We're officially 50 days out from the start of the 2020 NFL season and, as we learned this week, we won't get an opportunity to see players on the field against somebody other than their teammates before those games take place.
The NFL and NFLPA agreed this week to scrap the 2020 preseason in answer to not having an offseason program and the rules that will be in place to handle the coronavirus outbreak.
The players long have wanted no preseason games. For veteran players, it makes sense. They don't want to risk their bodies in a game that doesn't count in the standings and for which they don't get paid as well as they do in the regular season. It also makes it tougher for a hotshot rookie to beat you out for a starting job or spot on the 53-man roster if the coaching staff has never seen him play in a game.
Those young players are the ones who are really losing out in this settlement. How, for example, does an undrafted rookie make an impression on the coaching staff if he never gets an opportunity to play in a preseason game?
The Steelers have had a lot of success with undrafted rookies over the years. James Harrison, Nate Washington, Willie Parker, Dan Kreider and our own Ramon Foster are just some examples of undrafted players who went on to play prominent roles with the team despite being undrafted. Other players such as Alejandro Villanueva, Matt Feiler and Mike Hilton were cut loose by other teams after going undrafted and made it with the Steelers despite their "lowly" status.
For the Steelers, it's never mattered how you got into camp. It's only mattered what you did with that opportunity once you got it.
But without games to judge those players, the road to earning a roster spot just got a lot more difficult.
After all, teams are going to err on the side of keeping the players they drafted if things are close between two players. Every chance to catch the coaching staff's eye matters. And preseason games were always weighted more heavily than what happened in practice.
• No example of the Steelers keeping an undrafted player over one they drafted sticks out more than Foster sticking with the team in 2010 over Kraig Urbik.
Both Foster and Urbik had been with the Steelers in 2009, Foster as an undrafted rookie and Urbik as a third-round draft pick. But Foster had shown himself to be the better player.
So, as rookies, Foster dressed for 14 games and made four starts, while Urbik was inactive all season.
In 2010, with Ben Roethlisberger suspended for the first six games of the season -- later reduced to four -- and Byron Leftwich having been injured in a preseason game, the Steelers needed to keep four quarterbacks. They needed a roster spot for an additional quarterback.
So Urbik was released and Foster, who would start eight games that season, was retained.
There aren't many, if any, other teams who would give an undrafted player the same opportunity as a third-round draft pick, let alone keep him over that drafted player just a year later.
And, by the way, it wasn't like Urbik was terrible. He went on to have a solid career, playing in 100 career games and starting 63. Foster was just better.
• The NFL also agreed to trim camp rosters to 80 players this year, meaning 10 players who thought they would at least get an opportunity to show they belonged on rosters won't even get that chance. Without even going through a real practice.
That means 320 young men had their dreams dashed before they even had a chance to set foot on a field.
It makes things more manageable for teams for social distancing purposes at their facilities and it's 10 fewer coronavirus tests that have to be given daily. But how do you decided who stays and who goes without having seen them all on a field?
• What has already been a much more difficult job for coaching staffs will be even tougher this year.
Coaching staffs around the league have already been forced to hold all of their offseason training sessions with players virtually. There's been no hands-on training.
Now, they will be forced to make decisions on the future of players with whom they've only had a handful of practices.
After all, the first few weeks of training camps will be an acclimation period. There will be some classroom learning -- socially distanced, of course -- but no real on-field training.
• None of the things that have been agreed to or done this offseason is going to make for a better product on Sundays. In fact, it's all likely to make things more sloppy.
As I have repeatedly said this offseason, the teams with less turnover are going to have a head start to be certain. The teams counting on rookies to be major contributors this season are going to be in serious trouble.
The Steelers did everything they could to get Devin Bush ready to play early last season. He took 100s of snaps in the offseason and training camp. He played extensively in the preseason games. And he still made rookie mistakes early in the season -- though he made enough splash plays to offset that.
As the son of a former NFL player and multi-year starter at Michigan, which in Jim Harbaugh has a former NFL coach leading the way, Bush was better prepared than most rookies to come in and play right away.
How, for example, are the Ravens going to get Patrick Queen and Malik Harrison, a pair of rookie linebackers who were one-year starters in college, ready to contribute right away as they need them to do?
Good luck with that.
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