Welcome to another edition of the Around the League podcast. I'm Greg Rosenthal. We are missing our friend Dan Hanzis in action, but we soldier on today Mark Cessler and Chris Wesseling are here with me. We had a night of preseason games. What's up boys? It's good to be back. Are we excited about the preseason?

No. Come on. No, I am honestly. I gotta say it was a rush for me. Like you're waiting for that on that preseason live app. You've got four screens spinning saying like the game is about to start. I got some butterflies. We haven't seen this in months. Wesseling within minutes of the Broncos in 49ers playing. We see Peyton Manning lining up in the in the pistol formation. That does not get your NFL juices flowing at all. Well, you know, I do like that kind of thing.

We're seeing the scheme changes. We see in how creative teams are going to be. That's that's fun. My balloon was a little little deflated when not minutes into the books Ravens game. We have to wait for the ref to go under the hood for a replay. Just just seems extraneous in a preseason game. We should kill instant replay in the preseason. I think everyone would be on board with. Well, West tweeted that and I almost retweeted it because I found it funny and then I got distracted and I went back and looked later. And people had.

They had hammered you a little bit saying, you know, the refs need a preseason to they need to, you know, get their vibe together. I mean, I guess I see that point of view. It's it's preposterous.

Why the refs just jumped right into the season last year at what week four they did it was. I don't remember them needing hood practice.

Well, the Broncos, you know, broke out that formation and for football dorks like us who are all over the preseason. That was like Nirvana.

See in Peyton Manning back there. I think it was a surprise. You got the running back behind him. He's only out there for one drive, but it gives us something to talk about. Are we already making too big of a deal about Peyton Manning pistol formation in this little change?

I don't think so because I think we're going to see more teams that don't have the running type quarterback.

Give this a shot. And you know, we had talked about this a little bit earlier today that Chris Alt even came on NFL network.

In January and preach that listen, you don't need the read option angle to make pistol effective because when you're lining that back up four yards behind the quarterback.

Defenses can't see that running backs first step. And he's to talk about Nevada used it for two years without the read option and they had a lot of success with it.

And he even mentioned Eli Manning, not Peyton by name as a guy that would make sense and would improve the running game of basically any NFL team that incorporated it.

Well, on the other hand, that's kind of why we are making a big deal out of it. It is too big of a deal because it's not about the quarterback then Peyton Manning's running the pistol, but this is purely about helping the running game.

And it can help the passing game to though. It can simplify things. It can make it so that their play action game.

You know, they have a great zone running scheme. People forget the outskid back in Denver. That could be a big story this year.

And look, I think the entire NFL sees the flexibility that formation gives you.

It doesn't mean it's going to be their whole offense, but the Broncos, you know, they give defenses enough to worry about.

Now you throw this into the mix. You got West Walker there. You got Julius Thomas, so I know Wesselings very excited about.

I am. I feel like he's that wild card now. He's a lot more athletic than Joel Dreson. It gives them another mismatched type of guy potentially.

He took first team reps all off season. And now he's starting while Dreson is out. I guess I'm interested to see whether he keeps the starting job.

And had a nice game. How, how great an offense would that be to be a tight ending? I mean, you're going to be open.

Right. Single coverage. You're going to be open. You know, Damari's Thomas, Welker, Decker, all taking defensive attention away.

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