The 2026 NFL Preseason So Far: 17 Games, One Tie, and a 63-Point Shootout in Canton

A Dated Snapshot: Where the 2026 Preseason Stands

This page is a snapshot, computed August 16, 2026, of every 2026 preseason game completed so far — pulled from ESPN's public scoreboard feed the same way as this site's preseason-signal study, final scores only, nothing scheduled or in progress. As of the pull: 17 games are final, starting with the Hall of Fame game in Canton on August 7 and running through the first full preseason weekend. Games slated for later on the 16th and beyond are not in these numbers, and this page says so rather than guessing.

The 17 Finals So Far

Every completed 2026 preseason game through the August 16 pull, straight from the feed:

The spread runs from the 63-point Canton shootout down to Minnesota–Giants at 23. Eight of the seventeen finished within one score; the average margin is 10.9 points. With the first full weekend now complete, all 32 teams have appeared at least once. The 13-13 Colts–Patriots final is still the only tie of 2026, and the eighth tie in this dataset's 584 games — all eight have come since 2021, the year the league removed overtime from preseason games; the 2015–2019 pulls contain none.

Scoring So Far, Against Eleven Preseasons

Preseason football scores low, and 2026 so far is no exception. The 17 finals average 35.6 combined points; the eleven completed preseasons in the dataset (2015–2025, no 2020) range from 34.9 (2024) to 41.0 (2025) and average 38.0, while the 2025 regular season averaged 46.0. August football runs seven to ten points per game below the real thing — vanilla schemes, deep-roster quarterbacks, and coaches with nothing to chase.

One honesty note on that hatched bar: 17 games is a tiny sample, and early-window samples swing hard. Through the same August 16 cutoff, the 2024 preseason was averaging just 32.8 points and the 2025 preseason 42.3 — and they finished at 34.9 and 41.0. The 35.6 is what has happened, not an estimate of where 2026 will land.

The Shape of the Slate, and a Week 1 Cross-Check

Since the 17-game regular season arrived in 2021, the preseason format has been three games per team plus the Hall of Fame game — 48 or 49 completed games in every year of the dataset since (the 48 was 2021, when Hurricane Ida canceled the Saints–Cardinals finale). 2026 follows the same shape: Carolina and Arizona opened in Canton on August 7 and get a fourth exhibition; everyone else plays three; expect the completed count to land around 49 by early September, cuts following soon after.

A question worth asking every August: did any of the 16 regular-season Week 1 pairings already meet in the preseason — a September game with an August dress rehearsal? Joining the 17 completed preseason games against the 2026 Week 1 schedule in the nflverse file: none so far. Zero of the 16 opening-week matchups appear among the preseason finals to date. Preseason games are still being played, so a late-August rematch pairing could yet appear; as of this snapshot there is none.

What this page will not do is turn any of it into a forecast. The companion study put eleven years of preseason records against the regular seasons that followed: r = +0.10 overall, +0.008 in the three-game era — and the unbeaten August teams finished below average. Chicago's 34-10 rout, the Chargers' 27-7 romp, Atlanta's 7-27 face-plant: history says all of it is roster-bubble noise. The site's 2026 game predictions and their graded ledger take nothing from these games; the Elo model enters September on last season's regressed ratings, exactly as designed. For what the first real games are worth as evidence, see the Week 1 signal page — and the Week 1 slate breakdown for the openers themselves.

Honest Limitations

• This is a mid-flight snapshot, on purpose. Computed August 16, 2026, completed games only. Games scheduled after the pull are excluded; roughly thirty more will be played by early September. Every count on this page carries that date.
• Preseason data comes from a different source than the rest of the site. The nflverse log carries no preseason games, so these are ESPN public-scoreboard pulls, team codes normalized to match the site's (the join against the Week 1 schedule uses those shared codes). Historical pulls land exactly on the known calendar — details in the signal study's limitations section.
• 17 games support almost no conclusions — which is why this page draws none. The scoring comparison shows the sample's own instability (2024 and 2025 looked like 32.8 and 42.3 at this same point). Team "records" in August predict nothing; see the companion page for the 320-team-season receipts.
• The Hall of Fame game is a neutral-site oddity — listed home/away is bookkeeping (Arizona was the listed home team in Canton), which is why this page says "listed road teams are 10-6-1" rather than pretending preseason home field means anything.

Reproduce It

One dataset: preseason.json, built by data_layer/build_preseason.py from ESPN's public scoreboard feed (seasontype 1, completed games only, franchise codes normalized) and served at /data/preseason.json; the Week 1 cross-check joins it against the 2026 rows of the nflverse file at /data/games.csv. The chart comes from explainer_src/make_preseason_scoring_chart.py. The whole page is a filter and a mean:

import json, csv

pre = [g for g in json.load(open("data_layer/preseason.json"))["games"]
       if g["season"] == 2026]                      # 17 completed games
print(sum(g["home_score"] + g["away_score"] for g in pre) / len(pre))  # 35.6

wk1 = {frozenset((r["away_team"], r["home_team"]))
       for r in csv.DictReader(open("data_layer/games.csv"))
       if r["season"] == "2026" and r["game_type"] == "REG" and r["week"] == "1"}
met = [g for g in pre if frozenset((g["away"], g["home"])) in wk1]
print(len(met))                                     # 0

All figures computed 2026-08-16. The dataset regenerates by re-running the build script; this page describes the August 16 pull and is dated as such.

Data: ESPN public scoreboard API (2026 preseason, completed games through 2026-08-16) + nflverse/nfldata (2026 regular-season schedule). No predictions on this page by design; ties stand as played.