I’ve always thought this was/is bullshit, no matter how many coaches say this.
NFL teams are in training camp and preseason for six weeks before the real games start. They do also have a smattering of minicamps in the offseason, and the season itself is 17 weeks long. They are football players from July through January. with occasional minicamps in the spring.
High school and college teams go into their first game with 2-3 weeks of practice, and most of those kids spent the offseason playing basketball and baseball (or wrestling, or track, or tennis, or whatever else they do). They have a shorter season (ends in November/December) and don’t came back to football until two weeks before school starts (yes, a few states have some spring practices, but most aren’t in pads).
I’m not buying “lack of practice time in the offseason” as an excuse for sloppy play.
I’m well aware that NFL playbooks are about nine thousand times as complicated as high-school playbooks; and actually, the funny part is, that’s where I place the blame. NFL coaches are obsessive, uber-competitive people that can’t turn it off; so when they aren’t coaching players because it’s the offseason, they are working madly trying to draw up new plays and formations, which is how we end up reading quotes about a playbook that has 800 different passing plays in it (with the average NFL quarterback throwing somewhere between 500-600 passes per season, that means your team could literally go the entire season without calling the same pass play twice).
The teams are sloppy in part because said coaches have written playbooks that are so damn complicated that a) the players can barely remember which way they’re supposed to go half the time - which accounts for lots of things like delay-of-game, illegal-motion, illegal-formation, and all that and b) there’s no practice time to work on things like “fundamentals” (throwing, catching, tackling, etc) because the coach has to put in all 800 pass plays.
One specific problem with no easy answer is tackling. The League decided that one of its major concessions to players in the last CBA would be a reduction in the number of padded practices, and that was a relatively obvious point to “give” on with all of the noise surrounding head trauma and CTE. More tackling in practice and genuine emphases on good, fundamental tackling would probably help with sloppy tackling, but the cost in extra impact and practice injuries is probably not worth it…I already hate how much it starts to feel like half the JV team is playing by midseason as the injuries pile up, and the League will not be enthused if star QB’s and RB’s go down with injuries in practice and you’re stuck watching the fourth-string RB who wasn’t even on the team after camp instead of the big-money stars.