August 19, 2006
You wanted Drew Bledsoe to Terrell Owens? You got Tony Romo to Patrick Crayton. You were hoping to see Michael Vick in action? You'll miss him if you take an ill-timed bathroom break. Want to check on Shaun Alexander? Check the sidelines.
It's the exhibition season, and NFL teams have one burning question: Are you ready for some fauxball?
But there are some authentic elements to exhibition games. Namely, the cost to fans — and sometimes to players. After suffering a partially dislocated shoulder last Sunday in Washington's loss to Cincinnati, Redskins running back Clinton Portis railed at the system.
"Four games is ridiculous, man," said Portis, who hopes to return for his team's Sept. 11 opener. "How much wear and tear can you get? Maybe they need to let us start smoking cigarettes or something in the locker room again, like they did back in the day. And play with no mouthpiece, play with the pads and the helmets that they did back then, then maybe you'll need to go through all this training."
Fans pay as if the games really count. Ticket prices are the same as the regular season, and so are parking and concessions. That, of course, is the No. 1 reason there's no change in the offing.
NFL teams play four and sometimes five exhibition games, and every year players grouse that it's too many. These aren't the old days, after all, when players commonly came into camp overweight and out of shape. Now, with millions of dollars at stake, most players stay in top shape year-round, so it stands to reason they could be ready to begin the regular season much earlier.
For team owners, though, exhibition football is the closest thing to minting money. To find out just how much an individual team might make for the exhibition season, I asked an NFL insider, someone very familiar with those types of bookkeeping calculations, to crunch the numbers.
Let's assume our fictitious team draws crowds of 65,000 for its two home and two road exhibition games — last week's 15 games averaged 65,466 — and general-admission tickets cost an average of $60, a fractional bump from last season's league average of $58.95.
In ticket sales, the owner of our team would receive $2.6 million per home exhibition game, and a total of $2.6 million in visitors' share for the two road games. That's $7.8 million on gate alone.
A total of $1 million is a very conservative estimate, I'm told, for the parking and concessions revenue generated by two home games. Likewise, $1.5 million is a realistic amount a team might expect from the preseason portion of local TV and radio deals — money that isn't shared with other NFL clubs, even under the new revenue-sharing system. That TV number probably would be much higher in a larger market such as New York, Chicago or Dallas.
So that's $10.3 million in a typical owner's pocket for four exhibition games. That number looks even better when you consider that by far the biggest operating cost for an NFL team is player salaries. But those don't kick in until the regular season. Veteran players in training camp are paid $1,100 per week with an additional $200 for every exhibition game. Rookies are paid a flat $800 per week.
Said Brad Hopkins, a former NFL tackle: "It's basically beer money."
It takes an awfully compassionate soul to shed a tear for NFL players, who are paid in 17 weekly checks during the season, and whose average salary last season was $1.4 million, with starters earning an average of $2,259,000. But it's also easy to understand how week after week of games that are essentially meaningless — except to possibly hash out the bottom of the roster — could wear on established veterans.
Tampa Bay cornerback Ronde Barber is among those who say the exhibition season is far too long. So is his twin brother, Tiki, the New York Giants' top running back.
"Tiki says ditch the preseason totally," Ronde said. "He didn't even carry the other day. It's unfortunate. And you see it every year. … You really want to go out there and compete and get better. But I think the premium for everybody is not to get hurt. You hate to see it."
There's no simple solution. If the NFL were to drop two exhibition games, the players wouldn't like it because that lost revenue would shrink the salary cap.
If two exhibition games were made to count, extending the regular season to 18 games, there would be even greater potential for injuries to significant players because they would be on the field more. The NFL would have to start the season earlier, possibly weathering lower TV ratings during Labor Day weekend, or push the Super Bowl deep into February.
And what about those losing teams that are out of the playoff picture by midseason? Two more games tacked onto the regular-season schedule would only bury them deeper and draw minuscule crowds.
There might actually be some merit to exhibition games. According to research by the website TwoMinuteWarning.com, which studied nine seasons of exhibition games and how those related to regular-season results, teams with three or more exhibition victories tend to fare markedly better than teams with fewer victories.
Then again, last season the Indianapolis Colts went 0-5 in exhibition games before winning their first 13 games of the regular season. …
Fauxball at its best.
