So Long NFL Season... You Will Be Missed

It feels like yesterday I was waking up for the first NFL Sunday of the season. Now, with the Super Bowl coming and going, we enter the worst period of the year to be an NFL fan: the offseason, when players go back to their homes and take a couple of weeks to recover before they start training for the upcoming season.

During this period, we also have free agency, which is the first piece of the offseason for every franchise. During this time, teams will do everything they can to negotiate with players who are free agents to get them to join their teams. Even if a player isn’t a free agent, they can still be traded up until a certain point in the season. Free agency usually starts off fast, with a lot of player movement happening in the first week. Teams act quickly so they know their positional needs for when the draft comes just a few weeks later.

Once we reach the NFL Draft, everything moves extremely fast. There are OTAs, which are Organized Team Activities. This part of the offseason is usually voluntary until the mandatory portion comes a couple of weeks later. The only ways to get out of the mandatory part of training camp are injury or what we have seen happening more and more: player holdouts.

In the past five years, NFL players have been avoiding reporting to their team at their scheduled time in hopes of getting a new contract that gives them a pay increase. The first notable example was Le’Veon Bell. He was on the Steelers for the first four years of his career, and after having a solid start, he believed that going into the last year of his contract he should be paid then, so he didn’t miss his chance in case he suffered an injury. All glory to the player—go get your money—but in Mr. Bell’s case, it didn’t work out well. He ended up being traded to the Jets, and let’s just say that was the beginning of the end of his career.

A recent example of this was Micah Parsons and the Dallas Cowboys. Micah was an All-Pro player multiple times throughout the first four years of his career, putting up double-digit sack numbers each of those years. The owner of the Cowboys, Jerry Jones, is a very greedy man. He openly bashed Parsons, even though he is by far the best player on the team. This resulted in Micah Parsons being traded before the start of the season to the Green Bay Packers. While holdouts usually go the way of the player, it is still a nuanced problem that has consistently taken place over the last couple of offseasons.

After all of the training camp, joint practices, and other offseason events, we finally get our first taste of football: the Hall of Fame Game. Even though we do have a football game on our TV, it is still just a tease because there are no starters—just second-, third-, and fourth stringers. This might get a pass if we had a normal preseason game with starters the following week, but that is not the case. There is a week break, then the rest of the preseason gets played. One more week break, then the season starts on the Thursday of that week.

If you are a football freak fanatic like I am, these next few months are going to feel like an extended winter. Instead of waiting for the summer, like we are all doing now, at a certain point in summer I am going to be wishing for the NFL to get here. Each year in the NFL is like a new season of a television show. When the season comes to an end, we sit there reminiscing about it, hoping for it to come back. But at least with the NFL, we always get it back at some point—we just have to be patient. If you need a fix of sports until the NFL starts back up in August, there is March Madness starting in, you guessed it, March. The MLB is starting spring training and will resume the race in October in just a few short weeks. Then, in the summer, we have two amazing events with the NBA playoffs that never disappoint, and then the crowned jewel for soccer fans: the FIFA World Cup. We are almost there, everyone—just hold on a bit longer.