Take Your OTA Coverage With a Large Grain of Salt

Football-starved fans, and reporters, can fall into the trap of making mountains out of OTA molehills. 

This is just excellent from Les Bowen and I could not agree more. 

Money quote:

The past few weeks, reporters have been trying to write stories by desperately breathing life into tiny, dried morsels left over from the week after the draft, the last time we were able to speak with anyone. Today figures to be chaos, a starving horde descending on an all-you-can-eat buffet. (Yes, yes, many of us don't look like we're starving. Don't be so literal.)

We will get only the barest glimpse of what is happening on the field, and yet sweeping conclusions will be reached - players will be elevated, demoted, cut and traded, at least on Twitter, based on what can be gleaned from 50 yards away on one afternoon in May.

That is the way of the NFL in 2015, and it links directly to the carefully doled-out access. A few teams still function the way the Eagles did years ago, invite everybody in for every day of everything, have the coach talk frequently, but their ranks dwindle each year. More and more, the calculation is "if we can keep those people out of here for a while, let's do it."

The Eagles beat is one of the few in the NFL that is possibly even more saturated than the Packers and they have even less access on that beat than the Packers' scribes do in Green Bay. 

Les' point about Twitter is spot on. Fans are starved for football and any related info. They want to know how the season will shake out, right now, in May, prior to one pad being put on. It's natural that every move is scrutinized. The danger comes in fans, and reporters, thinking any of this means any more than it actually does - which is not much. 

So enjoy the coverage of the Packers today and throughout the offseason, but be careful not to draw any sweeping conclusions from what you see, hear or read. There's a long way to go. 

 

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Comments (4)

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Idiot Fan's picture

May 28, 2015 at 08:35 am

Look, all I want to know from these practices is: which rookies are going to make the hall of fame and which ones should be cut immediately????

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TKWorldWide's picture

May 31, 2015 at 02:28 pm

I think you are missing the sarcasm.

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TKWorldWide's picture

May 29, 2015 at 06:14 am

I'd like to add "looking good in OTA's" to my list of useless expressions.

(Other items on that list include "it is what it is", and, "it's always in the last place you look".)

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