The NFL’s decision to shift from four preseason games to three meant that head coaches had to plan accordingly about how they would utilize and prioritize personnel in each game. The fourth preseason game was typically reserved for fringe roster players to state a final case. The third game was the “tune-up game” for the start of the regular season when the starters got their most extensive playing time.
Back when the change was first made, Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin acknowledged that it might require a period of adjustment. A few years in, however, he struck a different chord, telling reporters yesterday that he approaches the third preseason game no differently than he did when there were four, including the game-planning aspect.
Yet QB Kenny Pickett didn’t seem to feel as though the preparation aspect this week was substantially different from weeks past, at least in his own experience. That could be driven largely by the fact that their final game comes on a Thursday after playing on a Saturday, only five days in between.
“It’s a short week, so I mean I wouldn’t say there’s a lot of game-planning”, Pickett told reporters, according to a transcript provided by the team’s media relations department. “We’re just kind of continuing what we’ve been doing all preseason and want to work on some small things that we can work on, put on tape. But really, it’s kind of the same model that we’ve had this whole preseason”.
So how much difference will there be in their preparation? Will it be less for Pickett and the quarterbacks than it might be for other units, since you are more likely to spend more time planning with the most important position anyway?
“We did a little planning for this”, Tomlin said in the opening remarks of his press conference on Tuesday. “The process of strategic planning, teaching, learning, preparing, and then playing, we want to see that—their ability to execute planning, relative to a game-plan perspective”.
Asked if he felt there was any advantage to having his final preseason game come on a Thursday rather than a Sunday to get a jumpstart on making the final roster decisions, Tomlin would only offer, “I don’t care”. I think we can safely surmise we would get the same answer if asked about the disadvantage of having less time to game-plan for a short week.
Will it have any effect on the starters’ preparedness right out of the gate? The preseason is the time that you get everything ready for the real thing, after all. Part of the process is going through the motions of preparing for an opponent and designing a game plan.
If that process was hindered for their finale because of the short turnaround time, that’s unfortunate, but is it significant? I guess we’ll see if the Steelers stumble out of the gates in September, but even then, the degree of fair attribution to this particular issue would be impossible to ascertain.
