Add Doug Pederson to the list of coaches who think the current preseason set-up isn’t conducive to preparation for the regular season.
The Eagles coach said he gets more from joint practices — like the ones he’s having with the Ravens this week — than he will from Thursday’s game or any other preseason game.
“Sometimes you don’t get all the situations in a game that you’d like to see your players in,” Pederson said, via Zack Rosenblatt of NJ.com. “So practices, I can set practices up that way. I can set them up hard. I can set them up where we’re in pads, or going live, whatever it might be that we can really get a true evaluation of a player.
“The only real change from a game to a practice is in a game you don’t get to do it over. At least in a practice setting, if we make a mistake, we can line up and do it again, and so we can correct that mistake right away. In pre‑season games we can’t do that. We get a little bit better evaluation in practice in that case.”
Of course, until Pederson comes up with a way to make up for the revenue, his preference might not matter to his boss and his boss’s business partners. But he does think things are moving in that direction, and from his football perspective, that’s a good thing.
“As coaches, we get to set the situations,” he said. “We get to control the environment and sometimes you don’t get those in games. You don’t get that situation in a game and this way we can control that and work on specific things and get some really good work done with our starters.”
Pederson hasn’t played quarterback Carson Wentz in the preseason and isn’t likely to, and most of his offensive starters haven’t played at all so far.