For key players, lack of preseason shouldn't matter much
You'd be hard pressed to find any correlation between preseason and regular season performance
Photo courtesy of the Minnesota Vikings
On August 24, 2019, Minnesota Vikings quarterback Kirk Cousins played very bad football.
The Vikings faced the Arizona Cardinals in the “all-important” third preseason game. The dress rehearsal, if you will. And Cousins went 3-for-13 for 35 yards and was sacked twice.
“If I play the way I did today, it’s going to be a long year,” Cousins said after the game.
Mike Zimmer ripped into his team at the postgame podium.
“I felt like there wasn’t much energy,” he said. “Defensively, we didn’t rush the passer well. We had guys not going to the huddle defensively, so they don’t know the call. Offensively, we had dropped balls, penalties, a bunch of three-and-outs. We missed two field goals. It was really a poor performance, and we need to play a lot better than that if we’re going to win football games.”
In the regular season opener the Vikings demolished the Atlanta Falcons and they went on to win 10 regular season games and a playoff game in which Cousins threw a game-winning touchdown in overtime. He set a career high in quarterback rating and nobody remembered what happened in Week 3 of the preseason when Cousins looked like Josh Freeman.
On the other side of the coin, Kyle Sloter dominated the fourth quarters of the preseason and the Vikings cut him in favor of Jake Browning, who barely appeared in actual games.
There’s probably some value in running plays against another team but training camp practices are where teams are made. Cousins threw a grand total of 25 passes in the preseason and completed 13 of them.
In total, his preseason starting career looks like this:
2019 — 13-for-25, 86.8 rating
2018 — 24-for-40, 86.0
2017 — 25-for-44, 72.0
2016 — 17-for-28, 107.3
2015 — 40-for-53, 103.9
The top performing 2019 preseason quarterbacks in PFF grade were Matt Barkley, Case Keenum and Mason Rudolph. Cousins graded 48th. Maybe that was in part because Stefon Diggs didn’t have a single preseason snap. He went on to average nearly 20 yards per reception in a new offense.
So if the NFL heeds the advice of the NFL Players Association, which reportedly requested the cancellation of the preseason, it isn’t likely to have much impact on the final results of the 2020 season.
No doubt late-round picks and undrafted free agents fighting for an end-of-the-bench or practice squad job will get a bad break. Maybe the next Adam Thielen or Anthony Harris will end up on the chopping block before they ever get a chance — though expanded practice squads may mitigate that issue.
Overall you would be hard pressed to find any evidence that starters are impacted by missed preseason games. Side note: PFF’s highest graded preseason team last year was the New York Giants.
The NFL owners reportedly agreed to hold two preseason contests, which could give teams just enough reps to rev up the engines for starters. But if coaches feel compelled to play starters for several quarters in each game, the net outcome for teams could be negative. Losing players to injury is far worse than having them start Week 1 sluggishly.
The Vikings have largely been lucky in this regard but last year Cam Newton suffered a foot injury in the preseason that derailed his 2019.
The idea of removing preseason games isn’t new by any means. In 2017 Roger Goodell said that teams have been finding them less and less useful.
“I’ve asked every football guy, ‘How many preseason games do we really need to prepare your team and develop players and evaluate players and get yourself ready for the season?” Goodell said. “And I think that has shifted dramatically in the last three years. I think that coaches and football people think that you could do this in three [games], and I actually think that’s better for the fans. I actually don’t think the preseason games are of the quality that I’m really proud of. From my standpoint, I think that would be a really healthy shift.”
The Los Angeles Rams simply stopped playing starters in preseason games. Quarterback Jared Goff hasn’t thrown a preseason pass since 2017. He led the No. 1 and No. 2 ranked regular season offenses in two of those years and reached the Super Bowl.
If you’re wondering: Has anybody studied this? Of course they have. PFF looked at whether preseason grades and schemes translated over to the regular season and — spoiler alert — they did not. Author of the piece Timo Riske points out that teams simply do not show their hand.
“During the preseason, teams hesitate to show off their route combinations over the middle of the field, a recent trend and a vital part of modern NFL offenses,” he wrote. “Instead, they have their outside receivers run simpler go routes, not showing any tendencies and their full arsenal of skills.”
And if the point wasn’t clear enough, there’s this tremendous factoid and quote from former Lions OC Jim Colletto concerning the team’s 0-16 season in 2008:
"We were 4-0 in the preseason," Colletto told ESPN. "But if you know enough about pro football, that didn't mean squat diddly."
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Just enjoyed the "what happened there", podcast. Sage was pretty funny, although he might want to get that cough checked.. the Chilly comments were hilarious!
OK, I feel better about the possible lack of preseason games. I really watch them to see how the rookies, free agents and year 2 guys perform. I’ll miss that aspect of it.