One main reason Sean McVay has made the Rams your new favorite team

The Los Angeles Rams are your new favorite team, and for two seemingly unrelated but actually quite intertwined reasons.
 
One, they are about to sign defensive force of nature Aaron Donald to the largest contract ever granted a defensive player, in keeping with his abilities and the market rate. This means Khalil Mack isn’t far off from signing with the Oakland raiders, which means we can stop talking about it.
 
And two, and probably more important, head coach Sean McVay didn’t play many of his offensive starters a single down in the preseason because the preseason is essentially useless except for extracting money from football junkies. He told ESPN’s Lindsey Thiry as much, saying, “We want to get to that first game in Oakland healthy and ready to go. And we're giving ourselves a chance to do that.”
 
And there it is, right there – the admission that you’ve been played, and that you desperately want to be played. You watch the games armed with the illusion that you can see something that the coaches aren’t going to let you see, and you end up feeling like a dope – until the next season, when you do it all again for all the same reasons, with the same result.
 
This is news only because McVay admitted he saved his best for the regular season because he didn’t want the good players injured for no good reason, and the practice games are the worst reason of all. It’s the admission that will probably get him yelled at (if it hasn’t already), but the truth shall set us all free.
 
Except that many don’t want to be free. For football fans, the preseason is a dispositive example of Stockholm Syndrome – you say you want to be out, but you develop an unrequited relationship with your captors and decide to stay against your own best interests. And you will experience that again this Thursday with Raiders-Seahawks and Chargers-49ers. Happy days, marks.
 
And with the least valuable of the four practice games this weekend – the one that everyone already understands will feature no players of interest – it’s good to remember that one of new forward-thinking coaches in the sport is telling you out loud and without ambiguity that the practice games are useless.
 
Now the NFL being what it is, Roger Goodell will grind his teeth at McVay’s admission and then turn it into a new marketing campaign to reduce the number of practice games and increase the number of regular season games, thus increasing the number of injuries and repetitive head collisions the league says it is trying without success to reduce. But that is a less-than-compelling reason, since the teams already charge for the practice games as though they are regular season games. The presumed ratings spike will be helpful to the owners, and so will the money they can crowbar from their media “partners” (which is corporate-speak for slaves), but like everything else the league stands for, it’s short money.
 
But that’s the fight down the road. There is no fight about the uselessness of preseason football. We’ve known it for years, but now the answer is so painfully clear that even the coaches can’t lie about it any more.
 
At least Sean McVay doesn’t. Now that it’s safe to say it’s all an expensive lie, there will be others. And it won’t change a thing, except to tell fans that their eyes weren’t lying to them all this time. Their hearts were.