Joe Theismann: How Fewer Preseason Games Impacts the NFL Regular Season

Joe Theismann never learned how to sit still in July, and he is convinced the modern NFL has quietly made the same mistake at the team level. Asked about this slow stretch of the calendar, the lull before training camp, Theismann answered like the football junkie he freely admits to being.

"I was always antsy," he said on the show. "A lot of guys like to take this time off, maybe take a month or six weeks off just to get away from the game. I couldn't." Even now, he said, he cannot fully unplug. He described going out to a park three days a week during his playing days to throw, run routes, or start up a pickup game, anything to keep an edge. "I don't think you can work on any trade and then take six weeks to two months off completely and still try and keep an edge."

The real meat of the conversation was the shrinking preseason, and Theismann has watched it erode across generations. "When I played, we had six preseason games and 14 regular season games," he said. He traced the slide from there. "We went from six to four. Now we're four to three. Soon they'll go to two." His problem with that trend is not nostalgia. It is preparation.

He reached for Rollins to make the point land. Cutting the preseason, Theismann argued, "would be like you going into a ring and wrestling but never having a chance to wrestle against anybody to warm up." Football, he stressed, changes the moment the pads come on. "When you put the uniform on and you start hitting people, it's a lot different than running around in shorts and a cap and sneakers. When you get hit, things change."

That, in Theismann's view, is the hidden cost. Starters barely play in the preseason anymore, which means the first real contact many of them absorb arrives in Week 1. "The only time they're really going to get hit is the beginning of the season," he said, which is why he now treats the opening two or three weeks of the regular season as "real glorified preseason games." He also worries for the coaches trying to evaluate talent in that vacuum. "How do you evaluate somebody in a pair of shorts? How do you know how they handle a hit?"

There is a flip side he acknowledged, one that raises the stakes for every young player fighting for a job. "It makes every decision you make, every play you run so vitally important to whether you're going to be there or not," Theismann said, pointing to a roster like Cleveland's crowded quarterback room as a place where reps are precious.

He closed with the way his own era actually used preseason games, and it was not for polish. Playing for George Allen on what Theismann called the oldest team in football, those six exhibitions doubled as conditioning. "This is the way they got themselves in shape, through the course of playing games." He compared it to golf. "The way you get better, you don't get better hitting balls on the range. The way you get better is to go out on the course." Take away the course, Theismann warned, and September becomes the driving range.