In recent years, NFL teams have had until the Tuesday following the final week of preseason games to officially cut their roster down to 53 players ahead of the regular season. Today, Tom Pelissero reported they’ve moved the cutdown deadline two days up to that Sunday at 6 p.m. ET.
This might seem like a minor change, but could massively impact the decisions teams make. The preseason concludes 3 days before for 8 teams, 2 days before for 20 others, and 1 day before for the final 2. 1-3 days is a relatively quick turnaround for the teams to decide on and make the cuts compared to the 3-5 they had last year, and in other years past.
Would teams weigh more of their decisions towards what they saw on the last days, since they had to finish after the night of the game or the very next day? Would they cut more players in earlier cutdown dates, to avoid tougher decisions right after the final game? It’d be easy to theorize and hard to pinpoint, but here’s what the NFL might be hoping:
They also get to move the deadline for waiver claims to that Monday at 1 p.m. ET, which gives teams and players a quicker look at their Week 1 roster. For a team like the Seattle Seahawks who play the Wednesday after, these extra days are especially crucial.
