homegame

Reply Hazy, Try Again Later

 Every sports reporter or commentator on the planet does preseason predictions. Every sports media outlet does them for every sport. They are insanely popular. They are also smart, knowledgeable people engaged in an insane endeavor.

For eons, the inevitable ratio of sports bookmaking has been that to be profitable, the house need only to have more bettors be right less than 55 percent of the time. That's folks betting on individual games that're happening in the immediate future. Or consider this. In all the NFL survivor pools conducted across this fair land, the week where the most participants will be eliminated is this one. Given a blank slate and full rosters, it remains damnably hard to forecast an outcome of a single game with no point spread involved at all.

Of the four major team sports, one wonders why anyone writes/reads NHL previews at all. This is a league who actually markets the idea that its regular season is essentially a preseason of kind of exhibition games leading up to the playoffs, which are all that count. Even lifelong hockey fans, coaches, executives, etc. take as a given that one or more teams that barely stumbled into the postseason will get hot and contend for the Stanley Cup. No one dares guess who those teams will be. Few if any were long the Canadiens back in April.

Basketball is a sport dominated by its top players, so one would think NBA previews would be both easy to create and pretty accurate in terms of results. To an extent, this is true. The team with Kevin Durant on it is likely to do well. Same for James Harden. But which team will that be? The, ah, fluid nature of superstar employment in pro basketball is approaching that of European soccer. How is anyone supposed to predict a Celtics future without knowing if Jayson Tatum really likes playing in Boston? He may not know himself.

Baseball has the most games of the team sports. It also has a tremendous innate bias towards reversion to the mean. Most players are what they are until they fade at career's twilight, so their teams usually are what you thought they were in March. This is not universal. The Giants are way way better than anyone thought this winter and the Yankees nowhere near as good. But the norm are teams like the Red Sox, who were seen as a team that could be a playoff contender and are, or my Phillies, who figured to be a .500 outfit and may hit that mark on the nose.

Of course, the sport that's drowning in preseason previews today is pro football, seeing as the NFL starts real games tonight. These, of which I've written a few, tend to somewhat formulaic. The defending Super Bowl champion, loser, and the losers of last year's conference title games receive bullish assessments. So do teams that were active in free agency (hence the sunny forecasts for the Patriots, not just from New England media either). 

These previews are all earnest, well-meaning and futile. A real NFL preview would go as follows. As always, injuries will be the largest determining factor in how teams perform. The healthiest team entering the playoffs is the Super Bowl favorite. One possible contender will be ruined by a rash of injuries to vital personnel. An irreplaceable player will get hurt DURING the playoffs, spoiling a possible dream season.

That's my preview. That's exactly what happened last season. The Bucs were healthy in January,  the 49ers had an horrific casualty rate, and the Chiefs offensive line got hurt down the stretch. But I'm not a soothsayer nor is anyone else. Everyone who follows football knows injuries are an unhappy but inevitable part of the sport. Whose injuries will spoil it for which teams in 2021 is beyond our ken.

 As a result, NFL previews are written on the unmentioned assumption no important player will get hurt, a forecast so obviously absurd it cannot be said, but an assumption that renders previews silly on their face. Don't blame the preview authors. The entire league operates on the same premise. The Saints did not build their franchise for 2020 assuming THIS was to be the year Drew Brees suffered a disabling injury ending his fabulous career. How could they? Human beings aren't built that way.

It is my profound wish nobody gets a season-ending injury in the NFL in 2021. That wish is already inoperative, because this happened more than once in preseason and training camp. It'll become more and more inoperative starting tonight, this weekend, and every week thereafter.

Joe Namath said it over 50 years ago. "The most important person on the team is the doctor." Your Super Bowl 56 champion will be the NFL team for whom that statement is least true.

posted by Michael Gee @ 9:03 AM