I was talking with former NFL lineman Pete Kendall recently about this weird offseason and training camp. Was there any area in which players might lag behind because of the lack of preseason games?
âYou have to hit during practices,â said Kendall, the 21st pick in the 1996 draft. âYou can either hit or lay on the ground and have eight guys kick you with steel-toed boots for five minutes.â
As it turns out, no team embraced the latter option. Far as I know. And there was hitting during practices. But there hasnât been ratcheted-up, game-level contact this year.
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Kendall â who played 189 games in his 13-year, four-team NFL career â Â was reiterating a point Bill Belichick has often made: The only way to get in the proper condition for football is by playing football.
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But without preseason games or even joint practices, full-speed collisions arenât happening, especially for players who arenât in the trenches. Punt returners, kickoff returners, wide receivers and quarterbacks arenât being taken to the ground with force. And corners, safeties and linebackers arenât taking them down.
âWhen I played, I needed those preseason games to kind of know where I was, and get a feel for the game,â said Patriots Hall of Famer Troy Brown during a video conference on Wednesday. âEspecially as a young player, those games are tremendously important to you. So, itâs a unique situation here with us. But, like I said earlier, every team in the league is going through the exact same thing. No team is going to play a preseason game before they step on the field for their first game. So, these guys are figuring it out. Theyâre professionals now. They have to get out there and with what little contact theyâve had over the past few months, theyâre going to have to make the best out of it.â
New England Patriots
There is a knack to getting tackled. It is something that players â most notably Tom Brady â used to work on.
Brady practices falling. He practices getting hit. He has trainers pummel him with pads and tackling dummies to prepare him for impacts.
"Your body gets used to the hits," Brady said last year. "The brain understands the position that you're putting your body into. And my brain is wired for contact. I would say in some ways it's become calloused to some of the hits."
As a pocket quarterback, he took exceptional punishment.
But the punishment he took while flat-footed and sometimes unaware is different than what Cam Newton has absorbed through the years as a viable running threat who not only takes on but dishes out punishment as a runner.
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In his red jersey, Newton â the Patriots presumed starter â isnât getting the whacks heâll get from the Dolphins in the opener.
Joe Judge, the former Patriots special teams coordinator whoâs now head coach for the Giants, recently mulled having his starter, Daniel Jones, take a few whacks to get ready. Â
âI donât think weâre going to throw him in any Royal Rumbles, or anything like that,â Judge said. âWeâve talked about it. With quarterbacks, you want to be calculated with how you bang them around. At some point, weâll pop his pads a little bit in a controlled environment.
âIâm not in a hurry to just beat the hell out of him, but at some point, we want to prepare his body for what itâll take in the first game,â Judge said.
Belichick said the Patriots havenât been âdeficientâ in having contact over the past month.
âWeâve live-tackled, weâve tackled the guys to the ground but weâve done it in more of a 1-on-1 setting as opposed to game conditions,â he explained. âWeâve done some game conditions as well where we tackled as a team in a few selected drills but not extensively. âŠ
âIâm sure thatâs a skill weâll have to acquire a little bit as we always do,â he allowed. âItâs similar in preseason. If you look at how many tackles the guys who play a lot make (during) preseason (itâs not a lot). A couple here and there. Weâll be less than that but itâs not a whole lot different than how it normally is. I think weâve prepared our players for that. I think theyâve had their opportunities to feel the contact and to feel as close to game reps as we can without playing in a game. Thereâs another level to that that weâll have to experience but I think weâll be prepared to take that next step and then weâll have to refine it from there. I donât think itâll be perfect but I think itâll be competitive and weâll continue to work and improve on it.â
Every season, there are plenty of players who play sparingly or not at all in fake games then show no ill effects when the real games begin.
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Others, according to former Patriots quarterback Matt Cassel, want to get hit.
âI used preseason to get myself prepared for the energy level and excitement thatâs there and the adrenaline when youâre getting hit legit for the first time,â Cassel said. âIn terms of quarterbacks, it will just add another level of adrenaline and excitement. Â Thereâs no preparation for getting hit unless you are getting hit and that may create some issues for quarterbacks not just with getting hit but with stamina.
âYou use game one and game two (of preseason) to be prepped to play a little longer each week and then game three is the âreal oneâ, âCassel said. âTheyâre gonna be tired physically and mentally. You have to be into it for four quarters. It canât be simulated.â
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