Pre-season games offer risks and rewards

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This article was published 06/06/2016 (3405 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

At the best of times, when an offence and its staff have been in place for a number of years, and the majority of the players are comfortable with the system, deciding on how long the starters should play in the first preseason game is a difficult decision. When you have a large percentage of coach and player turnover on offence, though, like the team does this year, this decision, and subsequent roll of the dice, becomes even more difficult to navigate.

There really is no script for how much, when, and where you play your starters in the preseason, which opens Wednesday with the Montreal Alouettes in Winnipeg. It used to be that the majority of your savvy vets, who have been around the block and who are going to make the team, would simply not play in the first preseason contest, unless, maybe, it was a home game. If it was a home game, depending on who the coaches were and how they were influenced by a management team that wanted to maximize profits in every game, those vets might see a quarter of action on the high end.

Deviations from the script were sometimes made with the offensive line, which in some schools of thought, require more live-fire repetitions and game-day scenarios to operate cohesively as a unit, but when all is said and done, it really just comes down to addressing the needs of your team. With somewhere in the neighborhood of five new starters on offense, a new coordinator and receivers’ coach, and a different quarterback and running back coach, it would be fair to assume that this phase of the football team needs to get more out of the preseason than is generally customary, and that is what can make it potentially dangerous.

While defenses can overcompensate for a simple and short playbook with energy and effort, and are at their best when they are fresh and only sporadically deployed, high yielding offenses are a craft of precision and methodic execution, that can easily take months to hone.

If you could guarantee any head coach nothing but minor bumps and bruises in the preseason, you would probably see the starters play upwards of 75 per cent, to every snap of each of the two exhibition games. If potentially catastrophic injuries are taken out of the equation, you only stand to gain from repetitions on the field in live conditions, conditions that simply cannot be replicated in practice. Offences already take exponentially longer than defenses to get up to speed because of their timing requirements, the complexities of the playbook, and the attention to detail that so many moving parts require in order to be productive and avoid disaster. When a single misstep or mistake can nullify an entire play, and even lead to seven points the other way, every opportunity the players have to become more familiar with the scheme, and each other, is critical.

The other side of this coin, as this team saw in 2015, is that it won’t matter how polished and efficient your offense is if key members of it are hurt and not able to participate. No matter what precautions are taken, at least one important player will miss the bulk of every season, but when this happens in games that don’t count, it makes it even harder to digest. This team may have more depth at more positions than they have had the previous two years, but that doesn’t make them capable of overcoming another Drew Willy absence, or losing a Smith, Dressler, or Harris for an extended period of time.

Most veteran football athletes know that at some point in their career they will be injured; the only question mark is the severity and the frequency. Yet they also know that the day they stop playing with reckless abandonment, and hesitate and play with degrees of caution, is when they really mess themselves up. With the number of changes on offence this year, and how important this season is from a number of perspectives, I don’t think this team can afford to be cautious and patient in the preseason, and will have to push these limits of exposure to make sure that all the chambers are loaded when it starts to count.

Doug Brown, once a hard-hitting defensive lineman and frequently a hard-hitting columnist, appears weekly in the Free Press.

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