Nothing in sports compares to the NFL preseason.
Everyone—from fans to coaches to analysts to players—admits how little the preseason matters. It’s similar to spring training baseball. Sure, certain players can look good and some can look bad. But it ultimately doesn’t matters. Practices out of sight from most fans is where the real evaluation takes place.
Yet we do the same thing every summer: Overreact to what we see in glorified practices, usually without the benefit of game plans or all the starters on the field.
Here’s an attempt to debunk the worst of the worst in the NFL’s first slate of preseason games.