Most fans are certainly ready for football with the NFL starting this past weekend and joining the already-started high school and college seasons. Now, while the fans are definitely ready for football, one wonders if the players are ready after watching some of the clunkers from the NFL’s first weekend. With a few exceptions (Tom Brady and Drew Brees), sloppy play was rampant. Why is that? There are probably several reasons, but one big reason was lack of preparation.
With all due respect to Allen Iverson on his famous rant minimizing the importance of practice after being criticized for missing it, he was wrong. Practice is vital. Actually, practice is critically necessary whether you are talking about sports, music, acting or business. Practice or rehearsal, whatever you call it, is a form of preparation and it is essential to success. In athletics, practice is training muscle memory and working with your team. In rehearsals in the arts, it’s either memorizing lines, music, or choreography. In business, rehearsals help either memorizing speeches, practicing voice inflections or just storing key concepts in your mind to recall when trying to sell someone something. The old axiom of practice makes perfect applies in all facets of life.
With football being such a violent sport, most NFL teams hardly play their starters in preseason or “practice” games for fear of injury. That has resulted in sloppy season openers for many teams.
Want to see what could happen to your latest new business pitch if you don’t rehearse enough? Watch the film of last Thursday’s Night’s NFL Season Opener between The Bears and The Packers. That game, with the NFL's oldest rivals gives a bad name to Old School.