Practice squad

• 1. Introduction

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  The practice squad sits just below the surface of professional football, invisible on game day but essential to every team's survival. These are the players who show up to practice every week, run opponents' plays so their teammates can prepare, and wait. They earn a paycheck, they study the playbook, and they know that a single injury on the main roster could change everything.

  How did this system begin? Who decided that professional teams needed a hidden reserve of ready players? And what does it mean for the careers of the players who end up there, sometimes for years? The answers reach back to a taxicab company in Cleveland, a rule change in 1965, and a collective bargaining agreement that reshaped the sport.

• 2. The Taxi Squad Origin

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  Paul Brown, coaching the Cleveland Browns in the 1940s, came up with an arrangement that would outlast nearly everything else about that era of football. Brown identified promising players who did not quite make the roster and wanted to keep them close. The problem was the All-America Football Conference, which had payroll rules that would have made paying idle reserves a complicated matter.

  Team owner Arthur "Mickey" McBride found a workaround. He put those players on the payroll of his taxicab company, Yellow Cab of Cleveland. The players never drove a single fare. They simply collected wages from Yellow Cab while remaining available to the Browns. The arrangement was informal, a little absurd, and entirely effective.

  The name stuck long after the AAFC folded. Other professional football teams adopted the same basic idea, even without the taxicab cover story. The NFL, however, did not officially recognize the taxi squad's existence until the 18th of February, 1965, when team owners formally adopted a 40-man active roster supplemented by a reserve group officially called the "future list." Over the following seasons, the league tightened the rules, capping inactive players at seven and establishing procedures around injured reserve and waivers. By 1974, the NFL eliminated the taxi squad entirely, folding those seven spots into an expanded 47-man active roster. Three years later, in 1977, a more limited version returned, and the term "taxi squad" came back with it.

• 3. How the System Works

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  Practice squad players serve two functions that are easy to overlook from the outside. The first is preparation: they study an upcoming opponent's formations and then run those plays against their own team's starters in the week before a game, acting as a live simulation of the enemy. The second function is insurance. When the main roster loses a player to injury, a practice squad member can be signed to the active 53-man roster immediately, without any compensation going to their current team.

  That promotion can happen at any point during the regular season or postseason. Once a team's season ends, practice squad players typically receive reserve/futures contracts, which keep them attached to the organization through the start of the new league year in March. Standard practice squad contracts expire automatically one week after the team's final game.

  The 2020 collective bargaining agreement added a new wrinkle: teams can elevate up to two practice squad players per week to the active roster for game day, and those players automatically return to the practice squad afterward without having to clear waivers. Starting in 2020, players could be elevated for up to two weeks in a regular season; starting in 2022, that limit rose to three weeks.

  Names that are now well known to football fans spent meaningful time in this shadow system. Linebacker James Harrison, safety Adrian Phillips, offensive tackle Jason Peters, wide receiver Danny Amendola, running backs Danny Woodhead and Arian Foster, and center Kyle Cook all passed through practice squads before establishing themselves on active rosters.

• 4. Squad Size Through the Years

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  The 1993 collective bargaining agreement set the practice squad limit at five players. That number held for over a decade before NFL owners voted on the 1st of April, 2004 to expand the squad to eight. August 2014 brought another increase, to ten players.

  The 2020 collective bargaining agreement pushed the number to twelve starting in 2020, and to fourteen beginning in 2022. But the COVID-19 pandemic overtook the calendar. Before the 2020 season began, the league expanded practice squads to sixteen players to provide teams with extra depth in case outbreaks forced sudden roster moves. That expanded size was made permanent effective with the 2022 season.

  Eligibility rules evolved alongside the squad size. In 1998, the NFL limited practice squad spots to players without an accrued season, or players who had one accrued season but were active for fewer than nine games. A player could spend at most two seasons on a practice squad, with one season defined as being on the squad for at least three games, with bye weeks counting toward that total. In 2006, a third practice squad season became possible under specific conditions. In August 2014, the games-played threshold for a season to count against eligibility was raised from three games to six. And beginning in 2022, up to six veteran players with two or more accrued seasons were allowed on a team's practice squad at any one time.

• 5. The Pay Scale

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  The minimum weekly salary for NFL practice squad players started at $3,300 in 1993. It climbed steadily over the following decades: $3,650 in 1998, $4,000 in 2000, and so on upward through the years until reaching $8,000 in 2019 and $8,400 in 2020. Practice squad players are paid for 18 weeks of the regular season, the same as active players, but they receive no signing bonuses and no guaranteed salaries.

  The gap between practice squad and active roster pay is substantial. In 2020, a practice squad player earning the minimum took home $8,400 per week, or roughly $142,800 for the season. The minimum rookie salary for an active roster player that same year was $610,000. Since the 2021 season, the pay structure splits into two tiers: one for rookies and players with two or fewer accrued seasons, and another for veterans with no cap on accrued seasons.

  Some players negotiated considerably better terms than the minimum. In 2006, the New England Patriots paid third-year player Billy Yates his full potential active roster salary of $425,000 while he sat on the practice squad, a figure well above what the league required them to pay. The 2026 minimums run from $13,750 per week for rookies to $22,850 for the top veteran tier, a figure that illustrates how far the floor has risen since the $3,300 baseline three decades earlier.

• 6. Beyond the NFL

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  The Canadian Football League follows the NFL's basic structure but adds a layer shaped by Canadian football's nationality rules. CFL rosters distinguish between "national" players (Canadian citizens), "American" players, and "global" players (those from outside the United States and Canada). Each CFL team normally holds ten practice squad players, two of whom must be nationals, and those salaries count against the team's salary cap.

  Because CFL seasons start before NFL seasons, each CFL team's practice squad temporarily expands to fifteen players (seventeen when counting global players) after the NFL makes its roster cuts at the start of its season. Those extra five players do not hit the salary cap.

  The global player designation itself began in 2019, tied to partnerships with amateur and semi-pro leagues in Mexico and Europe. Players drawn from Mexico, for instance, have 10% of their CFL salaries sent back to the Liga de Futbol Americano Profesional. Each CFL team may carry up to two global players on the practice squad outside the normal size limits.

  In the NFL, the International Player Pathway program, launched in 2017 as a trial with NFC South teams, allowed each team to sign one international player to the practice squad who would not count against the roster limit. That program expanded to eight teams for 2018 and opened to all NFL teams in 2024, at which point the NFL also began allowing IPP players to be elevated to gameday rosters for up to three games per season. The earlier International Practice Squad Program, which ran from 2004 through 2008, sponsored sixteen players at its peak and produced at least one active roster promotion: Rolando Cantu of Mexico, who joined the Arizona Cardinals' active roster in 2005.

  The XFL's brief 2020 return took a different approach entirely, operating a single centralized reserve unit called Team 9 for the whole league, with its own coaching staff and a league-minimum salary of $1,040 per week for its players. Team 9 did not return when the XFL resumed in 2023.