The NFL preseason is a short run of exhibition games in August, before the real season starts. The results do not count for anything: no standings, no playoff places, nothing. Its actual job is to help each team decide which players to keep, so most of the stars you tuned in for barely play.
The first year I paid attention to the NFL, I sat down for a preseason game expecting the names I had just learned, and spent most of it watching players whose names I never caught. That is not a scheduling accident. It is the entire design, and once you understand it, the strangest three weeks of the football calendar start to make sense.
What the preseason actually is
The preseason (pre-season, if you are used to the hyphen over here) is a set of practice games that come before the regular season. Each team plays three of them across three weeks in August, plus one extra game, the Hall of Fame Game, that opens the whole thing.
Think of it as a dress rehearsal. The teams are real, the stadiums are open, the games are on television, but nothing that happens is entered into the record that decides the season. A team can lose all three preseason games and still win the Super Bowl five months later. It has happened.
That is the one idea to hold on to: these are the only games all year where the score genuinely does not matter.
Do the games count?
No. Preseason results have no effect on the standings, on who makes the playoffs, or on seeding. They are exhibitions, and the league treats them as separate from the season proper.
This trips up a lot of newcomers, and fairly, because everything else about the games looks real. Here is the honest version: the games are for the coaches, not the fans. A coach uses them to answer questions the practice field cannot, mainly which of the players on the edge of the roster can actually perform when the hitting is live and the lights are on.
So a preseason win tells you very little about how good a team is, and a heavy preseason loss tells you even less. What it tells you about is the back end of the roster, which is where the real drama sits.
Why the players you’ve heard of barely play
The star players sit out most of the preseason on purpose, and the reason is injury risk. There is no upside to your best quarterback getting hurt in a game that does not count, and there is a lot of downside.
This is not a hunch, it is league policy backed by the league’s own data. When the NFL cut the preseason down in 2021, the commissioner pointed to figures showing preseason games carried the highest rate of player injuries, and noted that the players getting most of those minutes were backups unlikely to make the team anyway. Follow that logic to its end and you get the modern preseason: the people with the most to lose barely feature, and the people fighting for a job play almost all of it.
Increasingly, coaches would rather run joint practices instead, where two teams train against each other for a few days in a controlled setting. They get to test their players against unfamiliar opponents without the full injury exposure of a game. If you hear that a team “held joint practices” in August, that is why, and it is often more revealing than the game that follows.
The short version: the football you watch in preseason is mostly played by players you will never see again.
The real contest, ninety players cut to fifty-three
The genuine competition in August is not on the scoreboard, it is for the roster. Every team is allowed up to 90 players through training camp and the preseason, and every team has to get down to 53 for the regular season. That is 37 players cut per team, and close to 1,180 released across the league inside roughly a day.
That is what the preseason is for. A player on the bubble, an undrafted rookie or a fringe veteran, gets a handful of preseason snaps to prove they belong, and a coaching staff decides a career on what they show. This is the highest-stakes football of the year for the people playing it, wrapped inside the games that count for the least. That contradiction is the whole point of the preseason.
In 2026 the cut to 53 happens on Sunday 30 August, earlier than the usual timing because the season opens on a Wednesday. After the cuts, a second layer forms: each team can sign a practice squad of up to 16 more players, mostly drawn from the ones just released. Practice-squad players train with the team and can be promoted into a game when needed, so for a lot of the bubble, “making it” really means making that list of 16.
One neat detail that ties back to how the league is built: when a player is cut, other teams can claim them off waivers in reverse order of last season’s standings, so the worst teams get first pick of everyone else’s leftovers. The league leans towards the bottom again, quietly, even here.
The takeaway: the preseason decides who has a job, and that is a bigger deal than any score in it.
How the 2026 preseason is laid out
The 2026 preseason runs from the Hall of Fame Game on 6 August through the final games on 29 August. Here is the shape of it.
| Stage | When (2026) |
|---|---|
| Hall of Fame Game (Panthers beat Cardinals 33-30) | Thursday 6 August, Canton, Ohio |
| Preseason Week 1 | 13 to 16 August |
| Preseason Week 2 | 20 to 23 August |
| Preseason Week 3 | 27 to 29 August |
| Rosters cut to 53 | Sunday 30 August, 6pm ET |
| Regular season kicks off | Wednesday 9 September |
Sources: NFL.com schedule for the dates; Pro Football Hall of Fame for the Hall of Fame Game result. Figures for the 2026 preseason.
The Hall of Fame Game is the traditional curtain-raiser, played in Canton, Ohio, home of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, as part of the weekend when that year’s new members are inducted. Only two teams play in it, which is why those two end up with four preseason games instead of the usual three.
After that, all 32 teams play their three games across the three August weeks, and then the season proper begins. If you want to know how the games that do count are then scheduled, that is the NFL season, explained.
Why the preseason used to be four games
For over four decades, each team played four preseason games, not three. That changed in 2021, when the NFL added a 17th regular-season game and trimmed the preseason to three to make room. It was the first change to the length of the regular season since 1978, when it went from 14 games to 16.
The reason the preseason got shorter rather than the regular season getting longer for free is a cap written into the agreement with the players: the two together are limited to 20 games per team. Add one to the regular season and you have to take one off the preseason. The injury data made the choice of which to cut an easy one.
This is a small example of a much bigger truth about the NFL, and the reason this whole section of the site exists: the way the league is shaped is the product of history and negotiation, not clean logic. The preseason is four games, then it is three, because of a deal, not a design. For the rest of it, start with how the NFL works.
One last practical note. Because preseason snaps go mostly to players fighting for a roster spot, the statistics that come out of these games are close to meaningless for judging established players. A rookie lighting up a preseason game against other rookies is not the same as doing it in the season, so treat the numbers with real caution. If you want to know which stats actually tell you something once the season starts, I have gone through them in NFL stats, decoded.
Preseason FAQ
What is the NFL preseason?
The NFL preseason is a short series of exhibition games in August, before the regular season begins. Each team plays three, plus a single extra game, the Hall of Fame Game, that opens the schedule. The results do not count towards the standings. The preseason exists to help teams evaluate players and settle their final rosters.
Do NFL preseason games count?
No. Preseason games are exhibitions, and the results have no bearing on the regular-season standings, the playoff race or seeding. A team can lose every preseason game and still have a great season. The games matter to coaches deciding who makes the team, not to the record.
How long is the NFL preseason?
The NFL preseason lasts about three and a half weeks. It opens with the Hall of Fame Game in early August, then runs three weeks in which every team plays three games, before the regular season starts in September. In 2026 it runs from 6 August to 29 August.
Why don’t starters play much in the NFL preseason?
Because the games do not count, and the risk of a key player getting injured is not worth taking for no reward. The league’s own data found preseason games carried the highest injury rate, which is part of why the schedule was cut in 2021. Coaches rest their starters and give the minutes to players competing for a roster spot.
What is the Hall of Fame Game?
The Hall of Fame Game is the exhibition game that opens the NFL preseason each year. It is played in Canton, Ohio, at the home of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, during the weekend the new Hall of Fame members are inducted. Only two teams take part, so they each end up playing four preseason games instead of three.