So, what's the deal with preseason?

Do you remember the first season of Seinfeld?

All right, smartypants. Would you remember the first season of Seinfeld if you didn't have all nine seasons on DVD?

Unless you were actually a cast member on Seinfeld, you probably don't. And that's okay. Very few people watched Seinfeld in its first season. It was on Wednesday, for Pete's sake! But that was back in the days when it was all right for a show to not have too much audience to start off with, as long as it didn't offend anyone too much, and the networks still felt like they were only competing with the other networks, and if a show was pretty good they knew that people would find it and then they'd put it on Thursday so people would watch it.

Unfortunately, those days are gone now. Either your show has vampires in it, or it's Mad Men, or it's canceled. Case closed. Nobody's got time for a loser, Arrested Development!

Now, if this blog were about baseball, we could Seinfeld around for a while, write some episodes that didn't make a lot of sense, lose a few games, and be fine. The baseball season has approximately nineteen hundred games a year! Who cares if you lose a couple dozen?

In football, there's no time for shenanigans. There are only sixteen games a season (contrast this with 22 episodes of Two and a Half Men, the most successful TV sitcom of all time). And with only sixteen games, there's no time for dicking around. If you're on that field, you better know what's up.

But the NFL commission is merciful. They realize that the pro game is different from college and their rookies might need a game or two to learn the ropes. They understand that a lot of veteran players are coming back from long vacations with their families, or short jail sentences with their families, or moderately paced reality TV shows with their families, and they need to readjust to not having their families around. They totally know how it is for the coaches to readjust the dosage on their prescription meds to deal with their new game-season schedule.

So this is what preseason is for: After everyone has had a couple of weeks to practice, but before the games start to actually matter, everybody plays four games that don't count. These games serve many purposes, but they all basically fall under the tent of “Yeah, but how do they actually play?” This is a chance for rookies to play pro for the first time, it's a chance for coaches to see who will freak out and need to be fired, it's a chance for Brett Favre to retire again, and it's an extra bonus chance for anyone and everyone to get injured right off the bat.

Most importantly, it gives everybody four chances to lose, and how often do you get to lose something before you even start?

I myself have been injured this past week and I thought it would be a great chance to watch some football after all this abstract research, but we can't afford the NFL network and ESPN was airing the Little League World Series, so no dice. But I have been keeping an eye on the scores and game results, and I was pleased to see that all four of my division favorites won their first preseason game. I was even more delighted to find out that the Miami Dolphins quarterback is named Tyler Thigpen. He's a backup quarterback and he didn't score any touchdowns, but that's my kind of name.

Keep it up, Thigpen! Let's make every irrelevant game count!