In the absence of preseason games, the typical Hard Knocks week-to-week structure is being challenged this year. The preseason schedule lends itself to a perfectly fluid arc for each season of the show: an episode begins with practices and meetings, culminating with a game against a different team, followed by roster cuts, where we learn the fates of players we've grown to care about during the show's run. It's a tried and true method that's proven effective for the previous 14 seasons of the show.
Constraints breed creativity, though, and the show's producers have had to work with what they've got.