Less is more when it comes to offseason work

By STEVE KING
The year-long — and counting — COVID-19 pandemic has already changed, and will continue to change. nearly everything in our lives.
To what extent, and for how long, exactly, is yet to be determined, but rest assured that the new normal will look, and feel, much different than the old one.
And the NFL is not exempt from that. Though its top people may haughtily think that the league is above the fray of the everyday world, it is not in every regard, including this one.
Which brings us to the inevitable — to the train that has been chugging on down the track toward us for a long time — and that is how to handle all the offseason workouts. It is a question that has just begun to be discussed publicly now that there is a little window of opportunity between the cooling off of free energy and the heating up heading toward the NFL Draft.
The NFL Players Association wants a similar model to last year when, because of the coronavirus, the offseason was virtually all-virtual, much to their delight since it did not take nearly as much of a physical toll on their bodies. The organization’s point is that the quality of play during the regular season and playoffs did not suffer one bit.
The owners believe that the offseason needs to include a lot of physical, in-person work, especially with the reinstallment of a full training camp and preseason. The revenue from promotions and advertising, and ticket sales, was sorely missed a year ago and, according to them, it needs to return. It makes for a healthier bottom line.
There needs to be — and there will be — some middle-ground agreement reached, because it benefits everybody involved. But as that process evolves, both sides — along with you, the fans, and the media — need to keep some things in mind. 
That is, for starters, we don’t need all those seemingly endless — seemingly pointless at times — days of guys running around at half-speed while wearing shorts and shell pads.
A little of it? Well, yres, of course, there is learning to be learned, particularly with rookies for whom pro football — and their new team’s schemes — are new. But a little of this goes a long way.
As we found out last offseason, these schemes can be grasped and this coaching and teaching can take place with players and coaches on tablets and computers. They don’t need to leave their families and, in the Browns’ case, parade to team headquarters in Berea day after day after day to do all of those things. Despite what some of the coaches and football purists contend, it’s simply not necessary — at all.
Football is such a physical sport and a physical and mental drain. It takes a toll on the players. When the offseason rolls around, it needs to be the offseason, not the season repackaged and reconfigured to look like something different when it’s really not.

Less is more. It really is. And too much is too much. There is such a thing as recovery, and it needs to take place fully and completely, which takes time. Doing nothing is OK. Relaxation is OK. Going on vacation, or just hanging out at home, is OK. Really. Honest. It’s not being lazy and irresponsible. It’s being smart and responsible.
How we got to this belief that football has to be 24/7/365 is beyond me.
Former Browns head coach Butch Davis used to talk about “guys running around in short pants in the spring and being All-Berea (while mispronouncing the city’s name as Bear-a-ah),” saying that it provided a lot of misinformation about players. As football people will tell you, and which is true, these players don’t begin revealing what they can do until “the bullets start to fly” and the hitting begins. But that hitting quickly starts to chip away at a player’s durability for the season, and, as former Browns head coach Bill Belichick likes to say, “A players ability is his availability.” This, it must be done with care, and only when necessary.
Let’s hope the owners and players make sure that as many players as possible are available when the regular season begins, and the football that is played really counts for something.