The NFL needs to fix its thinking on the preseason, a relic of a bygone era

As he heads into his 20th NFL season, Aaron Rodgers is one of the few players who can remember how things used to be. He wasn’t exactly here at that point, but how nights like Saturday used to buzz neon. How people would file into the Meadowlands stadium — the old one or this newer one — looking to settle scores with friends who rooted for the other guys, and how even the players and coaches would be spitting venom and striving to leave their stamp on the event.

The Giants once fired their head coach two weeks before the start of the regular season because he lost a lopsided preseason game to the Jets.

Now?

“It’s not what it used to be,” Rodgers practically groaned when talking about preseason football and the unmitigated funk in which it has found itself.

“Preseason,” he added, “it’s not real football.”

Real ticket prices? Yes. Real parking costs? Of course. Real concessions and souvenirs and all the other things you can tap your credit card for? Definitely.

But the football? Fake, fraudulent and frivolous.

If you went to MetLife Stadium on Saturday wanting to see Rodgers throw passes to Garrett Wilson and hand off to Breece Hall, if you wanted to see Daniel Jones connect with rookie receiver Malik Nabers, if you wanted to watch newcomers Brian Burns or Tyron Smith before they make their regular-season debuts for their teams, buster, you were in the wrong place.

All of that stuff happened this past Wednesday when the Giants and Jets met for a few hours of work in Florham Park. It doesn’t happen here anymore during the preseason games.

We used to remember the scores of games like this one. Now we can’t even name half the starters. These were the Jests and the Gi-aints. Are you ready for some fauxball?

There were 34 players on the Jets’ 90-man roster who were scratched from participating in the game before it ever started. There are only 22 first-teamers, meaning there were 12 backup guys who were given the night off and 12 third-teamers who were starting.

The Giants, at least, put starting quarterback Jones in a jersey and pads for warmups with some fans in the seats before handing the game over to third-stringer Tommy DeVito.The only people wearing Rodgers jerseys on Saturday were in the stands and nowhere near the sideline. Certainly nowhere close to participating in the action.

This isn’t a Giants-Jets problem, even though it hits hardest here because of the natural rivalry between the two teams who share a geography and a stadium. All around the league, these newfangled joint workouts have taken the place of the actual preseason games.

Coaches like that there is less risk for injury in a more controlled environment, that their quarterbacks are snugly vested in red noncontact jerseys. But for fans — other than the comparative few who get to attend those practices — all it means is a missed opportunity to whet their appetite for the coming schedule and get some value for their investment.

We often think of the NFL as a rigid monolith, an old-school entity that clings to its past. But in reality, the sport and the league have proved in recent years to be quite flexible, whether that shows itself in the new “dynamic” kickoff rules or the shift toward streaming services.

Preseason games, though, remain stubbornly stuck on the calendar as an antiquated reminder of a bygone era, a nod to when players would come to training camp to actually train and get into shape, an homage to the period before even Rodgers was around when they’d play six of these darned things. We’ve whittled it down to three now. Even that is far too many.

The NFL needs to fix its preseason thinking.

It faced a similar problem at the other end of its schedule recently when its Pro Bowl became a noncompetitive, no-show joke of an event. What did they do? They scrapped it and refashioned it into a skills competition with a flag football component. That seems to have been a success, and even the players seem to enjoy it.

Obviously, the league can’t replace these preseason contests with dodgeball games and carnival-level quarterback target practices. But it does have the leeway to re-imagine what this time of the year looks like and, most importantly, how the fans interact with it.

If those joint practices are so valuable and taking the place of the preseason game reps that used to fill up stadiums in August, why not move them to the big fields under the lights and sell tickets for those workouts?

If the NFL can turn the Combine into a viewing experience, it certainly can do the same with a full team-on-team practice. It certainly would be a better value for the ticket-buying public to get to see their team’s starters going one-on-one and head-to-head against another team’s best players than it is now as they check their game programs between each snap just to get a sense of who is on the field.

As for the one value that these preseason games do seem to provide — evaluation and the opportunity for younger players to perform in front of the other 31 teams, who soon may be weighing whether to claim them off waivers — that needs to be protected. If not for the preseason, would the world have ever heard of Victor Cruz? Then again, if not for the preseason, we might have heard a whole lot more from Jason Sehorn.

That one is easy. Designate periods during those joint practices in which only players with less than three years of experience are permitted. The Jets already do that themselves during the season with extra reps after the official practice. They call it “Flight School.” Work that time into the schedule.

All of this certainly will be fair game to discuss and chew on as the NFL lurches toward an 18-game regular season and possibly gets rid of its annual summer break between the minicamps and the start of training camp, as was floated by some earlier this year.

We definitely know what Rodgers thinks about the preseason. In something of a pleasant rarity, he’s actually voicing a very popular and coherent line of thinking.

“It’s to see if young guys, once the lights go on and the pads go on and the tackling happens, if they can show up or if they don’t,” Rodgers said when discussing the pros and cons of participating in preseason games. “So what’s there to gain?”

With the way things are, nothing.

Besides the 20-year veteran, the Jets also sat 20-year-old rookie running back Braelon Allen.

If Allen sticks around long enough, he someday will be able to remember how things were when he came into the league the way Rodgers does now. And if we’re lucky, he’ll be able to laugh at how the NFL used to tackle its preseason before things were rectified.

By Tom Rock

tom.rock@newsday.com@TomRock_Newsday

Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.