When the New Orleans Saints and Pittsburgh Steelers took the field last night for the annual Hall of Fame Game in Canton, OH, the National Football League kicked off the portion of its season that is boring for fans, dangerous for players, and profitable for owners.

It’s the NFL preseason, the worst deal in sports for the paying customers and the athletes they watch — but the best deal in sports for the men pulling the strings.

The NFL’s slate of 65 preseason games is a meaningless diversion at best and a hazardous rip-off at worst. The games don’t count, fans only get to see the star players for a few plays before they hit the showers, the coaches care more about evaluating individual players than whether the team wins or loses. By the fourth quarter, even hard-core fans have never heard of most of the guys still playing. There’s absolutely nothing to hold the fans’ interest for three hours.

And the worst part is that even though the games are merely glorified scrimmages, they’re played at full speed, meaning that true fans often wish their favorite players will skip the games altogether to avoid injury. There’s nothing more cringe-inducing than watching a star quarterback get sacked in an inconsequential exhibition game. Every time it happens, fans are left wondering why he’s out there at all.

Preseason injuries are a fact of life in the NFL. At some point in the next four weeks, at least one team will lose an important player for a significant portion of the regular season because of an injury suffered in an exhibition game; if a torn ACL is the worst injury suffered this preseason, the NFL should consider itself lucky. During the 1978 preseason, New England Patriots wide receiver Darryl Stingley was left paralyzed after being drilled by Oakland Raiders safety Jack Tatum. Stingley died four months ago at age 55.

Although veteran players frequently complain about the preseason, their union hasn’t tried to persuade the owners to take any steps to reduce the risk of injuries, such as reducing the preseason from four games to two. The NFL Players Association is often criticized for not doing enough to ensure its members’ health, and its lack of action in the face of frequent exhibition injuries is one of the many reasons for that criticism.

Of course, there’s nothing stopping teams from holding their top players out for the entire preseason. No team follows that strategy, though, indicating that coaches believe the benefit of having players work together in live-game conditions outweighs the potential harm of injury. Of course, what choice do they have? Holding a regular player out until Week 1 of the regular season could stunt his progress for the season.

As far as the NFL’s decision-makers are concerned, the most important aspect of the preseason is that it’s a cash cow. Players don’t begin to collect their huge paychecks until the real games begin, so the cost of preseason football is extremely low for the owners. Player salaries are divided into 17 weekly checks during the regular season, and those salaries are the NFL’s biggest expense. So, almost all the money generated during the preseason goes into the owners’ pockets. And as long as August exhibitions make money for the owners, the preseason is here to stay.

The money generated is substantial, especially at the gate. Every team plays two preseason games at home, and they all charge full price for tickets. With the average NFL ticket at more than $60, and the average stadium seating more than 60,000, the owners can collect $4 million a game before the full-cost parking and full-cost concessions are factored in. Most fans resent paying regular-season prices to watch exhibition football, and if enough fans refused to pay, the owners would have to change their ways. But the fans won’t refuse to pay any time soon. NFL teams include full-price preseason tickets as part of their season-ticket packages, and most NFL teams have waiting lists for season tickets, often numbering in the tens of thousands. So as unfair as it might seem, there’s a surplus of fans willing to pay full price for preseason games if it means they’ll get to see regular season games, too.

The truth is, fans are so hungry for their football after a long summer that they’ll take whatever the NFL gives them in August. Preseason games get surprisingly good ratings. ESPN, for instance, averaged a solid 4.6 rating for its NFL preseason broadcasts in 2006, with 4.2 million households tuning in per preseason game. Those ratings are a far cry from the kind of viewing audience the NFL attracts in the regular season, but they’re still better than what ESPN gets for regular-season NBA games. (Of course, last night’s game was on the NFL network, so you probably didn’t see it.) The preseason is a tiny fraction of the NFL’s multibillion-dollar annual TV revenue, but a tiny fraction of a few billion dollars is still a lot of money, especially when the costs are so low.

Ultimately, the 32 NFL team owners have concluded that the preseason is profitable enough to justify possible injury to star players and the cost that would bring. The players on the field and the season ticket buyers in the stands might not like it, but they’re all just pawns in the game.

Mr. Smith is a contributing editor for FootballOutsiders.com.