The National Football League preseason is the period each year during which NFL teams play several not-for-the-record exhibition games before the actual "regular" season starts. Beginning with the featured Pro Football Hall of Fame game in early August, three weekends of exhibition games are played in the NFL to date. The start of the preseason is intrinsically tied to the last week of training camp.
History
Exhibition games have been played in professional football since the beginning of the sport. In fact, until league play was formalized in 1920, one could consider virtually all of an independent professional football team's schedule to be exhibitions (as in test matches). In the early years of the sport, teams often "barnstormed", and played squads from leagues outside their own, or against local college teams or other amateur groups, charging fans whatever the traffic would bear.
When the NFL was founded in 1920, all games counted in the standings and would be used to determine the league champion. In 1921, this was revised to only count games involving two league members, thus allowing non-league exhibitions, but effectively banning exhibitions between two league teams. This rule had a direct impact on deciding the 1921 championship, in which the losing team insisted that the deciding game only be considered an exhibition.
In 1924, the league again changed the rule to declare any games held in December or later to be exhibitions. By the mid-1930s, teams prepared for a standard 12-game regular season schedule, although even as late as 1939 teams would schedule non-league exhibition games both before and during the season (during bye weeks). The Pittsburgh Steelers (then known as the Pirates) were well known for playing both in the NFL and on a limited schedule in the decades-old Western Pennsylvania circuit in the 1930s.
In the 1960s, teams began playing 14 regular season games, with a corresponding decrease in the length of the preseason. Teams played four or five preseason games each year; for example, in 1966 each of the nine American Football League teams each played four preseason games. By the end of the decade, however, there would be a rapid increase in the number of preseason games.
With the AFL–NFL merger of 1970, the newly merged NFL was granted a Sherman Anti-Trust Act exemption, which emboldened some team owners to expand the exhibition schedule and to require season-ticket holders to pay for one, then two, then three home exhibition games if they wanted to keep their season tickets.
From 1970 through 1977, the NFL season consisted of 14 regular season games and six exhibition games, sometimes but not always three at home and three away (the 1973 Washington Redskins, for instance, played all but one of six preseason games at home), with some played at neutral sites. From to , the regular season was lengthened to 16 games, and the exhibition season was cut from six to four games.
From 1999 to 2001, when the league consisted of an uneven 31 teams, some additional exhibition games (usually two or three) were played over Hall of Fame weekend. In order to account for the uneven number of teams, each team was required to have a bye week during the exhibition season. Most teams held their bye week in Hall of Fame weekend, while the others utilized them somewhere else during the exhibition season. This practice was abandoned after the Houston Texans were added to the league in 2002, giving it an even 32 teams.
The 2020 preseason was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2021, a rule change was enacted that abolished overtime in preseason games, the first time since . Additionally, with the expansion of the regular season to seventeen games and eighteen weeks, the preseason was reduced to three games. That same year, the Baltimore Ravens and John Harbaugh claimed the record of consecutive preseason wins with 20, overtaking Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers record.
Scheduling
Unlike the regular season, the exhibition matchups are not based on any rotating or set formula.
The NFL schedules the matchups for all of the exhibition games. Since 2002, individual teams have been allowed to negotiate their own deals to play each other during the preseason: the league allows individual teams to provide input into desired matchups and determines the matchups for any games that were not individually negotiated, while the league sets all game dates and times.
The exhibition season schedule is released in the spring, shortly before the regular season schedule is announced. The NFL has set a loose precedent of determining exhibition matchups: