Columnist Dean Juipe: NFL should wise up, cut exhibitions

Dean Juipe

Wednesday, Aug. 26, 1998 | 10:09 a.m.

THEY'RE IN virtually every story originating from an NFL training camp.

They're injuries. Severe injuries. Season-ending injuries.

This guy's banged up and so is that one.

This million-dollar player is sidelined for a few weeks and that $3 million stud is out for the year.

It's the nature of the game, of course, and there's no getting around it. Professional football is the most brutal of American sports and those good enough to participate are apt to be hurt or hurting at any given time.

They're always susceptible and there's a certain inevitability of injury. The bone-displacing contact takes an awful toll.

But here's the part that doesn't make sense: Most of the serious injuries at this time of the year are occurring in these ridiculous exhibition games. From both a player's and a fan's perspective, anyone lost for the season as a result of being hurt in a preseason game -- as the NFL prefers to call them -- is a needless casualty.

Blowing out a knee or suffering a lacerated kidney is easier to accept if the mishap comes about in a game that counts in the standings. It's almost a question of valor, as if losing a man for an extended period or even the season takes on something of a heroic quality if the injury happened during the heat of a significant battle.

But when it happens during a game that neither team is really trying to win, it's both tragic and stupid.

To pick one player out of the hundred who have been carried or helped off the field in the last month, take a look at Jason Sehorn of the New York Giants. An all-pro cornerback, he volunteered to return kickoffs for last Thursday's who-cares game with the New York Jets and, wouldn't you know it, had a knee creamed and is out for the year.

This has become an annual complaint if not a crusade, but here goes: Cut back on exhibition games from the present four or five that each teams plays, to two. And, as importantly, extend the regular season from its current 16 games to 18.

There would still be just as many injuries, of course, but at least they would be comprehensible.

No one likes exhibition games and having to play more than two is absurd. Coaches don't need four or five preseason games to sort out talent and decide who's going to play; players hate the games for the risks involved; and fans detest them for the most part, especially those who want to purchase season tickets for the regular season and are told they have to buy the preseason games as well.

Likewise, TV can't be too happy with exhibitions and their poor ratings even with people starved for football at this time of the year, and, for what it's worth, neither can Las Vegas sports books. The games are boring, the results are mailed in and very few trends or patterns develop that carry over to the regular season and mean anything.

The solution is a trade that would lift everyone's spirits: Dump two exhibitions and start the regular season two weeks earlier. It's simple and the NFL has discussed it, yet for some reason it just hasn't pulled the trigger.

But it's a change that's long overdue and one without a downside.

It may even be inevitable.