Every August, somebody with a podcast microphone and a chip on their shoulder tells you the preseason doesn’t matter. Throw out the tape. The starters play twelve snaps. Nobody’s game-planning. It’s glorified practice with ticket prices. And every August, that person is right about the scoreboard and dead wrong about everything else.
Because here’s what the 2025 preseason has been quietly telling anybody paying attention: the score is the least interesting thing on the field. What you’re actually watching in week two of August is a character audit. And no position gets audited harder than quarterback.
The Cam Ward Test Isn’t Happening On Sundays
Let’s start with the one that matters most around here. Cam Ward, former Cane, now in Tennessee, and the early returns on him have almost nothing to do with throwing motion or arm talent. They have to do with how he’s carrying himself.
The kid is off social media. He’s living with his mom. He took a late hit in practice and a dust-up that came with it — the standard-issue rookie hazing every young franchise quarterback in this league gets served the second veterans decide they want to see what’s inside him — and he didn’t blink, didn’t whine, didn’t run to a burner account to litigate it.
That is the test. Not the completion percentage in a game where the third-team defense is playing vanilla cover three. The test is whether a 22-year-old with the keys to a franchise understands that leadership is a series of extremely boring decisions made when nobody’s applauding.
Miami fans should recognize the pattern, because we’ve watched it go the other direction plenty of times. The talent was never the question with any of them. The question was always what happens when the building gets hard, when the veterans test you, when the fanbase gets loud, when a guy takes a cheap shot at your knees on a Tuesday in August and every instinct you have says respond. Ward’s answer so far has been silence and work. That’s the answer you want.
And listen — this could all go sideways. Rookie quarterbacks get broken all the time by bad offensive lines and worse play-callers. But the part that gets a quarterback broken is almost never the part that shows up in a scouting report. It’s the character part. And on that part, the early evidence is genuinely encouraging.
The Rollout Tells You More Than the Box Score
Here’s the other thing August is good for: watching how a quarterback wins, not whether he wins.
Geno Smith in Las Vegas is a case study. The stat line from any given preseason drive is meaningless. What isn’t meaningless is watching him look genuinely comfortable on rollouts and play action — because those are the two concepts that tell you whether an offense has a functioning identity or is just a collection of plays.
Play action requires that a defense believes you can run. Rollouts require that a quarterback trusts his feet and his protection. If a guy looks poised on both in August, the coordinator has probably found something he intends to lean on in October. That’s real information. That’s not noise.
Contrast that with the way most people consume the preseason — checking a final score on their phone, seeing a backup quarterback threw two picks in the fourth quarter against guys who’ll be selling insurance by Halloween, and drawing a conclusion. That’s not analysis. That’s astrology with a first down marker.
The Running Back Question Nobody Wants to Answer Honestly
Ashton Jeanty had a hard-running day in Vegas, and the reaction to it splits the football world in half in a way I find genuinely funny.
Half the audience wants to see the rookie lower his shoulder and punish somebody, because that’s what you drafted him for and that’s the tape that makes you feel good about the pick. The other half — the half that’s watched a franchise back get his career shortened by an August collision that meant nothing — is screaming get out of bounds, son.
Both are correct, which is what makes it a real problem instead of a hot take. A running back who learns to protect himself in August is a running back who’s available in January. But a running back who learns to protect himself too well starts giving up yards he should be taking, and the coaching staff notices, and the reps drift elsewhere.
The honest answer is that this is a skill, and August is where you develop it. Knowing which collisions to accept and which to decline is one of the most underrated abilities at the position, and you can’t teach it in a walkthrough. You learn it by getting hit. Which is exactly why the preseason exists and exactly why the argument to cut it down to nothing has a real cost attached.
About Cutting the Fourth Game
That’s the tension in the whole “kill the preseason” argument, and it deserves a fair hearing on both sides.
The case for fewer games is obvious and strong: nobody wants to lose a starter, or a promising rookie, in a game that doesn’t count. Veterans don’t need the reps. Fans don’t want to pay full freight for a scrimmage. The product is bad and everybody knows it.
The case against is quieter but it’s real: the guys at the bottom of the roster only exist because of these games. The undrafted corner, the practice squad receiver, the sixth offensive lineman — those careers get made in the fourth quarter of preseason week three, against other guys fighting for the same thing. Cut the games and you don’t just cut the boredom, you cut the on-ramp. Fewer snaps means fewer chances, and fewer chances means the league gets more predictable and more credentialed, where the only guys who make it are the guys who were supposed to make it.
I don’t think there’s a clean answer. I think you can hold both things at once: the games are hard to watch, and the games are load-bearing.
What August Is Actually For
Somewhere along the way we started treating the preseason as content instead of process. We want it to produce takes and highlights and reasons to argue on the internet, and when it doesn’t we declare it worthless.
But the 2025 preseason has already done its job. It’s told us Cam Ward can absorb a shot to his ego without losing his mind. It’s told us Vegas has an offensive identity built on movement and misdirection. It’s told us a rookie back has the willingness — and now has to develop the wisdom. None of that shows up in a score. All of it shows up in December.
The other thing worth saying: Sundays aren’t what they were. There was an era where the whole week built toward one highlight show, where you didn’t know what happened until somebody told you with music underneath it. That era is over and it isn’t coming back. But August is the last stretch of the calendar that still feels like the old thing — low stakes, high hope, nobody eliminated yet, every fanbase in the league still technically undefeated where it counts. Enjoy it. It’s the only month all year where being a fan costs you nothing.
Then week one arrives, the audit results come in, and we find out who was actually paying attention.
This take grew out of this week’s U TALK NFL Edition, where the crew got into week-two preseason reactions, the Cam Ward leadership watch, and whether the league should be trimming August at all. Worth your time.
This take grew out of the August 21, 2025 episode — watch it here: “Week 2 NFL Preseason Reactions?” U TALK NFL Edition-2