Are you worried about a guy you want to draft in your fantasy league, but his team has looked like garbage so far? Don’t. I can’t state it any simpler. There’s just no reason to look at the pre-season as any sort of measure of how a team or player will do when the games start meaning something.
Look at the perennially great Colts. So far they’re 0-2 this pre-season. In the past four pre-seasons, they’ve gone a total of 4-13. In the regular season, they’ve gone 51-13 in that span. And that total includes the games they routinely take off in the last two weeks.
Want a better example of why the pre-season should never be used to judge real performances? Remember in 2008 when the Detroit Lions made infamous history by going 0-16? Well, in the 2008 pre-season, they were 4-0 and allowed only 32 points. In the regular season, they allowed a league-high 517.
It’s very easy to forget that coaches and coordinators are never going to use fresh substitution packages, new playbooks, trick plays and dynamic ideas in the pre-season. Defences will always throw out vanilla schemes and simple blitz packages. Why waste your hard work on the other side’s scout team?
So, when you see Matt Leinart stink or Brett Favre get battered around, don’t look too much into as a sign of things to come. And remember that those supposed studs that put up huge numbers are doing so against the scout team and are likely to end up on their squad’s scout team as well.