NFL Hall Of Fame Game: Who's ready for some football?

By Martin Rogers
FOX Sports Columnist

It has taken its sweet time to unfold, this latest chunk of life’s calendar when there was not a single snap of professional football. But the waiting game ends on Thursday night.

The moment kickoff comes at Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium, for the NFL Hall of Fame Game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Pittsburgh Steelers, America will start to beat to an entirely different rhythm again, one that won’t cease for the next six months.

Overdramatic? Don’t be so sure. Football impacts the country and its citizens, both those who love it and those who don’t, in ways both delicately subtle and as obvious as the pound of a sledgehammer. It can be as much or as little as you want, everything from an utter, all-consuming, life-controlling obsession to a casual interest and conversation point, or even, if you must, a source of annoyance and confusion as to why everyone else likes it so much.

I’ve written about how this offseason seemed to drag and linger more than most, and to delve too deeply for an answer as to why would be to pop down a rabbit hole from which there may be no emerging.

All we can be certain of is that the season ahead will spout activity just as fast and furious as the summer was lifeless and news-thin because that’s just how it is when football flows, every year, no matter what.

The Hall of Fame Game must be taken in its proper perspective. Sure, it is a preseason game and no more, and opening preseason matchups are a chance to test out your backups more than to give a runout to your stars.

"To me, this is what the preseason has always been about," Cowboys head coach Mike McCarthy told reporters. "Your starters and guys you have history with, you can get most of your work done in the practices. This is about the development of your roster, the competition of your roster."

But Thursday night will also be an awakening for football fans, crawling out from the summer slumber, when the temperatures soared but the competitive juices were allowed to chill for a while.

A lot of things begin to happen when the Hall of Fame festivities get underway. Your fantasy commissioner, even if they’re one of the inept ones who struggle to even manage the organization of a proper trophy, will probably drop an email that it’s time to begin figuring out a time for the draft.

Many fans, with the exception of a handful of diehards who have the whole thing memorized already, will start looking into the schedule in earnest, and figuring out how to plan a trip around it.

Football news starts to become a stream again to replace what has been barely a trickle, as rosters start to take shape, egos get tested and everyone gets nicely uptight and nervous.

The big names that you’ve barely heard a thing about for months suddenly become front and center again, their every word examined for signs of confidence or otherwise, and a deeper look into whether the locker room is as harmonious as they want you to believe.

And more than anything, it is the start of the sweetest time of optimism, when it feels like football is underway yet no one has lost a meaningful game yet, when it is possible to find means to believe that more successful days are ahead, because if there is one thing every NFL coach is good at it’s how to spin things in a positive light.

You can be sure that’s what McCarthy and Steelers counterpart Mike Tomlin will be doing after Thursday, no matter how it plays out in Canton. In Dallas especially, despite a shoulder strain to Dak Prescott that required an MRI, hopes are growing that last season’s 6-10 sting will soon fade.

"(With) Prescott, that offense, if the defense can hold up just a little bit, they could potentially get the job done all year," former All-Pro Brandon Marshall said on FS1's "First Things First."

"I hate to say this – I am starting to believe in the Cowboys."

Prescott won’t play Thursday and Ben Roethlisberger won’t be spotted either, with Pittsburgh quarterbacking duties shared between Mason Rudolph and Dwayne Haskins.

That’s how it is and it’s how we know it at this time of year. Preseason is the teaser before the season, the Hall of Fame Game is the teaser before the teaser.

It is not a fully-fledged NFL game and it doesn’t pretend to be. It is a taste. The same broadcast look, the same theme music, the same uniforms and teams that really look quite like the Cowboys and Steelers, even if they’re only a version of what will be put out there in Week 1.

It is meant to send us subliminal messages more than smack us into life, to give a gentle reminder not to sleep on this, because before we know it it’ll be February again.

It is just one preseason game, but it is here and it is a signal call – that football is back, and that it’s time to get ready.

Martin Rogers is a columnist for FOX Sports and the author of the FOX Sports Insider Newsletter. You can subscribe to the newsletter here.