I sat through a full month of NFL preseason football. None of it counted. Most of it was ugly. I’d do it again.
That’s not sarcasm, either. Preseason has a well-earned reputation for being close to unwatchable, third-string quarterbacks throwing to receivers who won’t have a job by Labor Day, offensive lines that look like they met for the first time in the parking lot. This year followed the script. Philadelphia’s quarterbacks struggled through the preseason finale, while a Saints quarterback named Spencer Rattler quietly turned in one of the sharper performances of the whole exhibition slate. That’s the entire preseason experience compressed into one sentence: the highlight reel is one guy having a decent night for a team that mostly didn’t.
Then came the roster cuts. Teams trimmed to 53 players this week, and the storylines were their own kind of strange. Former first-round quarterbacks like Anthony Richardson and J.J. McCarthy spent the month fighting just to survive the roster. Not to win a starting job. To keep the one they already had.
Tomorrow night, all of that disappears. The defending Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks host the New England Patriots in a rematch of last season’s title game, and for the first time since January, every snap actually matters again.
Here’s the part worth saying out loud: the ugly month isn’t a design flaw. It’s the whole system doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. You don’t notice a starting left tackle is good until you’ve watched a guy who’s out of the league by October get bull-rushed into the quarterback’s lap four times in a quarter. It’s not close. You don’t notice a franchise quarterback’s timing until a camp arm sails a checkdown ten yards over his running back’s head, and that happens roughly every August. Preseason recalibrates what “good” is supposed to look like, by drowning you in what it isn’t.
It’s also the only real window coaches get into things film can’t show them: whether the fifth receiver can actually block, or whether the rookie guard flinches on a blitz he’s never seen live and full speed. Nobody’s watching for entertainment. They’re watching for information. We just happen to get to watch too.
So enjoy the opener. Seattle-New England is about as good as a Week 1 matchup gets, the champion against the team it just beat, with nothing padded about it this time. Just don’t pretend the ugly warm-up didn’t earn its keep. A month of guys who mostly won’t make it is exactly what makes you notice the ones who will.
Two cents: preseason football is bad on purpose, and complaining about it every August is basically its own tradition now, as reliable as the games themselves.