Well I guess this is one of the consequences of no preseason games. Everyone just gets hurt in the early regular season instead!

“Oh my god this year seems worse than normal with injuries” has been a line that I’ve followed football long enough to no longer give much credence to. I can’t remember the last season people didn’t say that after the early weeks when we have our usual time-frame of people going down. When was the last time you heard anyone go “Wow, hasn’t been too many injuries this season, everyone’s healthy!” Never. No one says that.

We always have a few big names go down, this year features Von Miller, Saquon Barkley, and Nick Bosa as our starring roles. Most of the injuries we’ve seen are the types of injuries we’d still be seeing in preseason instead and nothing about this rash of destruction strikes me as something that wouldn’t be happening otherwise, maybe with different names, maybe more spread out over 3 weeks of preseason and early weeks of real season. Yeah, week 2 hit us pretty damn hard (especially the poor 49ers, who sacrificed everything to beat…the Jets?) but that might be a product of the condensed timeframe.

2020 is the first season I can remember that was actually set up to deliver us a worse than normal injury situation with the lack of training camps and no preseason games, but unless the dominoes keep falling like this in week 3, It doesn’t seem any worse than normal to me. After week one was relatively mild, I saw some creeping whispers that maybe this season just proved that preseason games are useless. I…don’t buy that, but not entirely for the injury argument. I’m probably in favor of 2 preseason games that are mostly there for younger bubble players to go out and prove themselves. Vets with unquestioned standing shouldn’t even have to play preseason games, but for a young and inexperienced team, those weeks are vital.

The teams doing well right now are teams that came back with good continuity to pick back up. There aren’t any big 0-2 surprises outside arguably the Vikings. There aren’t any big 2-0 surprises outside the Raiders and Bears, but the Bears are pretenders who have faced to garbage piles and did just enough to not also get set on fire. Weeks 3-4 are always the weeks of truth, where the pretenders get exposed and the true teams to watch emerge from the murky depths of confusion.

Also, if you didn’t check it or forgot to go back, READ MY LAST POST PLS!