It's impossible to figure anything out from preseason games when half of your starters are sitting and potentially half of the other teams starters are sitting as well. It's a team game, you need to all play together at the same time for about a half to just get the feel for everyone you are playing around, to make fine adjustments on spacing, timing, etc.. and just regain some of the on field communication. Now is the only time these bubble players will be able to get these reps, so as painful as it is to try to watch, especially on offense, you have to just pay attention to individual performances as much as possible until the real dress rehearsal. In addition, from what I can tell the Cowboys have been very vanilla with everything other than trying to get some of the younger D players some experience with various line games to get their execution down and an occasional blitz.
It used to be that starters would play the first half of the second game and 3/4 of the 3rd game, now it seems like more and more teams are cutting that back significantly while others are still following the old practices, which makes for a lot of skill mismatches. We have yet to see this years starting lineup play a single snap against another team on offense or defense because no one thinks it has been worth risking them for a real game. The Steelers-Packers game felt like a much higher level game, but then you see two premiere players get hurt and you wonder if you really needed to see them go to prove what you probably already knew about them and how they affect your team.
