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Billy, updated poll for you:
What is the purpose of preseason?
a) Money grab for owners where players go out an go through the motions and don\'t attempt to compete against one another.
b) Allow veterans an opportunity to shake of the offseason rust in a game scenario and to allow back-ups the opportunity to show they can effectively run the plays designed by coaches.
c) Provide a springboard for individual players and the team to enter the season at full game speed and effectiveness.

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B&C and part of A.

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Good answer. So what you just said is that the preseason means something, and it what happens in those games means something for players and the team. It also said that what you do in preseason can impact how you start the season.

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No that\'s not what I said. I just took your poll.

Here\'s what I am saying- Preseason can be an indicator of things to come or it could mean absolutely nothing as far as comparions to how the team will play when it counts. It has worked both ways in the past and I\'m sure it will continue to be like that until the end of time.

I agree that a team should use preseason to evaluate players and as a tune up to the regular season to be at peak performance. I think we have failed miserably in our attempt to showcase what what kind of defense we are going to have.

While it would have been great do use the preseason to tune up our defense and be at peak performance-Let\'s not lose sight of the fact that we were not returning a lot of starters like some teams. We have 7 new faces on defense and they probably had to do things a little differently to see if they could perform as expected.

If you want to compare the defense to a car engine, then we are not just tuning it up. We rebulit the whole engine and have had to make many more adjustments. Now if we just replaced the carberator and the intake manifold then we would have had very little problem making those adjustments and we would be racing down the highway right now.

Regardless, they should have played better no matter what.

Lastly- There are some very talented players on this defense, and when all is said and done. I think we will be racing down the high way. I\'ve saw nothing in Venturi\'s coaching this preseason to suggest he is to blame. Not yet anyway.

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What I find odd is how you discredit the importance the preseason in almost every post and bash any arguements that focus on hard evidence displayed in the preseason, yet in turn you use preseason performance to support your opinions....
You want us to accolade his \"meaningless\" preseason stats as you have put it?

People are out giving kudos to Deuce and Beerman and Brooks for looking in game form, yet no one is allowed to use the preseason performance to point out negativity in the players or team? That seems a bit hypocritical.

I am just curious as to why you wish to see people that criticize the poor aspect of things as ship jumpers when they are using the same wealth of evidence as you and others have used to point out positives? The only difference I see is that people who look for weaknesses are being dubbed \"ship jumpers\" and the people who see the positives stand atop a mountain oblivious to what is going on below.

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LummOx,

Every post I make is not serious. For instance the post about Brooks completion percentage. That was a playful post and the stats I used was just to get a reaction out of them.

Who said no one is allowed to be negitive? Not me!! I\'ve said several times that I enjoy hearing the other side. Would you like me to go back and find the posts?

I don\'t think I\'m standing on the mountain pretending to know what is going on. The only stand I have taken is that no one knows how the defense is going to play based off the preseason performance. That includes me. I don\'t know nor do I pretend to. Others have stated that they KNOW how the defense is going to do. Why aren\'t you questioning them instead of me? Now that seems hypocritical to me. I get referred to as being to optimistic and I refer to other members as too pessimistic. There\'s nothing wrong with that.

But let\'s cut to the chase. Everyone can analyze this or that, and form opinions and that\'s fine. But, no one knows what\'s going to happen. Some will be right and some wrong. That includes you and I.

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tex i think you have lost your mind brotha

an evalution of coaching? teams run plays in preseason that they would never run in the regular season for several reasons, coaches don\'t want to give other teams insight into the coming season\'s playbook, they run plays designed for rookies to help evaluate them, they run man defense even when they normally wouldn\'t to evaluate players one on one ability, they run blitzes when they shouldn\'t to test plays breaking down

after your comment on another thread about how we shouldn\'t prepare for the coming week\'s opponent i\'m beginning to wonder if you know what a coaches job is

i\'m not trying to start a fight so don\'t come back with a billy reply like i\'m gay :P

had to get ya billy ;)

[Edited on 26/8/2003 by rusta]

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Since the preseason means nothing, I figure I\'d throw this out there:

http://www.nfl.com/news/story/6593746

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LummOx,

I guess I\'m gonna have to play Paul Harvy again and tell \"The Rest of the Story\" Which you left out.

I did the research on the preseason a long time and it\'s about 50/50 based on losing and winning records in the preseason of teams that make the playoffs and there has only been two teams to go undefeated in the preseason to make it to the super bowl.,

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http://www.footballproject.com/story.php?storyid=95


It Don\'t Mean a Thang... Does It?
by Dino Scoppettone (2002-08-17)


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NFL preseason football has always brought a smile to my face, for a number of reasons. Aside from the fact that it signals the start of a great new year of football, I\'m always more than mildly amused at the doomsayers that come out of the woodwork when their favorite team opens the exhibition season with a 38-3 loss. Such a result always invariably means said losing team will go on to a 2-14 season at best, right?

I\'ve always been of the mindset that preseason results don\'t mean much of anything. Really, the only game that concerns me when I\'m looking at preseason scores is the third full weekend\'s slate of games. This seems to be the game in which the starting units get the most playing time - in the final preseason weekend, of course, the coaches rest the starters most of the game in order to keep them away from injuries that would impact the regular season. Meanwhile, the first couple weeks of exhibition games exist mostly for the coaching staff to weed out the fringe players and solidify the depth charts. If your name isn\'t Steve Spurrier, then your first-stringers aren\'t seeing much action as August dawns.

Recently, NFL.com posted a list of teams that had some gaudy preseason records over the last 12 years, and then went on to match up those results with the teams\' subsequent impressive regular season results. While this list proves nothing - it\'s actually the NFL\'s way of justifying your $80 ticket to a meaningless exhibition game, by saying \"Hey, look, this game actually is kinda relevant, even if half these guys won\'t be around in a month!\" - it was indeed interesting to see that the 2000 Ravens went 4-0 in preseason before going on to win the Super Bowl.

Of course, this list fails to mention that the Ravens also went 4-0 in the 1998 preseason before finishing 6-10 in the actual games, but that\'s neither here nor there.

So, for want of some more complete information, I decided to go back a few years and put together some rudimentary stats to see how well preseason performance correlated with making the playoffs. It\'s sorta conventional wisdom - well, apart from what the doomsayers think - that how a team fares in the preseason doesn\'t have much to do with regular-season success, but is that notion backed up by the numbers?

While I was in the process of gathering some records, I also wanted to put another piece of conventional wisdom to the test - the axiom that says that it\'s important for a team to \"finish strong\" because such a boost will carry over to the next season. In other words, the thought is that teams that string together a bunch of wins at the end of one season will have some momentum to help them succeed the next year. Is this true - and does it have any more bearing on regular-season success than preseason results do?

Granted, I didn\'t spend too much time on this, but I went back six years, primarily because that\'s when the effects of the salary cap really began filtering throughout the league, resulting in the conditions that comprise the present state of the NFL. I looked at the playoff teams from each of the last six years, and compiled their preseason records, the number of teams that made the playoffs with both winning preseason records and losing preseason records, and the records of the final four games of the previous regular season, in order to test the \"finish strong\" theory.

PLAYOFF TEAMS - 1996-2001

YEAR EXB REC PLAY-WIN% PLAY-LOSE% PREV YR REC
1996 26-25 .510 4/11 (36%) 4/12 (33%) 25-23 .521
1997 31-22 .585 7/12 (58%) 5/13 (39%) 26-22 .542
1998 29-23 .558 5/10 (50%) 3/11 (27%) 23-25 .479
1999 26-23 .531 5/11 (46%) 3/11 (27%) 25-23 .521
2000 28-21 .571 7/14 (50%) 4/11 (36%) 28-20 .583
2001 23-26 .469 5/11 (46%) 3/8 (38%) 30-18 .625

TOTAL 163-140 .538 33/69 (48%) 22/66 (33%) 157-131 .545
(KEY: EXB REC is playoff teams\' record in exhibitions that year; PLAY-WIN% is percentage of teams with winning exhibition records that made the playoffs; PLAY-LOSE% is percentage of teams with losing exhibition records that made playoffs; PREV YR REC is the cumulative record of the playoff teams in the final four games of the previous regular season)
So, what exactly did we learn here? Well, nothing definitively. These numbers are, by no means, the final word on the subject. However, we do see that teams that go on to postseason qualification generally perform above average, if only a little, in the preseason. Furthermore, a better percentage of teams with winning preseason records make the playoffs than teams with losing preseason records, by about 15%.

Still, if your boys clang through the exhibition slate with an 0-4 mark, take heart - one out of every three losing preseason clubs still makes the January party. Overall, the .538 preseason winning percentage of playoff teams isn\'t significant, as it equates into only 8.6 wins per a 16-game season. In other words, don\'t book your tickets to San Diego this year on the basis of a four-win preseason.

How about our \"finish strong\" theory? Well, it appears to be pretty negligible. A .545 winning percentage is only slightly above average in NFL terms, so really, it appears there is little to no advantage to closing a season strong if you try to apply it to the following year. From the looks of the chart above, if you\'re gunning for the playoffs - as most teams are - the advantage of having a great preseason or finishing the previous year on an extended high note is insignificant.

Therefore, I\'ll leave the moaning and groaning to the doomsayers. I suppose that, like any normal fan, I\'d feel more comfortable heading into September if my team went 4-0 or 3-1 in the preseason as opposed to 1-3 or 0-4, but in the grand scheme of things, I won\'t waste any energy worrying until Week One. Until then, I\'ll keep smiling when I hear fans lamenting a 21-point loss in the middle of August - especially if it occurs against the Redskins.