In recent years, the NFL used an all-at-once roster-cutdown format that brought transaction avalanches following the preseason’s conclusion. This year, the league will tweak that structure.
Come August, teams will be mandated to trim their rosters gradually. Rather than trimming rosters from 90 to 53 players, Tom Pelissero of NFL.com tweets teams will be required to cut players in multiple stages — from 90 to 85, 85 to 80 and from 80 to 53 — in August.
Teams must get down to 85 players by Aug. 17, move down to 80 by Aug. 24 and set their final rosters on Aug. 31. These respective cut dates come after each of the new-look preseason’s three weeks, so teams will have fewer players on their rosters by the third week of the preseason. This may force teams to play a few more regulars in their preseason finales. As Hard Knocks viewers know, the NFL once had a cutdown structure that mandated teams reduce their rosters to 75 players late in the preseason ahead of the 53-man finalization. This recent adjustment harkens back to that.
Additionally, the NFL set July 27 as a de facto return-to-camp date for most of its teams. Twenty-nine of the 32 teams will open their respective camps that Tuesday, Pelissero adds (on Twitter). The CBA allows for camps to begin 47 days before Week 1. The three teams who will begin camp prior to that date — the Steelers, Cowboys and Buccaneers — are either set to play in the preseason-opening Hall of Fame Game or open Week 1 on a Thursday. Dallas is scheduled to do both.
There are bigger problems for them to worry about. If they wanted to go back to gradual cut downs, why did they decide yet another new system for a relatively minor procedural phenomenon while just literally ignoring huge parts of their game? Change cut downs, change numbering schemes, sure, but they refuse to make half of their penalties reviewable. And when they did that for one of them, they hamstrung it with invisible rules and an incompetent fool at the head of officiating to oversee it. Onside kicks are still broken, the catch rule only applies to Bigfoot, and players are selectively suspended for indeterminable standards of evidence. But yeah, I’m glad we’ve got our roster cut downs out of the way, because that’s what needed to change here.