Dallas waived quarterback Joe Milton III on Aug 31, six days after our preseason page graded him a winner, and NFL.com called the move a surprise. He is the only one of the 20 players we graded who is on no roster at all. For most of the rest, a draft position or a contract had settled the question before August started.
Two different things were at stake
Our preseason page graded twenty players on Aug 25, and it graded them on two different questions. A few were playing to make a roster at all. Most were playing for reps, for a place on a depth chart, for the job behind the starter. Checking all twenty against one test, did he survive the cut to 53, would flatter the grades and tell you nothing: a first-round selection making a roster is not news, and counting him next to an undrafted quarterback who had to earn his way on is the kind of arithmetic that produces a big number and no information. So the two groups are kept apart below, the way the original page kept them apart.
The roster spots that were genuinely in question
These are the five where making the 53 was the whole point and the answer was in doubt until the deadline passed. All of them arrived undrafted or late, with no guaranteed money arguing on their behalf.
Jack Strand, QB, Atlanta Falcons
Our grade, Aug 25: Winner. Playing for: A third quarterback spot, or the practice squad. Now: on the Atlanta Falcons active roster.
The undrafted Division II passer is the clearest result on the page. Atlanta kept four quarterbacks on its initial 53, and Strand is the fourth, behind Tua Tagovailoa, Michael Penix Jr. and Cooper Rush. A club does not carry a fourth quarterback by accident. It does it when it has decided a player is worth a roster spot it could have spent on a special-teams contributor, which is a heavier verdict than any stat line he put up in August.
Behren Morton, QB, New England Patriots
Our grade, Aug 25: Winner. Playing for: The third quarterback spot on the 53-man roster. Now: on the New England Patriots active roster.
A seventh-round rookie arrived with no guarantee the job he wanted existed at all, since most clubs treat a third quarterback as a luxury. New England kept him. The fourth-quarter touchdown drive we graded him on was the only kind of situational film a third quarterback ever gets to produce, and it was enough.
Kahlil Benson, OT, Kansas City Chiefs
Our grade, Aug 25: Loser. Playing for: A starting right tackle job, as an undrafted rookie. Now: on the Kansas City Chiefs active roster.
We graded the Kansas City line our clearest unit-level loss because August left the right tackle job unsettled in front of a quarterback coming back from a knee reconstruction. The unsettled part survived the cut: Kansas City kept both Benson and the veteran Jaylon Moore, so the competition was carried onto the roster rather than resolved by it. For an undrafted rookie, being kept while still competing for a starting job is a better outcome than the unit grade implies, and it is worth separating from it.
Joey Aguilar, QB, Jacksonville Jaguars
Our grade, Aug 25: Winner. Playing for: The third quarterback spot on the 53-man roster. Now: cut, signed to the practice squad.
Cut from the 53 and signed straight back to the Jacksonville practice squad, per the league practice-squad tracker. That is the outcome an undrafted quarterback with one good half of football realistically plays for, and it is not the same as being out of the league. The nine-of-ten passing line we graded him on bought him the second of the two doors available to him.
Ja'Mori Maclin, WR, Buffalo Bills
Our grade, Aug 25: Winner. Playing for: A 53-man spot as an undrafted free agent. Now: cut, signed to the practice squad.
Same shape as Aguilar: cut, then signed to Buffalo's practice squad. We graded him on one 71-yard touchdown and argued that an undrafted receiver wins a job on the one play a coach still remembers, not on consistency he is never given the snaps to show. The play was remembered enough to keep him in the building and not enough to keep him on the 53, which is the honest middle outcome we did not name at the time.
The players whose roster spot was never the question
Our preseason page filed several of these men under playing to make the 53. That was wrong, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than quietly regrading them. Draft capital and contracts had already settled their roster spots, and no August was going to move that in either direction. What their grades were actually about is reps and position, so those are the only terms the outcome should be read in.
Several were selected inside the first four rounds of the last three drafts: Jeremiyah Love was a first-round selection in 2026, No. 3 overall; De'Zhaun Stribling a second-round selection in 2026, No. 33 overall; Ja'Kobi Lane a third-round selection in 2026, No. 80 overall; and Ty Robinson a fourth-round selection in 2025, No. 111 overall. Jacob Cowing is a fourth-round selection in 2024, No. 135 overall, and John Metchie III is a fourth-year receiver, not a camp arm. Clubs do not release that kind of investment after a few exhibition games. Every one of them is on an active roster, and none of it is a verdict on their August.
The quarterbacks were even less at risk
Ty Simpson was the last member of the 2026 first round to sign his rookie contract, so his August was an audition for the succession behind Matthew Stafford and never for employment. Shedeur Sanders lost Cleveland's starting job to Deshaun Watson and remains on the roster, because a second-year quarterback on a rookie contract is not a cut candidate. Drew Allar and Will Howard are both on rookie deals in a Pittsburgh room that kept four quarterbacks, competing for position behind Aaron Rodgers rather than for a job. And Watson could not realistically be released at all: the contract restructures that make him expensive to move are the same ones that keep him employed, which is why we graded him a winner on a structural basis while printing his 5 of 12 for 35 yards rather than tidying it away.
Tyrone Tracy Jr. is the one we should have framed differently
We graded him a loser and he is on the Giants roster. The grade was about a shrinking role in a backfield that had just added Najee Harris, and that reading holds. Calling it losing ground implied a proximity to release his record does not support: the Giants' own account has him as a fifth-round selection in 2024 who ran for 895 yards with 12 starts as a rookie. Players with that on their card lose carries, not jobs. The verdict was about touches and should have said so.
The one nobody had written down
Joe Milton III, QB, Dallas Cowboys
Our grade, Aug 25: Winner. Playing for: An audition the rest of the league can see. Now: not on any active roster.
Milton is the only one of the twenty on neither a 53-man roster nor a practice squad. Dallas waived him on Aug 31 after claiming running back Emari Demercado off waivers from Kansas City, and NFL.com wrote that the departure "is a surprise" and that he would likely draw interest on the waiver wire. We graded him a winner on the argument that his August was aimed at the other 31 clubs rather than at Dallas, because the job above him was not available at any price of performance. That reading is now literal in a way we did not intend: he is available to those 31 clubs. The reasoning held and the roster spot did not, and the two are different things.
The genuine coin flip landed
Odell Beckham Jr., WR, New York Giants
Our grade, Aug 25: Toss-up. Playing for: A 53-man spot, at 33, after two years away. Now: on the New York Giants active roster.
We declined to grade this one because the people who watch every day disagreed with each other, and that was the right call rather than a hedge: it was close, and it went the opposite way from where the written expectation sat. Beckham made the roster. The more useful point is that our grade was taken on an incomplete preseason. We published before the finales, having seen two quiet lines, and his best football came in the third game: three catches for 53 yards against the Jets, both preseason highs, with every reception going for a first down. A receiver room thinned by a release and a season-ending injury did the rest. Grading a roster case before the last audition is a window problem, not a judgement problem, and it is the one to fix next time.
Named to be cut, still employed
The other side of the same week. A named NFL.com writer published a cut-candidates list before the deadline naming twenty-two players across 14 clubs. It is not reproduced here, because a list of other people's expectations is not our content. What is worth reporting is how it broke: ten of the twenty-two are still on the active roster of the club they were named at, and twelve left.
The sharpest reversal came at the same club that produced ours. Sam Howell was the Cowboys' named cut candidate, described as a practice-squad candidate rather than an initial 53-man player, with the backup job already conceded to Milton. Howell is on the active roster and Milton is on none. Both New York Giants named on that list, Beckham and Tracy, are also still employed by the Giants. Going the other way, Tennessee waived quarterback Will Levis, the 33rd overall selection of the 2023 draft, and NFL.com reported it from Ian Rapoport's report before the club announced it. Levis was on nobody's published list, which is the limit of any check like this one: it can only test the names somebody wrote down in advance.
Where our own pages touch this
Kansas City kept both tackles, so the job in front of Patrick Mahomes is settled by roster rather than by release. He is the only player in this story with a page in our published NFL fleet. A cutdown is decided among undrafted rookies and fringe veterans, and our player pages are built for players with long histories of posted lines, so the two barely overlap. That is a real limit on what our own data adds to a roster story, and it is worth stating rather than working around.
How this was measured
- Roster status is one source and one field, read the same way for every name: the status column on 32 official club roster pages at
https://www.nfl.com/teams/<club>/roster, 3,101 players indexed. Status changes by the hour during cut week, so this page states when it was read: 12:28 a.m. ET on Sep 1, 2026. - Draft standing is verified, not recalled. Every round, year and overall number on this page is checked by the build script against that player's own page before the page is written, and the build fails if the source does not print the same figures. One figure in the working notes for this article had Tyrone Tracy Jr. as a third-round selection; the Giants' own bio says fifth round, 166th overall, so the sourced number is the one printed.
- The list of graded players is fixed in the script: every individual on our Aug 25 page, all twenty, with none dropped, and the build fails if any of them is missing from the finished page. Choosing which of your own calls to revisit after seeing the outcomes is how a scorecard flatters itself.
- No accuracy rate appears on this page. The preseason page graded performances that had already happened and said it did not project roster decisions, so scoring it against roster outcomes would measure it against a claim it never made. It is also why the players who were never at risk of release are separated out rather than counted in with the rest: including them would inflate the appearance of accuracy for free.
- The practice-squad check required a stricter test than a name search. The tracker page embeds a sidebar carrying the headline of the story about Milton being waived, so searching it for his name returned a match and would have printed a waived quarterback as signed. The check now requires the tracker's own list format, a position abbreviation immediately before the name.
- Correction to the earlier page: it describes Joe Milton III as a 2025 sixth-round selection. He was selected in 2024 by New England, per NFL.com and the Cowboys' own roster page, which lists him at three years of experience with New England in 2024 and Dallas in 2025. That page is being corrected.
Next steps
Frequently asked questions
Which 2026 NFL cut was the most surprising?
Dallas waiving quarterback Joe Milton III on Aug 31. NFL.com had named Sam Howell as the Cowboys' cut candidate six days earlier and described Milton as having already won the backup job, and its own report on the move called the departure a surprise. Howell is on the active roster and Milton is on none.
Did Odell Beckham Jr. make the Giants roster in 2026?
Yes. Beckham is on New York's active roster as of Sep 1, 2026. Our Aug 25 page declined to grade him because the reporting contradicted itself, with one writer saying he needed to produce to command a roster spot and beat reporters calling him impressive in camp.
When did NFL teams cut down to 53 players in 2026?
Clubs cut from a training-camp maximum of 90 players to 53 by 6 p.m. ET on Sunday, Aug 30, 2026. Waiver claims were settled at 1 p.m. ET on Monday, Aug 31, after which clubs built practice squads of up to 16 players.
Which undrafted players made a 53-man roster in 2026?
Of the undrafted players we graded, Atlanta quarterback Jack Strand and Kansas City tackle Kahlil Benson made active rosters. Jacksonville quarterback Joey Aguilar and Buffalo receiver Ja'Mori Maclin were cut and signed to practice squads at the same clubs.
Do preseason grades predict who gets cut?
Not on this page, and ours did not try to. Most players graded in a preseason piece are on rookie contracts or carry draft capital that settles their roster spot before August starts, so their performances decide reps and depth-chart position rather than employment. The players whose jobs are genuinely at stake are mostly undrafted or late-round, and they are a small share of any grade list.
Related: NFL preseason winners and losers 2026 · NFL rookies 2026: who starts · NFL Week 1 2026 opening lines
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