 1.

Below I’ll made a short list on the pros and cons on the preseason.

Pros:  It helps cut’s down on injuries as players knock off the rust from months of non-football activities and fill the gaps either do to injuries, free agency or retirement.  It helps creates depth behind your big name starters, i.e. the Peyton Manning’s or Patrick Willis’ out there.  It helps discover the talent you have on your team, it’ll give you an accurate depiction of what your team looks like.  It also helps discover someone that you might’ve over-looked while signing other veterans or starters.

Cons:  The injury factor, early in the preseason its because of “being rusty” or because they’re playing too much in a worthless game.  The “worthless game” mindset, the fact you play in essentially games that don’t have no positive or negative outcome to it at the end of the day.  Four games to decide what you have as a team or to knock the cob-webs off, most high school and college teams have two weeks of camp, and two maybe three preseason games to decide what they have as a team.  On top of that four games increase the chance of injuries, chance of players being sluggish come late in the season to name a few of the negatives out there.

There can be numerous arguments behind the pros and cons, these and those, that and this with the idea of the preseason football.

As I look at it, it’s just another opportunity to watch football.