King Kaufman's Sports Daily

NFL practice games: Everybody whines about them, but nobody does anything about them.

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Aug. 22, 2006 | This is the time of year when people whine about the length of the NFL exhibition season. It happens every year, and sooner or later, everybody who doesn't own an NFL team does it. I've done it.

It usually comes up after some significant player gets hurt. That would be Washington running back Clinton Portis this year, so far, but it's always somebody. Thirty-two teams playing four or five games each, even meaningless, boring, thoroughly unentertaining rip-offs of the fan base, and someone's bound to get hurt.

Here's the thing about shortening the preseason: The only people in the NFL universe who would benefit would be the fans.

In other words, Bill Parcells and Janet Jackson will sing a halftime duet in their skivvies at the Super Bowl before it happens.

Owners love exhibition games because they're able to charge regular-season prices for them while not paying the players their regular salaries. The players get a preseason stipend that works out to about $1,300 a week when there's a game, which isn't bad money -- it's $67,600 a year if that's your weekly wage -- but it's about 2 percent of an average NFL weekly paycheck.

Coaches love exhibition games because they get to play coach, luxuriating in a full month of player-evaluation onanism. In other words, figuring out which of about seven guys are going to take the last three roster spots.

Players -- they hate exhibition games. Or at least the ones who come to camp with jobs hate them. Marginal guys like having the chance to showcase themselves as they fight for jobs.

But the regulars don't like risking injury in meaningless games for chump pay, and they really don't like a month and change of training camp, a schedule designed to get the fat plumbers who used to populate the NFL into playing shape.

It's just a pain for today's athletes, who are always in shape and just need a couple of weeks to get back into the swing of football. College players, after all, manage without exhibition games, usually a scrimmage or two.

On the other hand, for most college football powers, about three-quarters of the regular season is exhibition games.

Next page: It's up to fans to end the tyranny of the full-price exhibition season. Good luck with that