There’s a saying that the NFL playoffs and regular season are for football fans, and the preseason is for NFL fans.  Fair enough—it’s true that you have to genuinely love the league to appreciate the preseason, or love a team enough to see its third-stringers battling week in and week out for a month, because the big stars—Peyton, LT, etc—won’t be playing much, maybe not even a single snap.  But automotive enthusiasts don’t just love Bentleys or old Chevys; those may be the cream of the crop, but they aren’t all that’s out there.  

Anyway, the preseason doesn’t mean anything, right?  Why should Peyton or LT play and risk anything in what merely amounts to a tune-up game?  It’s understandable—when a team invests forty million dollars in a player, it makes sense to want to keep them fresh for when it really matters.  But to see the preseason as “just a tune-up” misses the glory, the guts, and the grit of August.  After the tune-ups are over, usually around the end of the first half, the real game begins.  Gone are the starters or well-paid second stringers, all of whom are secure, usually with sizeable salaries, and are basically just trying to keep from blowing out a knee.

But the second half is populated by football players, pure as they can be.  1940s style guys, who aren’t playing for endorsement money, but for a job.  Consider this: when training camp opens for NFL teams, they’re allowed up to 80 members of the team, a limit that most teams meet.  At the end of August, that number will have to be slashed to the 53 members allowed on the final roster.  That means there’s probably forty guys competing throughout the preseason—mainly in the third and fourth quarter—for 13 roster spots.  If they don’t make it, they get bounced down to the practice squad (if they’re lucky, only 8 of the 27 cut will stay on the practice squad) or they get cut and hope they can sign somewhere else.  If they don’t, they’re probably getting a job as a real estate agent near wherever they went to high school.

Imagine that.  Imagine knowing that your career in football comes down to how you play in the second half of a “meaningless” football game.  Or imagine if you were on a practice squad the previous season, getting paid less than $90,000 a year to be a tackling dummy, and knowing that if you can make the team this preseason, you’ll be making at least $200,000 more.  That’s why, if you bother to tune in to the second half, you’re usually treated to guys flying around, making huge hits, and laying it on the line.  Because those guys are on the bubble—they know that one big play could make or break their career.  And they play like they know it.

Aside from the young and hungry guys, there are always a handful of stories among the first and second tier guys to pay attention to as well.  This season is even richer than normal, with the obvious Aaron Rodgers/Brett Favre soap opera to watch.  A number of teams could/will decide their starting QB based primarily on preseason play, including the 49ers and Bears.  You get a chance to see how the dark horses are faring, teams like the Browns that have been tabbed to make the leap into respectability this year.  And you can watch players who’ve just returned from disrespectability—most of them play for the Cowboys—interact with their team and the fans for the first time in a game situation.

There are also more gadget plays on display as coaches tool around with their playbook a little, trying out tricks in a game situation that they maybe couldn’t necessarily risk during a regular season game (case in point, the Colts started the 2008 preseason with an onside kick).  And of course, there are the downright funny slipups (the Colts snapped a ball out of their own end zone for a safety later in the game) that inevitably happen because, let’s face it, it’s preseason.  But above all that, if you’ve ever complained about how soft athletes are now, or how little the game means to them, I implore you—tune in to that second half.  Desperation makes for great competition.