Every off-season I lament the two major voids that take place over the course of the six months we must endure without football. Usually they break down as follows:
- Post-Season Void: the period after the Super Bowl but before Free Agency or the Scouting Combine. Usually you’re picking up the pieces from how the season ended, starting draft research, and looking at free agent possibilities so it’s fairly tolerable.
- Post-Draft Void: while you can fill much of March and April with draft and free agency stuff, once the draft ends and mini-camps are over we enter the longest and hardest time of the off-season. It doesn’t get much worse than mid-May through late July, the period we’re entering right now.
Well here we are, in the midst of a new and uncharted void which I will dub the Lockout Void.
The Lockout Void has elements of hope that the Post-Draft Void of years past did not because we still have all of Free Agency ahead of us. Who knows, the sides could hammer out an agreement and we could spend all of June (always the worst month of the NFL year) in a Free Agent frenzy.
But there is an underlying feeling of pessimism that maybe a deal won’t get done anytime soon. I don’t think anyone knows for sure what will happen if the lockout continues and the sides are unable to work out a deal.
When will free agency start? Could it not be until August or even September? How would a team with a ton of free agents like the Jets manage to assemble a team just weeks before the season starts? (Okay that one isn’t really bothering me that much).
Obviously there’s a ton of uncertainty right now, but that almost makes this last and most painful void a little more tolerable. This year, May and June could very well be filled with a great deal of NFL news and moves. So strangely, the Lockout Void is actually preferable to the usual Post-Draft void, when we’d only have a couple mini-camps to keep our football appetite satiated.
However, until the lockout ends, Free Agency starts and we have a firm date for the start of training camp there won’t be too much to write about. That’s one thing I’m not looking forward to. But we’ll just carry on and hope this mess is resolved sooner than later.
I just hope the NFL doesn’t use this post as ammo in their next court appeal.
