[ad_1]
Football often comes with an incredible amount of paranoia about the media and / or fans watching practice, with many college and NFL teams cracking down on access to practice in recent years. The latest attempt in that direction came from the Houston Texans, who tried to end their training camp rules early (which include more media access than the regular season) and switch to a regular season model. . But after local media protested, the NFL stepped in and forced the Texans to comply with league policies over the duration of training camp. Here is more about it from John McClain from The Chronicle of Houston:
The Texans told reporters covering the team that Wednesday will be the last day of training camp and that they will switch to regular season mode on Thursday, two days before the first preseason game in Green Bay.
The change would mean the media limitations would go into effect, but there was one problem – NFL rules say, “All Daily Practices must be open in their entirety to local media until August 26.”
The Texans were notified of the violation and returned to training camp mode.
Now reporters can continue to watch all practices up to two days before the final preseason game on August 28 against Tampa Bay at NRG Stadium.
It’s good to see the NFL enforce a rule to preserve media access because that hasn’t always been the case. There has been a lot of restricted access in the NFL recently. But this rule in particular appears to be something that causes very little harm to teams in the league, and something that can bring benefits to local media. As for the damage to teams, this is a league-wide settlement; local media have access to all teams’ practices until the 26th, so it’s not as if one team has their practices more exposed than any other team. And media surveillance practices very rarely lead to the disclosure of important team secrets; this more frequently leads to smarter, more insightful questions to players and coaches after practices, and more thoughtful team coverage.
On some levels, it’s somewhat understandable that some football coaches are concerned about media and fan access to their training. Football, perhaps more than any other sport, is based on stopped games and countermeasures to other people’s games; that is why watching films of adversaries is so high priority and so important. And if someone whose strict agenda is to relay everything a team has done in training to an upcoming opponent is training, it could potentially have negative impacts for the team in question; we have seen a few attempts in the past in various leagues. But that’s not really what media coverage of the practices is these days, and the paranoia seems woefully exaggerated. So it’s nice to see the NFL step in here to impose a few extra weeks of training access in Houston.
[The Houston Chronicle]
[ad_2]
Source link