Ray Kowalczyk called me at the half. He said, ‘Duke, who is that.’ I said, ‘Ray, I do not know who that is.’ He said, ‘You’re the sportswriter.’ I said, ‘Ray, that man’s jersey number is 84 and his name on the back is spelled with a hyphen and what looks like a small drawing.’ That was our conversation. The Bills were up 6 to 3. Neither of us could have told you who was playing the Bills.
This is preseason football in the year of our Lord 2025. They roll out a man named Tre’Quavion who went undrafted out of a school I have never heard of, and he runs a 14-yard out, and the broadcast cuts to a sideline interview with a wide receivers coach about ‘standards’ and ‘process,’ and somewhere in a climate-controlled position room in Orchard Park, Josh Allen is doing a yoga flow on a heated bench while his quarterbacks coach hands him a smoothie.
The starters do not play. None of them. Not a snap. The head coach will tell you, with a straight face, that this is to ‘protect the roster,’ which is a phrase that would have gotten Coach DiMaggio to walk into Long Island Sound. DiMaggio’s idea of protecting the roster was making us run gassers in full pads in late August until somebody threw up, at which point he would point at the vomit and say, ‘There. That’s the guy who’s starting.’ I am not making that up. I have a witness. His name is Petey Corrigan and he was the guy who threw up.
Now, I understand the argument. I have heard it from my son-in-law, who works in ‘analytics,’ which as far as I can tell means he gets paid to tell millionaires not to do things. The argument is: why risk a torn ACL in a meaningless game? And the answer, which nobody seems willing to say out loud, is that if the game is meaningless, then maybe stop charging me $94 to watch it on a streaming service that requires a separate password and a ‘household verification’ text sent to a phone I don’t own.
Because that is what is happening. They have admitted, openly, on the record, that the product is not worth playing. The actual football players, the ones whose faces you would recognize, have collectively decided this thing is too dangerous to participate in. And then they sell it to you anyway. They sell it to you with the regular pregame show, the regular postgame show, the regular Tirico, and a regular full-price beer at the stadium where the regular starters are wearing bucket hats on the sideline and laughing at something on a phone.
If a Broadway show announced that the leads would be sitting in the lobby on opening night and the understudies’ understudies would be performing, and the price was the same, you’d burn the theater down. In football we call it ‘getting the young guys reps.’
I will say this for the young guys. They play hard. They have to. A 53-man roster is the only roster they will ever be on, and a special teams gunner spot is a mortgage. There was a kid last night, linebacker, number 47, undrafted out of someplace called Stephen F. Austin, who ran down on a kickoff and absolutely detonated a returner. Beautiful, clean, textbook. The broadcast did not show a replay. They were in a sideline package about a quarterback’s playlist.
Petey Corrigan called me after Ray hung up. Petey is 71 and watches preseason football the way monks copy manuscripts. He said, ‘Duke, I think the kid at 47 is going to make this team.’ I said, ‘Petey, what’s his name.’ He said, ‘I don’t know, but I trust him.’ That is the entire emotional content of preseason football in 2025. You don’t know anyone’s name and you trust a few of them anyway. It is the closest sports get to faith.
The regular season starts in five weeks. Allen will rise from his heated bench, blink into the light, and throw a 60-yard touchdown on the third snap of Week 1, and a man on a podcast will say he ‘looks fresh.’ He should. He has not done anything since February. None of them have. We are paying full freight for a sport whose stars have entered a kind of athletic hibernation, and we are being told this is good for us.
Denise is bringing chili tonight. Game two is on. She says the recipe is from a podcast.