It’s been rumored and expected. It’s now official: The 2020 preseason will be trimmed from four games to two.
Specifically, Week One and Week Four have been scrapped. The league is expected to announce the move on Thursday.
The move was driven by two primary factors. First, teams who will be playing preseason games on the road won’t want to move that many people. Second, given that no teams had on-field practice sessions in the offseason, coaches would rather have the extra time to work with their teams, and that will happen if they don’t have to worry about two extra preseason games.
Already, the Week Four preseason game is worthless (or, more accurately, less worthless than the other preseason games). So it’s really only the loss of one preseason game. And the first preseason game doesn’t typically involve much work from starters, anyway.