How do you think the new 3 game pre-season will work?

[CJD]

For whatever reason, it didn't really click with me that going to a 17 week schedule would make the pre-season 1 game shorter.

It makes sense, in a way. You only have so many weeks in a season and you only want your players playing so many games, so if you add a regular season game, removing a pre-season game is a reasonable solution. I didn't really pay that much attention to the pre-season scheduling or announcement.

But it does bring up one question that I am not sure the league has a consensus on anymore.

Is the week 3 game, which is also the pre-season finale, still a dress rehearsal game?

For years (maybe even decades), the 3rd pre-season game was a dress rehearsal for the starters, often playing into the 3rd and sometimes even 4th quarter and then the 4th pre-season game was the "let's figure out who our final 6 players on the 53 man roster will be" with starters playing either 0 or 1 series, and even the 2nd stringers often bowing out before the end of the 1st quarter.

We are entering week 2 of the pre-season and obviously this game isn't the dress rehearsal game, as Burrow is not playing along with a few other starters and I imagine our starters won't be in for longer than a quarter either.

So does that mean week 3 against Miami is our dress rehearsal? Or is week 3, being the final game, still going to be the traditional "let's figure out who our final 6 players" game?

And will teams actually agree? What if one team wants a dress rehearsal, so they play their starters into the 4th quarter, but the other team already feels comfortable with their starters and wants to work out their back ups? Are they just going to play their 3rd and 4th stringers against the other team's starters? Cuz that wouldn't yield anything of value to either team haha.

It's a weird pre-season and I'm kind of curious to see how it all works out.