This time a year ago, I noted my own personal conflicted feelings about the Pro Football Hall of Fame Game, which officially marks the preseason kickoff for a brand-new NFL season. On the one hand, it still excites me to think of football being back — and the concept of inducting a class of legends into Canton immortality, while playing a game in the shadow of the HOF itself, has always felt like a cool tradition.
The game itself sometimes proves to be fun as well. See the 1995 edition, when the expansion Jaguars and Panthers played the first games in either franchise’s history — and Jacksonville drove to the Carolina 3-yard line in the closing seconds before the Panthers made a goal-line stand:
But that was the exception to the general rule of boring irrelevance — growing each year in lockstep with the erosion of the NFL preseason itself — around the Hall of Fame Game, which will play out its 2026 installment tonight between the Panthers and the Arizona Cardinals.
The Hall class itself — featuring QB Drew Brees, RB Roger Craig, WR Larry Fitzgerald, LB Luke Kuechly and K Adam Vinatieri — is a great one. In fact, it’s one of the only “complete” groups to ever simultaneously enter Canton, in terms of containing a quarterback, running back, receiver, defender and specialist in the same class:
But that’s for Saturday. Don’t count on seeing any stars like that on the field tonight — because the recent trend is for important starters to skip this one entirely.
That wasn’t always the case. As I noted last year, in the early 2000s, QBs who would go on to start in Week 1 of the regular season accounted for roughly 30 percent of all Hall of Fame Game pass attempts. But by the end of the decade, their share had been cut about in half, dwindling even further throughout the 2010s. Today, QB1s simply do not play in this game — and they haven’t for a very long time.
The last eventual Week 1 starter to attempt even a single pass in the Hall of Fame Game was Teddy Bridgewater, who threw six of Minnesota’s 26 passes against Pittsburgh in 2015. (Ben Roethlisberger, meanwhile, did not attempt any throws for the Steelers.) In other words, over the now 11 years (!) since, not one starting quarterback for either participating team has recorded a pass attempt in the NFL’s ceremonial preseason opener.
This will not change tonight: Carson Beck, the No. 65 pick in this year’s NFL Draft, will make his NFL debut for Arizona against Kenny Pickett, who’ll start for Carolina — his fifth team in four years. Brett Favre versus Trent Green from 2003 (or even Roethlisberger versus Bridgewater from 2015), this ain’t.
But it does underscore the preseason’s ongoing, and growing, meaninglessness. Beyond just being invisible in the preseason opener, here’s the yearly share of all pass attempts thrown by eventual Week 1 starting QBs in the entire preseason as a whole since 2000:
Amazingly — from today’s perspective, at least — QB1s threw about 35 percent of total leaguewide passes back in the preseason of 2001. But this was roughly consistent with the era’s customary preseason pattern: Starters would typically play a series or two in the opener; somewhat more in the second game; the majority of the first half — sometimes even into the third quarter — in the third game, which was widely treated as the “dress rehearsal” for real action; and then very little or not at all in the finale.
That trend only began to break in the 2010s, when preseason QB1-attempt-share slid from 33.5 percent in 2011 to 12.1 percent by the end of the decade in 2019. Dipping further in the 2020s, it fell below 10 percent for the first time in this dataset last season, with first-stringers only being responsible for 9.8 percent of preseason passes. The only limits to this erosion might be that the share technically can’t go any lower than zero percent — and that the preseason may someday be eliminated altogether anyway.
So yes, football is technically back tonight. And on some childlike level, that’s super exciting! But the Hall of Fame Game itself has become little more than a ceremonial reminder that the actual season is coming soon — really just a football-like placeholder subbing in until the players who matter finally take the field.
Filed under: NFL, Frivolities
Do you have any data to show how much preseason QB's (or any position for that matter) EVENTUALLY become useful players? Even if not in the upcoming season.
In other words, is pre-season a place where useful players are actually developed, or only a place where fringe players are fighting for roster spots?