Dallas Cowboys VP Stephen Jones offered the following gem that should satiate the many concerns, and feelings of doom, embraced by his team’s fan base.
“I know the preseason games haven’t been perfect, but we expect that because we’re not wanting to really show anything, whether it’s offense or defense, what the Cowboys are going to be about this year,” Stephen said on the local TV broadcast during the team’s practice Wednesday at the Star in Frisco.
Two things:
1.) We’re not wanting to really show anything, whether it’s offense or defense.
Mission accomplished. A ++++++. Skip middle school and go straight to Harvard.
2.) What the Cowboys are going to be about this year.
All we need to do is look at the previous 30 years to have a pretty good idea.
The Cowboys preseason comes to its merciful conclusion Friday night when they host the Atlanta Falcons at AT&T Stadium. According to SeatGeek, a ticket can be had for $10. It will cost more to park your car than to enter the stadium.
We are watching the final stages of death for the NFL’s archaic schedule. The NFL preseason will be in hospice for a few more years, and ultimately the league will follow the same schedule that NCAA football embraced decades ago.
“Our deal (in college) is different in that we don’t have to make (roster) cuts, so that is the one thing that is unique about the NFL,” TCU coach Sonny Dykes said Wednesday, who added he does not believe college football needs a preseason game.
“You are going to look around college football Week 1 and you are going to see good, quality games and teams that are ready to play. The current system works just fine. Would teams be a little bit more ready if they (had a preseason game)? Maybe. Potentially. But you are going to look around Week 1 and say, ‘That’s a good football game, and those are two good teams playing against each other and they were ready to play.’”
That’s all you want.
Since the NFL has accepted its status as an entertainment company, a preseason pro football game is the trashy TV that’s not even a guilty pleasure. It’s not even good white noise in a living room. Even at reduced price of a ticket, this is a bad product.
Even if a preseason game is easy money for the owners, replacing it with a regular-season game is worth that much more.
It starts with the following, as unintentionally outlined by Cowboys coach Brian Schottenheimer after his team lost to the Baltimore Ravens on Saturday night.
“For some of the guys, it’s just we want to get them out there and let them play a few snaps,” Schottenheimer said of the regulars and veterans who deliberately do little in preseason games. “We let all of our guys go through pre-game warmups. That was a big part of it for us. We wanted to get (quarterback) Dak Prescott and (wide receiver) CeeDee Lamb and all those guys to go through the pre-game warmups.
“We think that that’s important. So the first time that they do it is not, you know, in a regular season game. It’s a formula based on how much football they played.”
It’s a horrible formula. Whatever the preseason accomplished in 1965, it has no value in 2025. An NFL preseason game is a practice between second and third string hopefuls.
The only preseason of any value any more is Major League Baseball; a spring training game is as equally worthless as the other practice games, but it retains its appeal, value and charm because of ease, quaintness, and tourism.
The NBA and NHL’s preseason are just a cheaper version of the NFL’s. The Dallas Stars will play six preseason games, and the Dallas Mavericks will have four.
What the NFL will ultimately do is either have one preseason game, or none. That’s what NCAA football does.
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has said he wants to expand the regular season, and for the Super Bowl to be played the Sunday before President’s Day in the middle of February. That would allow for Super Bowl weekend to be a three-day event.
This won’t happen until the league’s collective bargaining agreement with the NFL Player’s Association expires, after the 2030 season. The players will howl, protest and complain about expanding the length of the regular season, and do nothing about it once they see the money.
The idea of a preseason was born decades ago, in a different era of professional sports when the players worked part-time jobs in the offseason. When players really did need to get into shape for a season.
That’s long gone, and pro sports now resides under the same umbrella as TV, concerts and movies. A preseason game now is not trash TV. It’s just trash. No one will miss them when they’re gone.
The only thing we will ask is, “Why didn’t we do this sooner?”