Post by TheShadow on Aug 27, 2006 8:25:53 GMT -5
sfgate.com/
By Nancy Gay
NFL training camps are winding down, which means it's as good a time as any to conduct a quick survey of the carnage that has occurred since teams began sweat-soaked two-a-days about a month ago.
-- In Cleveland, the Browns lost their No. 1 free-agent acquisition, two-time Pro Bowl center LeCharles Bentley, to a ruptured patellar tendon the first time the team had an 11-on-11 drill. His replacement, Bob Hallen, quit the team. Free-agent replacement Alonzo Ephraim was just suspended four games for violating the NFL's substance abuse policy.
-- In San Diego, Chargers running back/kick returner Darren Sproles fractured his fibula in the team's first exhibition game and is on injured reserve.
-- In Washington, running back Clinton Portis partially dislocated his shoulder in the Redskins' first exhibition. He's out until at least the first week of the regular season.
-- In Oakland, the Raiders feared they lost starting center Jake Grove for up to three months with a shoulder injury sustained on the final day of workouts in Napa. Now that surgery isn't required, he might return in three or four weeks.
The NFL preseason casualty list is lengthy, as usual, and it's begging the annual question: Are NFL training camps, and the four- to five-game exhibition schedule, just too much?
The NFL, which has had this format of 16 regular-season games and the four-week exhibition schedule since 1978, is not contractually obligated by the television networks to broadcast 20 total games.
But the league argues that any notion that the preseason should be shortened -- say, to two exhibition games, with perhaps three weeks of training camp and a 19-week regular season -- is a specious argument.
"Then you would have more injuries during the regular season," said NFL spokesman Greg Aiello, who has heard these complaints for years. "Your star players and your starters typically don't play as much in the preseason."
The NFL's competition committee and any number of owners and coaches have long agreed that the four-week exhibition schedule is necessary to evaluate players and hone offensive and defensive schemes, especially in the era of unrestricted free agency.
But with so many players training year-round at team facilities, both through organized team workouts and during minicamps, is there any merit to the idea that 18 regular-season games and two exhibitions might limit these early injuries that devastate rosters?
"If you add more regular-season games, the veterans and starters are playing more, and you're putting them at additional risk for injury," Aiello argued. "When you talk about Clinton Portis, he injured himself in the first preseason game. Who is to say that would not have happened the first week of the regular season?"
Ask a player who comes up lame in an exhibition game, and you'll get an earful.
"I don't know why myself or any other player of my caliber should be playing in the preseason," said Portis, who set a franchise record for the Redskins last season with nine 100-yard rushing games, including five in a row to end the season. "I think for the last four years I've done enough to show the world I'm ready to go for the season."
Pittsburgh Steelers safety Troy Polamalu is so physically and spiritually chiseled year-round that he believes training camp -- with its physical 11-on-11 hitting drills and two-a-day routine -- actually becomes an impediment to him.
"Bill Romanowski once told me he went into football camp in the best shape of his life and came out in the worst shape of his life," Polamalu said. "That's how I feel, too. The thing about that is, people are so scared to revolutionize anything.
"If everybody is going to training camp and getting beat up, then nobody has an edge, right?"
Polamalu suggests clubs limit players to one practice a day, and that teams should turn more to massage therapy and chiropractors to keep players in top shape, rather than physical punishment.
"But coaches are too scared to revolutionize their ways," Polamalu said. "Can you imagine having five more weeks of fresh legs under you in December, when you've got four or five more weeks left of playoffs?"
The beauty of NFL weekends is the urgency that comes with only 16 regular-season games, Aiello argues. Making it a 19-week season by adding two more games just to shorten the preseason would douse that feeling.
"There would be saturation, making our games less special," Aiello said. "The preseason is part of the story of a team's season."
True. Players can sabotage themselves (the Raiders' Jerry Porter comes to mind), reinvent themselves (Browns tight end Kellen Winslow) or showcase themselves (49ers' sixth-round picks Melvin Oliver, Delanie Walker and Marcus Hudson).
Portis' gripes were understandable. But consider how hot he would be had that shoulder injury happened in Week 1 of a two-week exhibition schedule? He'd be rushing himself back onto the field in time for 18 games of regular-season pounding, a time when, coincidentally, the real weekly paychecks start arriving on Tuesdays.
Extra points: All the excitement about former U.S. Ski Team and Colorado star Jeremy Bloom coming up big as a return man for the Eagles has tempered because of what doctors believe might be a chronic hamstring problem. ... That lengthy holdout by Patriots wide receiver Deion Branch took an interesting turn Friday afternoon when New England announced it is permitting his agent to seek trade offers from other clubs and negotiate contract offers with other teams until Sept. 1. In the beginning, his holdout made some sense: Branch, the Pats' leading receiver in 2005, is in the final year of his rookie contract signed in 2002, and the Pats appeared to be balking on giving him the contract extension first offered in May. They've extended an olive branch several times since; Branch's agent keeps demanding more. But if New England wants to get tough with Branch, they could fine him the maximum $14,000 a day for being MIA (that would amount to $420,000 after taxes), as well as slap a franchise tag on him next year. By the way, the Pats have been doing just fine without Branch: They've scored 53 points in two exhibition games. ... The word out of Jets camp is that new coach Eric Mangini has a zero tolerance attitude toward hotheaded running backs who compare their former coach to Adolf Hitler. So Mangini put his foot squarely in the backside of newly acquired Kevan Barlow as soon as the former 49er arrived in New York. But it wasn't Barlow's attitude that made him expendable in Santa Clara. It was a logjam at running back (Frank Gore, Mo Hicks, rookie Michael Robinson), combined with Barlow's sometimes-ineffective upright running style that two coaching staffs could not correct.