Our winners of the 2026 NFL preseason: Patriots quarterback Behren Morton, undrafted quarterbacks Joey Aguilar and Jack Strand, Bills receiver Ja'Mori Maclin and Rams quarterback Ty Simpson. Deshaun Watson won Cleveland's starting job without playing well. Our losers: Shedeur Sanders, Giants back Tyrone Tracy Jr. and the Chiefs' offensive line.
NFL preseason winners and losers 2026
A preseason game is an audition, not a contest. Projected starters play a series or two if they play at all, the final score is a depth-chart artifact, and the players carrying the ball in the fourth quarter are mostly backups and undrafted rookies trying not to be released. Every club must cut from a training-camp maximum of 90 players to 53 by 6 p.m. ET on Sunday, Aug 30, 2026. That deadline, and the depth-chart calls being announced alongside it, are what these grades are measured against.
Playing to make the 53
These are the grades that carry the real stakes. None of the players below is assured of employment past Sunday, which changes how their two weeks should be read: a backup's August is not a preview of his season, it is the whole of his case.
Behren Morton, QB, New England Patriots. Our grade: Winner
Morton was a seventh-round selection this year, which in quarterback terms means he arrived with no guarantee that the job he wants exists at all. Most clubs carry two quarterbacks and treat a third as a luxury, so a rookie in his position is not competing against another player so much as against the roster math itself. He answered it about as well as the format allows: 13 of 17 for 129 yards, closed out with a 37-yard touchdown in the final minute to win the game. The throw matters more than the aggregate here. Fourth-quarter snaps in August are the only situational reps a third quarterback ever gets, and converting one into a winning drive is the single most useful thing he could have put on film.
Reporting: Sportsnaut, Andrew Buller-Russ, Aug 23, 2026, NBC Sports, Pro Football Talk staff, Aug 23, 2026.
Joey Aguilar, QB, Jacksonville Jaguars. Our grade: Winner
Aguilar is a collegiate free agent signed shortly after the 2026 draft, so he entered camp with no guaranteed money and no draft position to argue on his behalf. He played the entire second half against Carolina and completed nine of 10 passes for 130 yards and a touchdown with no interceptions, per Jacksonville's own game report. Our grade rests on the denominator as much as the numerator. An undrafted quarterback gets one half of one game to be judged on, and a single bad series inside it ends the audition; Aguilar threw ten passes and put nine of them where they were supposed to go.
Reporting: Sportsnaut, Andrew Buller-Russ, Aug 23, 2026, Jaguars.com, Jacksonville Jaguars, Aug 22, 2026.
Jack Strand, QB, Atlanta Falcons. Our grade: Winner
Strand went undrafted out of Minnesota State University Moorhead, a Division II program, and against Indianapolis he went 12 of 17 for 212 yards and a touchdown and added a 16-yard rushing score. The reporting on it was uniformly strong, and we grade the context as much as the line: Strand took those snaps having had very little joint-practice work during the week, which is the normal lot of a camp arm and the normal excuse for one. He did not need the excuse. Realistically his outcome is a third quarterback spot or a practice-squad slot, and a performance this size is how a Division II passer makes a club choose between the two rather than neither. That 212 is the largest single-game passing total reported anywhere in the two weeks of coverage this page draws on.
Reporting: Sportsnaut, Andrew Buller-Russ, Aug 23, 2026, Sports Illustrated, SI Falcons staff, Aug 23, 2026.
Ja'Mori Maclin, WR, Buffalo Bills. Our grade: Winner
The undrafted rookie out of Kentucky, and the nephew of former Pro Bowl receiver Jeremy Maclin, finished with 108 yards at Cleveland on the strength of a 71-yard touchdown reception in the third quarter. That one catch is the whole grade, and we think that is the honest way to read it rather than a limitation of it. An undrafted receiver cannot win a job on consistency, because he is never given enough snaps to demonstrate any. He wins it on one play a coach still remembers in a meeting room three weeks later, and a 71-yard score is the kind that survives that long.
Reporting: Sportsnaut, Andrew Buller-Russ, Aug 23, 2026, Sports Illustrated, SI Bills staff, Aug 23, 2026.
The cut-week risers. Our grade: Winners
Five more performances we grade up, all reported in the cited columns: Jacob Cowing strengthened his hold on the San Francisco punt return job; John Metchie III led Carolina with six catches for 77 yards; Philadelphia defensive tackle Ty Robinson stacked six solo tackles and three sacks across two outings; Arizona rookie back Jeremiyah Love piled up 14 touches and 72 yards by halftime of his debut; and Baltimore third-rounder Ja'Kobi Lane turned three targets into 38 yards and a diving touchdown. Note what Cowing's case is built on. A return job is the classic way a fringe receiver stays employed, because it lets a coach justify the roster spot twice.
Reporting: Bleacher Report, Moe Moton, Aug 23, 2026, Bleacher Report, Gary Davenport, Aug 16, 2026, ESPN, NFL Nation staff, Aug 15, 2026.
Playing for a job, not for a roster spot
A separate category, and we keep it separate rather than letting it borrow the urgency of the one above. Every player here was going to be employed in September whatever happened in August. What was at stake was position, and in one case a starting job that has now been decided.
Deshaun Watson, QB, Cleveland Browns. Our grade: Winner
Watson is a winner on the only measure that resolved: Cleveland named him the Week 1 starter at Jacksonville, and Todd Monken said the call was not a week-to-week decision. His football in August did not earn it. He went 5 of 12 for 35 yards with an interception across four second-half drives, the weakest quarterbacking anywhere in our sample, and we are not going to pretend otherwise in order to make the grade tidy. Read the decision as structural rather than performance-based. ESPN's reporting on the choice notes that after multiple contract restructures, "releasing him now would result in an NFL-record $127 million dead salary cap charge," and that Cleveland holds two first-round selections heading into a 2027 draft class already being hyped for its quarterbacks. That is the shape of a placeholder: too expensive to move, and holding the seat until the class the club is actually waiting on arrives.
Reporting: NFL.com, NFL.com staff, Aug 24, 2026, ESPN, ESPN staff, Aug 24, 2026, CBS Sports, Garrett Podell and Zachary Pereles, Aug 23, 2026.
Ty Simpson, QB, Los Angeles Rams. Our grade: Winner
Simpson went 21 of 25 for 190 yards and two touchdowns with no interceptions in his opening start, a line reported identically by Bleacher Report's Gary Davenport and Pro Football Network's Jacob Infante, whose impact metric ranked it third among 32 qualifying quarterbacks that week. Davenport wrote that Simpson "may have had the best performance of the lot." His roster spot was never the question, so this was not an audition for employment. It was an audition for the succession. This is Matthew Stafford's offense for now, and the useful thing about a performance like Simpson's is that it makes the eventual handover look like a plan rather than a problem.
Reporting: Bleacher Report, Gary Davenport, Aug 16, 2026, Pro Football Network, Jacob Infante, Aug 18, 2026.
Joe Milton III, QB, Dallas Cowboys. Our grade: Winner
Milton was excellent by the numbers two outlets printed identically: nine of 13 for 179 yards, two passing touchdowns and a rushing score. What makes the grade interesting is that none of it can move him up in Dallas. Dak Prescott's contract runs to $231 million guaranteed on a $240 million deal, which means the job above Milton is not available at any price of performance. So read his August as an audition aimed outward. A 2025 sixth-round selection putting three touchdowns on tape is not arguing for the Dallas starting job; he is arguing to the other 31 clubs that he could hold one of theirs, and that is a real and rational thing for a backup to play for.
Reporting: Bleacher Report, Moe Moton, Aug 23, 2026, Sportsnaut, Andrew Buller-Russ, Aug 23, 2026, Spotrac, Spotrac, Aug 26, 2026.
De'Zhaun Stribling, WR, San Francisco 49ers. Our grade: Winner
Stribling was the 33rd selection of the 2026 draft, so his employment was never in doubt and we grade him against a different bar: how many snaps he talks his way into. What he did was repeat. Davenport's Week 1 read was that Stribling effectively carried the San Francisco offense by himself in the first half, and a week later CBS Sports cited a research note calling him "the first player since at least 2017 to produce at least 11 catches combined within the first 20 minutes of two consecutive preseason games." One big August half is noise. Two of them is the argument for third and fourth receiver reps in a room that has to distribute them somehow.
Reporting: Bleacher Report, Gary Davenport, Aug 16, 2026, CBS Sports, Garrett Podell and Zachary Pereles, Aug 23, 2026.
Losing ground
Two players and one unit that needed August to answer a question and did not. We grade the weeks that happened and stop there; who is released on Sunday is the club's decision to announce, not ours to forecast.
Shedeur Sanders, QB, Cleveland Browns. Our grade: Loser
The clearest loss of the preseason, and it has nothing to do with how he threw it. Sanders was the better of the two Browns quarterbacks across the fortnight by the reported lines, going nine of 11 for 74 yards with a touchdown and an interception in the second game after a rough first one, and he still lost the job to Watson and begins a second season on the bench. Monken's framing was warm, that Sanders has "done a great job, come a long ways, and we're excited about his future." That is the language of a club that likes a player and has decided about him anyway. Outplaying the man in front of you and losing regardless is a specific kind of August, and it is the one Sanders had.
Reporting: NFL.com, NFL.com staff, Aug 24, 2026, CBS Sports, Garrett Podell and Zachary Pereles, Aug 23, 2026, Bleacher Report, Gary Davenport, Aug 16, 2026.
Tyrone Tracy Jr., RB, New York Giants. Our grade: Loser
Three columns across two weeks and a different problem each time: Davenport flagged repeated whiffed blitz pickups in Week 1, Moton a lost fumble in Week 2, and Buller-Russ listed him among the losers again. He carried six times for 26 yards in the second game. The timing is what makes it a grade rather than a bad week. New York added Najee Harris to a backfield that already had more bodies than touches, so Tracy spent August auditioning in front of a shrinking number of chairs while giving the club reasons rather than removing them. One poor August game is noise. Three different poor reels inside a cutdown window is a pattern.
Reporting: Bleacher Report, Gary Davenport, Aug 16, 2026, Bleacher Report, Moe Moton, Aug 23, 2026, Sportsnaut, Andrew Buller-Russ, Aug 23, 2026.
The Chiefs' offensive line. Our grade: Loser
Kansas City needed August to settle its one open line job and August made it worse. The club spent the summer letting Kahlil Benson, an undrafted rookie out of Indiana at 6-foot-6 and 319 pounds who went unselected across all 257 draft slots, push veteran Jaylon Moore for the starting right tackle spot. Andy Reid's framing on the competition was "I think you let them compete and see where it goes. Both of them can play." Then Week 2 went badly for both: Moton graded Moore a loser outright, and ESPN's Kansas City reporter described Benson surrendering quick pressure and a strip-sack. The stakes are what move this from a depth-chart curiosity to our clearest unit-level loss. Patrick Mahomes tore the ACL and LCL in his left knee in December and had surgery the following day, and the job still unsettled in front of him is the one that keeps pass rushers off that side.
Reporting: NFL.com, NFL.com staff, Aug 12, 2026, Bleacher Report, Moe Moton, Aug 23, 2026, ESPN, NFL Nation staff, Aug 23, 2026, NFL.com, NFL.com staff, Jan 13, 2026.
Too Close to Call
Two cases produced evidence in both directions, and in both the people who watch every day disagree with each other. We do not split the difference by reflex, and we do not manufacture a verdict a two-game sample cannot support.
Odell Beckham Jr., WR, New York Giants. Our grade: Toss-up
We decline to grade this one, because the people who watch it every day do not agree. Beckham is 33 and has not played since a leg injury with Miami in December 2024, and the preseason gave him two quiet lines: two catches for six yards against Minnesota, two for 17 against Miami. On that evidence The Athletic's Dan Duggan wrote that he "needs to produce to command a roster spot." But the beat reporters who see the practice field describe something else, with ESPN's Jordan Raanan and Art Stapleton both calling him very impressive in his camp appearances and Raanan placing him on the roster bubble rather than outside it. Preseason snaps and camp reps are pointing opposite directions here, and a two-game sample is not the tiebreaker. What is true either way is the shape of the attempt: a comeback at 33 is judged on whether the explosive plays are still there, not on whether the volume is.
Reporting: Heavy, Heavy staff, Aug 24, 2026, Yardbarker, Yardbarker staff, Aug 19, 2026, amNewYork, amNewYork staff, Aug 16, 2026.
The Steelers quarterback room. Our grade: Toss-up
Pittsburgh's August produced evidence without producing an answer, which is why we leave it open. The succession question is real and dated: roundtable.io's reporting on the depth chart states flatly that "Rodgers will retire from the NFL after this season," leaving Mike McCarthy to find the next one from inside a room that is four deep. Drew Allar, this year's third-round selection, held his form from the first game into the second while the unit around him did not, and he sits third behind Rodgers and Mason Rudolph. He is not only waiting on Rodgers, though, which is the part that gets missed: he is also measured against the club's other recent draft investments at the position, and Will Howard, a 2025 sixth-round selection, went 10 of 15 for 74 yards with two interceptions in the same window. Two exhibition games cannot settle which of them is the answer, and we are not going to pretend they did.
Reporting: Roundtable, Roundtable staff, Aug 18, 2026, Yardbarker, Parker Abate, Aug 21, 2026, Sportsnaut, Andrew Buller-Russ, Aug 23, 2026, Bleacher Report, Moe Moton, Aug 23, 2026.
How this was measured
- The winner, loser and split grades are ours: retrospective editorial assessments of performances that already happened. We do not project roster decisions, and no grade on this page should be read as a forecast of who makes a 53-man roster.
- The evidence is reported: every stat line names the column that published it (21 sources, each linked in place), reporting published Aug 15 to Aug 26, 2026 (preseason weeks 1 and 2, and the Week 1 depth chart decisions that followed them). Claims were verified against the cited pieces on Aug 24, 2026 and Aug 26, 2026 by reading the source pages directly; where outlets disagreed on a figure, neither figure was used, and every figure printed here appears in at least two independent sources or in a club's own game report.
- Roster rules and dates are quoted, not computed: the 90-player training-camp maximum, the 53-player limit, the 6 p.m. ET on Sunday, Aug 30, 2026 deadline, the 1 p.m. ET on Monday, Aug 31, 2026 waiver deadline and the 16-player practice squad each carry two independent sources: Football Nation USA, NFL.com, Bengals.com, NFL.com.
- Any claim that something was the largest or the only one of its kind in this sample is checked by the build script against every comparable figure the cited coverage reported, and is left off the page if it does not survive that check.
- At most one verbatim quotation appears in any single item, counted by the script that builds this page. Everything else is our own prose.
Next steps
Frequently asked questions
Who were the winners of the 2026 NFL preseason?
Our winners: Patriots quarterback Behren Morton, Jaguars quarterback Joey Aguilar, Falcons quarterback Jack Strand, Bills receiver Ja'Mori Maclin, Rams quarterback Ty Simpson, Cowboys quarterback Joe Milton III and 49ers receiver De'Zhaun Stribling, plus Deshaun Watson, who was named Cleveland's Week 1 starter without playing well. Cut-week nods to Jacob Cowing, John Metchie III, Ty Robinson, Jeremiyah Love and Ja'Kobi Lane.
Who is the Browns starting quarterback in 2026?
Deshaun Watson. Cleveland named him the Week 1 starter ahead of Shedeur Sanders for the Sept 13 opener at Jacksonville, and head coach Todd Monken said the choice was not a week-to-week decision. Sanders begins a second season as the backup.
When do NFL teams have to cut down to 53 players in 2026?
By 6 p.m. ET on Sunday, Aug 30, 2026, down from a training-camp maximum of 90 players. Waiver claims are due at 1 p.m. ET on Monday, Aug 31, and clubs then build practice squads of up to 16 players, with a 17th allowed for an International Pathway player.
Which undrafted players helped themselves most in the 2026 preseason?
By our grades: Jaguars quarterback Joey Aguilar (nine of 10 for 130 yards and a touchdown), Falcons quarterback Jack Strand (12 of 17 for 212 yards with a passing and a rushing touchdown) and Bills receiver Ja'Mori Maclin (108 yards including a 71-yard touchdown). Chiefs tackle Kahlil Benson had been pushing for a starting job before a difficult Week 2.
Do NFL preseason wins and losses matter?
Not as standings. Preseason records reset to nothing when the regular season starts, and projected starters play limited snaps or none at all. What these games decide is which players survive the cut from 90 to 53, which is what this page grades.
Related: NFL rookies 2026: who starts · NFL rookie opportunity 2026 · 2026 NFL draft grades: where the analysts disagree
The grades on this page are our editorial assessments of performances that already happened; they project nothing and recommend nothing. Reported stat lines belong to the cited outlets, and roster rules and dates are quoted from the league and club sources listed in the method note. Nebula Insights publishes no picks, no selections and no recommended wagers. You must be of legal gambling age in your jurisdiction.