A Brief Guide to Preseason Playing Time

A look at how teams have changed their preseason strategy and abandoned the "dress rehersal"

Times are changing and it feels as if NFL teams are placing less emphasis on preseason games every year. While preseason games are the most accessible opportunities for fans get a glimpse of their team prior to week 1, the teams themselves have gravitated toward joint practices with fewer prying eyes and greater control over the situation. In this post, I’m going to expand on some analysis I did years ago and look at how teams are approaching preseason workloads.

Let’s start with a refresher on the history of the NFL preseason. For many years, the NFL preseason consisted of four games (plus a fifth if the team was participating in a game on Hall of Fame Weekend), ending with a little more than a week before opening day. The 2020 preseason was canceled entirely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. When the preseason returned in 2021, the league expanded the regular season to 17 games and removed the final preseason week, effectively creating a bye week between the end of the preseason and start of the regular season.

Before 2020, teams tended to ramp up the activity of key players over the course of the first three games, culminating with first stringers playing well into the second quarter of game three, sometimes referred to as a '“dress rehearsal”. The fourth and final preseason game was often contested entirely by backups and players who would ultimately fail to make the 53-man roster. By 2019, less than 30% of snaps in the preseason finale were played by players who would go on to make the 53-man roster. With the fourth preseason game phased out, the third preseason game has lost its footing as the key preseason game for most teams. In 2024, the game three share of snaps from players on the 53-man roster dropped below 40%.

Meanwhile, the first two preseason contests of 2024 each had a 50/50 split of snaps played by players who would go on to survive final cuts. The reality should be clear at this point: there is no more “dress rehearsal” game in the preseason. In the last few years, teams appear to see their first and second week as nearly equal in importance. For the time being at least, activity in those weeks looks to be leveling out.

Different teams will obviously approach the preseason in different ways. In 2024, the Colts, Jags, and Titans gave just over 10% of snaps to their respective regular season starters in their first preseason contest. They rested their starters in the next week before closing their preseason with a workload comparable to the preseason “dress rehearsals” of the past. More than half the league didn’t play a single starter in their preseason finale last season. In many cases, teams stuck to a comparable level of starter activity in both of their first two weeks.

So who was the catalyst of reduced preseason activity for starters? In the third row from the bottom, you’ll notice the Rams severely cut back on their starter’s preseason snaps starting in 2018 (Sean McVay’s second season). Seven years later, the Rams approach is still more aggressive than much of the league, but no longer stands out as a clear outlier.

As I’ve shown above, the first & second full weeks of preseason play have become the focal contests. Let’s take a look at how things have played out over the course of those games in the last four years. I’ve broken every Week 1 & Week 2 preseason game from 2021 to 2024 into 3 minute segments and calculated the share of snaps that went to each player based on the role they occupied in the opening game of the regular season.

The average team begins these games with eventual starters taking 40% of the snaps in the first three minutes, joined by another 40% of players who are on the roster in week 1, but are not starting (i.e. Backups). This essentially translates to 9 players on each side of the ball that will make it through final cuts. As the first half wears on, we see the average team pulling most of their starters after a drive or two. By the middle of the second quarter, we might only expect to see one or two starters still working in. Halftime tends to be a common point for teams to make wider substitutions. The start of the second half is their first point at which we see the average team giving less than half of their snaps to players who will be on the week 1 roster. When the fourth quarter begins, we often see a handful of rosterable players, but nearly half of the playing time will go to players who won’t make the team or practice squad.

I’ll be sharing more as preseason games get underway, so stay tuned!