More from Albert Breer: Sean Payton Has a Familiar Plan for the Broncos | Mac Jones Has a Lot to Rebound From–And Maybe That’s a Good Thing | How Bryce Young Is Already Impressing His Teammates and Coaches
The opener’s two weeks from Thursday, and we have takeaways as preseason finales and final cutdowns fast approach …
The Buccaneers have a quarterback question, are carrying a lot of dead money on their cap ($75.3 million) and believe they have a better team than most. Yes, Tom Brady’s gone. But Lavonte David, Carlton Davis, Devin White, Shaq Barrett, Vita Vea, Tristan Wirfs, Ryan Jensen, Mike Evans and Chris Godwin aren’t. And over the past three years, those guys got a lot of championship-level experience playing with No. 12.
The other thing they got from playing with Brady? A standard that won’t just go away.
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It’s something coach Todd Bowles and I discussed at the Bucs’ hotel last week, as the team worked in New Jersey (they had joint practices and a game with the Jets), and something he very much believes his team is going to benefit from over the next five months.
“He was the same guy every day and he practiced every day and showed the young guys that you’re never too big to go through your routine and practice every day and try and get better,” Bowles says about Brady. “Everybody’s talented in their own right. But his work ethic you can never question. He did the same routine every day, and he competed every day. That’s where I think some of our younger guys got something to look at.
“We had guys that did the same thing that were fine, but some of the younger guys got to see how he worked every day. They knew they got to put in the work every day and take care of their bodies. I thought that was the biggest thing.”
Bowles was careful then to add other guys to list—“it wasn’t just him. It was Lavonte. It was Chris. We had a lot of guys that put in that kind of work.” But, just as he said that, he acknowledged that seeing a guy who was, by the time he got to Tampa Bay, a legitimate celebrity around the world, doing it did set the tone that no one was above the standard.
And that’s a nice legacy for Brady to leave in Tampa and, maybe, one reason why the backslide from his three years with the Bucs won’t be as steep as some expect.
Now they just have to figure out who’ll replace him (Baker Mayfield, for what it’s worth, just had his best week of the summer).
The Giants have legitimate confidence in Daniel Jones. I know a lot of you think GM Joe Schoen and coach Brian Daboll messed up giving him a four-year, $160 million deal. Maybe they did. Time will tell. What I can say now, though, is that no one in that organization is worried about a face-plant from their fifth-year quarterback after last year’s breakthrough.
In fact, based on how the spring and summer have gone, they think he’ll be better this year.
I’ll spare everyone the first-one-in, last-one-to-leave cliché about Jones’s offseason—even if it is true. Beyond that, he’s gained about 10 pounds of muscle and is moving better than he has at any point in his pro career. More important, he’s playing faster.
And that, the Giants believe, is the result of the stability he hasn’t really had as a pro. As a rookie, Jones had Pat Shurmur as head coach and Mike Shula as his offensive coordinator. In 2020, it was Joe Judge and Jason Garrett. In ’21, Garrett was fired in-season and replaced by Freddie Kitchens. Which, presuming Daboll and current OC Mike Kafka make it to the end of the season (a fair bet), would make this the first time he’ll get to see two years through with the same coach and coordinator.
Because of that, Daboll’s offense is now becoming Jones’s offense, all of which was on display in his first game action this preseason on Friday night against the Panthers.
Both coach and quarterback were careful in their postgame press conferences not to make too much out of the one series Jones got out there. But Jones was close to flawless on that series. He immediately worked new additions Darren Waller and Parris Campbell Jr.—guys who should make the Giants faster as an offense—into the game. He got rid of the ball quickly. His only incompletion was a drop by Waller.
Again, it’s August. So it’s hard to make proclamations about where all this is going. But I can say with 100% certainty that the Giants are very excited about Jones’s progress going into the season and about the very real confidence he has now with what the organization failed to give him earlier in his career. And that’s the right sort of situation around him.
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Being at Jets training camp was a reminder of one common thread between hyped teams that don’t make it. And that’s not saying the Jets won’t make it in 2023. But if there’s one thing that could take the team down, it’s the state of the offensive line.
Consider …
• The team’s left tackle, Duane Brown, is coming back from surgery to repair two tears in his rotator cuff (somehow he played through that last year), and will turn 38 this month. He hasn’t practiced—he has a checkup this week, and the expectation is he’ll be cleared by the doctors. If Brown is who he was last year, great. But with a player that age, there are always fair questions on whether he can make it through an NFL season.
• The right tackle right now is probably Mekhi Becton. He’s been better this summer in just about every way. But how reliable he’ll be, based on his history, is still an open question. And if Becton doesn’t seize and hang on to the job, the Jets would have to turn to 2022 fourth-rounder Max Mitchell, journeyman Billy Turner or move Ali Vera-Tucker from guard.
• Connor McGovern is likely to be the Week 1 starter at center, but the idea rookie Joe Tippman beats him out at some point isn’t out of the question. And if Tippman doesn’t, he could play guard instead, should the Jets have to move Vera-Tucker.
As you can see, there are a lot of ifs there. So while everyone focuses on Aaron Rodgers and the coaching staff and whatever else HBO’s Hard Knocks presents Tuesdays, the Jets know this is the one thing that has to come together for them before the Sept. 11 opener against the Bills. They’re aware, of course, what problems in that area did to the Bengals and Chiefs in the Super Bowl, and how it’s sunk a lot of other contenders in recent years way before then.
The Jets, by the way, aren’t alone. The Chiefs, Bengals, Steelers, Patriots and Titans are among the teams in the AFC undergoing turnover at tackle, and need things to fall into place the right way there. You could argue every team in the Jets’ division has the offensive line as its swing factor for 2023. Which makes this the sort of hidden story line that promises to get bigger when the games start to count in a couple of weeks
While we’re there, I wanted to follow up on the item I had last week on the difficulty the NFL is having developing backup young linemen. It’s been an epidemic for a while, going back to the rules changes on practice in 2011, and you know the cause and effect here—the NFL’s reduction in padded practices, and practices in general, has made it harder to develop linemen, particularly on offense, where backups often don’t play in games.
You can read about that in last week’s MMQB.
I have one prominent expert on the subject that disagrees with the idea that the rules changes have made it borderline impossible to develop linemen who aren’t playing Sundays: former Patriots line coach Dante Scarnecchia.
“I would never acquiesce to that thinking because the rules are the rules, and if you use it as an excuse, you’re not gonna come out with anything,” he says in his trademark blunt tone. “So what I really believe is, yes, you don’t have as much contact, and that’s probably a good thing. But I still think you can develop techniques in an offensive lineman by hitting bags and being able to get enough contact for those guys as you need it.”
The now retired Scarnecchia has, of course, a lot of skins on the wall. And he concedes that, yes, in the twilight of his career, with these rules in place, he had to be creative in finding ways to turn young late-round draft picks, who didn’t start right away, such as Marcus Cannon, Ted Karras and Shaq Mason, into guys he could trust on game day. He did that in postpractice “opportunity periods” for third-stringers during camp by having real balance in-season in the work he gave his backups, relative to what the starters got, and also through waiting to give coaching points in meetings while maximizing physical reps on the grass.
“You coach on the run,” Scarnecchia says. “Well, one guy just finished his rep, you say, O.K., you overset that, get your hands up, and then at night when you got time, you go over the finite details of everything they did in practice. And it’s boring, and the guys that have heard it a lot of times, they probably don’t like it, but too damn bad, because they’re all gonna get coached. I believe that’s what you gotta do.”
He also did it, he says, by prioritizing having smart linemen who could easily take classroom work and apply it to the field without needing hundreds of reps at it.
And from there, he continued, it’s up to the coaches to pick up on a guy who has real potential, the same way a fan might watch a receiver make a big play in a preseason game. To illustrate that, Scarnecchia raised an example of his old team—and how rookie quarterback Malik Cunningham created buzz in the Patriots’ preseason opener.
“I hope a lot of those things are being said about all those young linemen that were out there,” he says. “Like, Hey, this guy, he’s tough and he uses his hands well, he moves his feet well. Let’s keep working and working and working and try to get him to higher levels. That’s what we’re getting paid to do, and that’s what they’re getting paid to do, too.”
Fair enough.
Bill Belichick and Matt LaFleur, without question, did the right thing in ending Friday’s night’s Patriots-Packers game 10 minutes early. But doing it did raise some very real questions. Primarily, to me, it’s this: Did the Damar Hamlin situation change the way we, and more important NFL coaches, players and staff, digest these kinds of circumstances going forward?
Thankfully, New England rookie Isaiah Bolden is doing O.K. After being taken off on a backboard, with his facemask unscrewed from his helmet, Bolden was rushed to a local hospital, released hours later and wound up flying home with the team.
But by then, the game was called off, as was New England’s planned trip this week to Tennessee for joint practices—the Patriots were scheduled to fly to Nashville from Green Bay and now, instead, will just fly in Thursday for their Friday preseason finale and practice at home this week. Again, all of this is the right thing. The scene was jarring for the players, and getting them back to normalcy, I’m sure, is paramount for Belichick.
That said, the first time an ambulance is called onto the field during the regular season, do we see a difference from what’s been the norm in how it’s handled?
I don’t know the answer, and I’m not sure anyone else does, either. But I do think it’s fair to wonder whether what we saw in Green Bay on Saturday night plays out that way before everyone seeing what we all saw in January. And it’s something I’ve certainly got on my radar going into the season.
With, again, the main thing being that it’s good to see Bolden come out of this all right.
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I like what LaFleur’s done with Jordan Love this preseason. The Packers knew what they were doing when they scheduled joint practices with both the Bengals and Patriots—it’d give them the chance to feed their new starting quarterback real NFL reps through a firehose as they prepared him for Week 1. So he had two days of practices against Cincinnati defensive coordinator Lou Anarumo’s group, then another pair against Bill Belichick’s New England defense.
And after those practices, Love played two possessions against both teams, including 12 snaps against the Bengals and 17 against the Patriots.
The idea here was to keep building the library of defense seen in the head of a quarterback, who’ll go into the season having taken just 157 regular-season snaps through his first three years, and allow him to make his mistakes, and correct them, in a lower-impact setting, where the coaches can correct those the same as they would in the regular season. Which, really, has been the idea all through the summer to prepare Love.
“We’re throwing everything at him,” LaFleur told me a few weeks back. “I really don’t want him to have a four-interception [day]. But, yeah, that’s one of the things that I try to talk to him about—hey, man, whatever you do, trust what you see and let it rip. If you throw a f---ing pick, we’ll learn from it. I just don’t think you can play that position with any hesitancy whatsoever. You got the saying, indecisive equals ineffective. Just go be decisive. You got to trust the other 10 men around you. You got to trust yourself and what you see.”
Slowly but surely, I think you can see that happening with Love, both in how efficient he’s been this summer and how he’s starting to take chances in games. Should be fun to see what becomes of that.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Anthony Richardson looks really good in September. Here’s why—there are a lot of things, I’d bet, that the Colts aren’t showing anyone in the preseason that we’ll see come Week 1. In that way, this could be a little like it was when Washington unleashed Robert Griffin in 2012, having concealed their plans for the then rookie in the weeks leading up to that year’s opener.
There are a few factors here, as I see it.
• First-year coach Shane Steichen knows that position inside and out, and has worked with three guys who are significantly different from one another—from Philip Rivers to Justin Herbert to Jalen Hurts—at the position over the past decade. So adapting his scheme to Richardson was never going to be a problem.
• Part of that, in all likelihood, will involve reaching into Richardson’s past to get him comfortable and rolling. Steichen became Philly’s play-caller in midseason in 2021, and immediately worked to incorporate the Oklahoma run game into the Eagles’ offense, which is really what got Hurts going that year. Hurts hasn’t looked back since. And you’ll remember, too, that Herbert got in the lineup in a fire-drill situation, after Tyrod Taylor went down, in ’20, and that worked out O.K., too.
• Richardson is wildly athletic, and the traits he possesses will give Steichen plenty to threaten a defense, which should make it harder for defenses to throw the kitchen sink at the rookie quarterback, at least initially.
Now, eventually, everyone will have tape on the Colts, and there’ll be bumps. But my guess would be we get some excitement first. And Indy will get Richardson what he needs most, coming into the NFL with just 13 collegiate starts, and that’s reps.
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On the other end of the spectrum, it was good to see Trey Lance have a nice night against the Broncos. He did have an unsightly pick on his first series, but settled down from there to lead scoring drives of 38, 75 and 64 yards, the last one of which set up a 32-yard game-winning field goal from rookie Jake Moody (who’s had his ups and downs, too).
Lance finished 12-of-18 for 173 yards, a touchdown and that pick, and because of the guy he is, I know everyone in that organization had to be pretty happy for him.
That, of course, doesn’t change his standing on the team, other than keeping alive his shot at beating out Sam Darnold to be Brock Purdy’s backup, nor does it make the blockbuster trade of three offseasons ago look any better. That said, I did have a thought digging through how Lance played the other night that may apply to a lot of young, struggling QBs.
When I was at Seahawks camp, I had a conversation with a coach who openly wondered how many other Geno Smiths might be out there. Smith, of course, played four uneven seasons for the Jets, starting 29 games after they took him in the second round in 2013. He lost his job in bizarre fashion in ’15 (you can look up IK Enemkpali to learn more) and was allowed to leave without incident in March ’17. Smith then spent four years as a backup—two with the Chargers, two in Seattle—keeping his head down, growing and maturing.
By 2022, he was a completely different player, ready for his shot with the Seahawks, and the three-year, $75 million deal he signed in March is a good indication of how Seattle thought that went.
Point is, Smith’s story wasn’t over in 2015, when he lost his job, and Ryan Fitzpatrick played well enough not to give it back. Even if so many of us thought it would be. In the end, Smith benefited from the reset, and the chance to sit and learn that he wasn’t afforded when he came into the league, having played in a pure Air Raid offense in college. Could there be other guys like him out there just waiting for their shot?
Of course, there could be. And maybe Lance eventually is that guy.
I’m more excited than I thought I’d be about Kenny Pickett’s second year. He’s been outstanding in preseason. He was 6-of-7 for 70 yards, a touchdown and a 147.9 rating in one series in the Steelers’ preseason opener in Tampa, and was 3-of-4 for 43 yards and a touchdown in one series Saturday night against Buffalo. Those two scoring drives covered 83 and 86 yards, respectively. And he showed growth, too.
One example from Saturday came on his 25-yard touchdown throw to Pat Freiermuth. After the game, he told reporters the coverage took him to his tight end, and the throw showed an ability from Pickett to throw his receiver open—he put the ball on Freiermuth’s inside shoulder, which guided him away from the linebacker, who was covering him.
His reward for it was the rest of the night off.
“The plan was two series,” Pickett said afterward at his press conference. “Obviously, it went well, as we’d hoped it would. Every time you get out there, you wanna put points on the board. That’s what we did.”
I know how the Steelers feel about their second-year quarterback, and there’s a nice infrastructure of highly drafted guys around him at tight end (Freiermuth), receiver (George Pickens), left tackle (Broderick Jones) and running back (Najee Harris).
So, yeah, maybe we should all pay a little more attention to Pickett and his team, one that happened to win seven of its last nine in 2022 and hasn’t had a losing season in 20 years.
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Want some quick-hitters from the camp trail? Let’s go …
• C.J. Stroud looked a lot better in his second preseason start (7-of-12 for 60 yards). Whether coach DeMeco Ryans names him the starting quarterback now or keeps it a secret until the opener, it sure feels like this one’s over.
• If Stroud starts, that’ll mean all three first-round quarterbacks (Bryce Young and Richardson, too) get the nod in Week 1. And that’d make 23-of-44 quarterbacks drafted in the first round since 2008 to be their team’s starter from the jump. For context, in the eight years previous to that, the first eight of the ’00s, 21 quarterbacks were taken in the first round, and only two of them started Week 1 of their rookie year. What changed? Look at how Joe Flacco and Matt Ryan did in ’08.
• This is a week to keep an eye on the Jonathan Taylor story, with the running back returning to the Colts (he’s still not practicing and remains on the PUP list). Indy will be in Philly to practice against the Eagles on Tuesday and play there Thursday.
• I’ll be watching Bears rookie Tyson Bagent, who’s making a spirited bid for the backup quarterback job, this week. If only because he’s the son of arm-wrestling legend Travis Bagent.
• There are things to be excited about on Rams rookie (and two-time national champion) QB Stetson Bennett. But one thing the coaches have harped on with him is avoiding the catastrophic throw. So his pick-six Saturday probably wasn’t well received.
• Happy trails to Myles Jack—the veteran linebacker told the Eagles over the weekend he’s going to retire rather than play in 2023. The medicals on his knee were, well, not very good coming out of UCLA. So that he made nearly $50 million as a pro football player is pretty remarkable, all things considered. And a good story, too.
• His exodus highlights how important the development of Nakobe Dean is for Philly.
• The emergence of running back Tank Bigsby in Jacksonville—he turned in another solid performance (13 carries, 70 yards) in Detroit on Saturday—is interesting and could free the coaches up to do even more with Travis Etienne. At any rate, it sure looks like the skill group around Trevor Lawrence, one that’s also added Calvin Ridley, could make a nice jump from where it was last year.
• Bijan Robinson looked just as all the Falcons people have been describing him (four carries, 20 yards), and Atlanta looks pretty frisky three weeks out from its opener.
• Did people really think the Packers were going to trade David Bakhtiari?
