Preseason too long, too much of a rip-off

Welcome to Week 3 of NFL practice games.

I wonder who will get injured today?

So far, it’s been relatively quiet on the disabled list. Nobody who constitutes a franchise player has pulled up lame. Or worse.

But it’s always a tightrope the NFL walks in these practice games.

Yes, and I do mean practice games.

The NFL wouldn’t want me saying that. They didn’t even like it years ago when they were called exhibition games. Remember? The NFL enacted an aggressive marketing campaign to call them preseason games and many in the media drank the Kool-Aid.

Not me.

These are practice games. Nothing more. And more bluntly, they are not necessary.

Two weeks from tomorrow, on Labor Day Monday, the Florida State Seminoles open their season. So do the Miami Hurricanes. I say it this way to emphasize that they are opening the season — ta-da — against each other.

Big game?

Need you ask?

But guess how many practice games, exhibition games, preseason games, or whatever other pseudonym you want to call it, the ‘Noles and ‘Canes will play before that sizzling season-opening showdown?

None.

It’s that way for all of college football. The first game teams play coincides nicely with the first game that matters. What a concept, huh?

You could make the argument that college ball, with coaches trying to evaluate and judge players who only months earlier were riding yellow buses, needs practice games more than the NFL does. The leap from high school to college is much wider than it is from college to the NFL. Besides, with the proliferation of mini-camps and various off-season programs that ensure that everyone arrives in camp in shape, do NFL coaches really need four practice games to evaluate who can play?

Two, I can see. But no more than that.

Once again, college football doesn’t play any practice games, and the last time I checked, they don’t seem to suffer because of it.

Yet, and this can’t be emphasized enough, the NFL needs not one, not two, not three, but four practice games before it can start playing real ones. Heck, the Miami Dolphins and Chicago Bears are playing five practice games this month.

Five!

Think about that. The Dolphins and Bears are playing what amounts to a third of their regular season in practice games. It’s lunacy. That would be like baseball playing all its practice games in March for a regular season that would only last until the end of June.

Of course, baseball doesn’t do that. Neither does the NBA or the NHL. Only the NFL, which is the most physical sport of the big four, and thus much more prone to injuries.

The results are never good. The Bears, for instance, lost their starting quarterback, former Florida Gator Rex Grossman, with a broken ankle in a practice game last week. Two years ago, it was Michael Vick who went down with a mangled ankle in a practice game, effectively ending his season.

Why?

For the money, of course.

At least when baseball plays its practice games in March you can often buy tickets for less than $10 and sit in an intimate ballpark that places you closer to players than you’d ever get in a real game.

The NFL, meanwhile, charges the same prices as it does for regular-season games and often holds season-ticket holders hostage. If you don’t buy tickets for the practice games, then don’t expect them for the real ones. They do the same thing with TV networks that want the broadcasting rights to the regular-season games.

In the end, it all boils down to a business decision, with logic left in the lurch.

Adding insult to the always-present specter of injury is that fans and TV pay premium prices for an inferior product. Not only are head coaches reluctant to play starters in practice games, they also scale back on their game plans, not wanting to reveal too much before the real games start.

Established starters also are reluctant to go all out because they don’t want to risk the possible consequences of playing with reckless abandon, like they do in real games. Of course, trying to throttle back in a football game holds its own inherent risk.

But with Week 3 of these practice games arriving this weekend, we’ll see more star players on the football field, walking that tightrope.

I wonder who will get injured?