Happy summer, everyone. Here are my takeaways, with veteran mandatory minicamps looming …
Patrick Mahomes subtly showed his incalculable value to the Kansas City Chiefs this week—yet again. Three Super Bowl titles in five years. Six AFC championship game appearances in as many years as an NFL starter. A tone-setter for the team to the point where Andy Reid literally farms the first two weeks of the offseason program out to Mahomes in Dallas. And there are still new ways every day Mahomes proves his worth.
We don’t need to rehash the Harrison Butker thing again here. It’s been covered. Everyone has their opinions on it. At this point, it’d be hard for anyone to move the topic forward.
But Mahomes somehow did.
“I know Harrison,” Mahomes said. “I’ve known him for seven years. I judge him by the character he shows every single day. And that’s a good person. That’s someone who cares about the people around him, cares about his family, and wants to make a good impact in society. When you’re in the locker room, there’s a lot of people from a lot of different areas of life, and they have a lot of different views on everything. And we’re not always gonna agree.
“There are certain things he said that I don’t necessarily agree with. But I understand the person that he is, and he’s trying to do whatever he can to lead people in the right direction. It might not be the same values that I have. But at the same time, I’m gonna judge him by the character that he shows every single day. And that’s a great person, and we’ll continue to move along and try to help build each other up to make ourselves better every single day.
“At the end of the day, we’re gonna try to come together as a team, and that’ll help out as well as eliminating those distractions outside the building.”
Mahomes backed his teammate. He struck a chord on how the rest of Butker’s teammates should handle the hysteria. He respected the opinions of all. The Chiefs can move forward after a situation that was, to say the least, sticky for people who had nothing to do with it.
Now, that doesn’t mean people shouldn’t have strong feelings about Butker’s comments. But at some point, someone from the roster was going to have to address it. You’d like to have the person be prominent, because what the 40th or 50th guy on the roster thinks isn’t going to move the needle much. So having someone such as Mahomes take the bull by the horns is how you’d draw it.
That Mahomes is so capable of doing so is a blessing for the Chiefs, another one they’ve gotten from No. 15 that isn’t lost to anyone over there.
“Pat’s similar to [Tom] Brady in that way,” said one veteran staffer. “He’s just got a knack for saying all the right things, and things that never cause any division in the locker room.”
In fact, at times like this, Mahomes does the opposite. And given how quickly the temperature rose during this particular situation, I think most folks with the team would agree that it’s yet another thing about Mahomes that you simply can’t put a price tag on.
The NFL will try to go to 18 games by the end of the decade. The year 2030 is relevant because the NFL has an opt-out in its broadcast deals after the ’29 season, one it seems certain to take, particularly with the NBA television–streaming contracts likely to come in at astronomical figures in the coming weeks. And it’s fair to assume the NFL would want its broadcast partners bidding on an 18-game season rather than a 17-game season.
With that established, there are a few things to consider …
• The players do have veto power, and through the rest of the current CBA, which expires after the 2030 season. So what do the players do with their leverage? Ask for more ways to get their money faster, given that going from 17 to 18 games means putting an extra half-season on their bodies just to get through the four seasons needed to get to free agency.
So the players should ask for, in my opinion, unrestricted free agency after three years, rather than four, and restricted free agency after two years for undrafted free agents. That, of course, generally doesn’t help veteran players who carry the hammer during these negotiations, but it would work to push the market, which is good for everyone.
And asking for less-restrictive tags would be good, too. I don’t think the league is ever going to repeal franchise tags altogether. But raising the numbers to make it more difficult to tag a guy, and easier for said guy to swallow being tagged, makes sense as an ask.
• The idea of two bye weeks is fun on paper, but the networks haven’t been willing to go there. The reason? Historically, it’d create much thinner midseason Sunday slates, and work to wreck the NFL’s bread-and-butter, which is those afternoon windows. It’s been this way for a while, so it’s a safe assumption it’d be even more of a nonstarter now, with more and more games stolen from Sunday and put in midweek and Saturday windows.
So where I’ve heard a lot of folks say to add a second bye week, and have a 20-week schedule, I’m not sure that’d work without some overhauling of the basic model that’s worked so ridiculously well for the league.
• The 18th game and second bye week would push the Super Bowl to the fourth and final Sunday in February. Which means the NFL would have to move back the scouting combine, and shift the start of free agency (my guess is the draft would probably stay where it is, just because it didn’t work before when they tried to have it in May). Just as important, it’d cut down the offseason for everyone working in the league.
In this scenario, the regular season would end deep into January with the wild-card round on the last weekend of the month. They could move up the start of the season to Labor Day weekend—but probably wouldn’t, because that’s always been a ratings-poor period for television.
So would teams start training camp later to allow the players to have a normal-length offseason? Or scale back on offseason programs even more? All of that would need to be discussed.
That’s not to say, of course, that the move to 18 games isn’t going to happen. I believe it will, because the owners wouldn’t message something this way without the intention of forcing it through.
While we’re there, I did more digging and number-crunching on the 2024 schedule, and what it could mean for the NFL moving forward. Last week, we drilled down on some details, and looked at the amount of three-game road trips (four), Sunday road games after Monday night road games (five), and teams playing on multiple four-day rests (13, and 14 if you count the Chiefs’ Black Friday game) that the new slate held.
The reality, as everyone knows, came down to the business interests of the league, and in researching it, I happened to fall down what feels like a limitless rabbit hole.
That dive I took, of course, started with this ground-floor reality: The balance the league is seeking has become more difficult to strike with each pot of broadcast-money gold that’s been found—be it on Black Friday, Christmas Day, Thursday nights or Saturday afternoons. The NFL’s found flexibility, first and foremost, in the untangling of conference affiliations, and then in taking some of the above liberties that they may not have years ago.
“The biggest thing for us, with so much more to solve, to use a baseball analogy, it’s gone from using the eye test to now it’s more, let’s let the computer be smart for us,” said Hans Schroeder, the NFL’s EVP of media distribution. “And we’ve been able to give the computer more flexibility to run and solve for everything we present to it.”
With that backdrop, you can peek into how the schedule has evolved, and will evolve from here.
Schroeder and I talked over the weekend—after touching base at the league’s spring meeting in Nashville—where I expressed a little curiosity over what’s changed in allowing the NFL to schedule more aggressively. Through that talk, and, again, a little more digging, I was able to find some tells in the schedule that, I think, show where the league is going.
• While breaking up the traditional NFC–AFC Sunday broadcast structure has given the NFL flexibility, it’s also led to a lot of horse trading. Week 5 is a good example. NBC gets Cowboys-Steelers. ESPN gets the Chiefs. Four teams have byes. So CBS’s early window has only three games. But Ravens-Bengals and Bills-Texans are part of it. Fox also only has three early games that week. One, though, is the last two No. 1 picks going head to head, with the Chicago Bears hosting the Carolina Panthers. So absent quantity, they get quality.
• The NFL has used storylines as carrots for its partners, which allows it to stretch past the obvious pivotal Lions–49ers, Chiefs–Bills types of matchups in putting games on the marquee. That Carolina–Chicago game is an example. So, too, is Buffalo-Houston, with Stefon Diggs playing his old team. As such, Sean Payton’s return to New Orleans was an attractive game—even with two non-playoff teams in it—for Amazon to get in Week 7. Part of this, of course, is learning from history, and along those lines here, the league certainly took something from the monster rating Russell Wilson’s return to Seattle got in Week 1 of 2022.
• As it stands, there are eight games that effectively have been pulled out of the traditional TV packages—the five International Series game (the Brazil game was sold to NBC to broadcast on Peacock, the other four were put on NFL Network), the Black Friday game (sold to Amazon), and the two Christmas games (sold to Netflix). That, as I understand it, puts the NFL close to its limit, as far as built-in flexibility in the contracts to pull games back and resell them away from being on NBC, FOX, CBS, ABC/Disney or Amazon.
• I got two tells that the NFL is working with college football on avoiding overlaps with the College Football Playoff. One came last year, when the NFL moved Dallas-Detroit in Week 17 from a would-be Monday Night Football game to Saturday night, to clear Monday for the Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl, which served as the semifinals. This year, there are just two games conflicting on Dec. 21. But even on that day, the NFL put its games in the 1 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. ET windows, leaving primetime for the CFP. Of course, college football being healthy benefits the NFL in a very big way.
And, yeah, I’ll apologize that we’ve had a lot of content on this the past couple of weeks, and may be going a little over the top. But I do think it’s pretty fascinating and, hopefully, can inform all of you a little on how your consumption of the game might evolve in the years ahead.
The situation in Atlanta has normalized. Yes, things were a little awkward after Michael Penix Jr. was drafted, and Kirk Cousins took in his new circumstance in real time. What got Atlanta through a difficult situation—after that subsided—is the quarterbacks.
Penix’s maturity, humility and emotional intelligence allowed the rookie to carry a tactful approach into what was a pretty unusual entry to the NFL for a top-of-the-first-round quarterback. Cousins, for his part, did what he’s done throughout his career (and he’s been in situations more awkward than this one before) in taking the high road.
That Cousins has looked like himself to this point doesn’t hurt, either. He already has a lot of command over new Falcons offensive coordinator Zac Robinson’s offense, and is raising the standard for the other 10 guys in the offensive huddle.
For now, and the foreseeable future, the plan is for Cousins to take all the reps with the starters, and Penix to take all the reps with the backups. But this isn’t the sort of situation where the rookie quarterback needs to redshirt. Atlanta has the flexibility to deploy him as the backup without the sort of risk that, say, New England might run in carrying a reworked Drake Maye as its No. 2 in 2023.
So while all this has been messy, the bottom line remains this—if Cousins is the quarterback for the next two to three years, and Penix is the guy for the 10 years after that, it really won’t matter how the Falcons got there. Of course, by stripping yourself of the ability to build aggressively the way most teams would with a quarterback on a rookie deal (with Cousins’s contract on the books), Atlanta has narrow its path to get there.
But if they get there, again, the rest becomes a footnote.
While we’re on those rookie quarterbacks, it’s at least interesting that two of the six drafted in the first round aren’t the highest drafted players in their own quarterback rooms. Indeed, No. 10 pick J.J. McCarthy is competing with former No. 3 selection Sam Darnold for playing time in Minnesota, and 12th pick Bo Nix is fighting with former No. 2 pick Zach Wilson to start in Denver. You can throw Washington’s Jayden Daniels in that mix, too, with a fellow No. 2 pick, Marcus Mariota, in his quarterback room.
Why is that relevant? Well, because it gives the coaches a baseline of talent to work off.
Darnold, Mariota and Wilson, for their struggles, are all supremely gifted, and all three are with coaches (Kevin O’Connell, Kliff Kingsbury and Sean Payton) with extensive track records developing players at the position. So those teams are both positioned to see how the former first-rounders failed, while also getting a good level of talent to compare the new guys against.
The trouble, of course, would be if the new guy is significantly less talented than the reclamation project—and the locker room figures that out. I don’t think that’ll happen in these cases. And if you can avoid that? You get a situation where guys are pushing one another, knowing the other guy is talented enough to win the job.
It should make for an interesting dynamic during the offseason and training camp.
I understand the hysteria around the Justin Jefferson report—and respect, obviously, the St. Paul Pioneer Press’s reporting on how the Vikings handled the draft. But what I can add here is that if there was ever a thought that Minnesota could move up to get Malik Nabers, a move that on paper could lead to a corresponding transaction involving Jefferson, it never got very far.
I know that because I can say that once it became clear that the Patriots were going to stick at No. 3 and take Drake Maye, the market for other picks inside the top 10 collapsed.
The Cardinals and Chargers, and even the Giants and Titans, left open the possibility that they would trade down with other teams, and none got much action from anyone in the week leading up to the draft, or on draft day after New England made it official and took Maye. For their part, Vikings coach Kevin O’Connell and GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah read the market right on McCarthy, thinking he’d probably make it to them, which prompted them to resist the urge to trade further than one spot up to go and get him.
Now, that doesn’t mean a Jefferson deal gets done. That negotiation got more, not less, complicated with the Detroit Lions’ Amon-Ra St. Brown and Philadelphia Eagles’ A.J. Brown signing extensions, and it should not be ignored that Jefferson took on an extra year of injury risk after becoming eligible for a new deal and got hurt during that year.
But for now, and really throughout, my feeling is that the Vikings’ plan has been to do what they need to do to keep Jefferson around long-term.
Los Angeles will be the epicenter of NFL training camp. North of the city, as has been the case for a couple of decades, you’ll have the Cowboys in Oxnard. Closer to downtown, the Rams will be at Loyola Marymount, and the Chargers will be at their sparkling new facility in El Segundo. South of the city, in Orange County, the New Orleans Saints will take the Rams’ old UC-Irvine digs, and the Las Vegas Raiders will be where the Chargers have been the past six summers at the Jack R. Hammett Sports Complex in Costa Mesa.
It makes sense, in all cases. All three non-locals are coming from brutally hot climates. For the Cowboys, there’s the building of the brand, with the big fan base they’ve cultivated in Oxnard. Vegas and New Orleans, by rule, can’t do as much, or even host fans at camp, but the Raiders remain wildly popular in that part of the country, so their mere presence could be seen as a plus for the team’s brand.
I also like that these teams will be able to practice and scrimmage against each other like teams (Bears, Chiefs, Saints, Jacksonville Jaguars) in the old Cheese League did in Wisconsin every summer.
Now, it is a little tough for fans locally to have their teams go away. But Dallas hasn’t been home in forever, and Vegas isn’t set up to host fans at its home facility anyway. And for a lot of us in the media, the ability to go park ourselves in one spot for a good chunk of camp is gold. It’s also not a bad sign for the league’s presence in Los Angeles now, eight years after the league approved the Rams’ move back to the area.
Nashville is going to get a Super Bowl, and I’d bet it happens in February 2029. The new Nissan Stadium opens in ’27. With the general rule being that stadiums can’t host Super Bowls in their first seasons, Super Bowl LXII would be the first shot at it for Nashville—and I’d be surprised if the NFL doesn’t jump right on that.
In fact, at the owners spring meeting last week in Nashville, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones was asked if he thinks Nashville could host a Super Bowl, and he simply shot back, “Of course I do.”
With the gleaming new hotels and convention space downtown, and the constant presence of cranes building new structures to an ever-evolving skyline (which will include the new stadium), and this one’s academic. Which means we’d be going from New Orleans this year to San Francisco to Los Angeles to another in February 2028 (Miami?), and then to Nashville.
It’s good to see Philadelphia Eagles players standing up for defensive coordinator Vic Fangio, but the tension in Miami last year was very real. By the end of the year, the issues the Dolphins had metastasized to the point where veteran defenders were ignoring calls and freelancing, which is about as open as on-field rebellion gets in the NFL—at least this side of Antonio Brown.
The problem there related to overall cohesion within the defensive coaching staff. Fangio subscribed to a one-voice approach in running meetings, which some folks there believed reduced the position coaches to information gatherers. The frustration of those position coaches spilled over to the players, who were less aligned with the idea of a defensive dictatorship than those in most of Fangio’s previous stops.
Regardless of who was at fault, Fangio now has to fight that perception.
That said, what should help is that position coaches Clint Hurtt, Christian Parker, Roy Anderson and Jeremiah Washburn have all worked with Fangio, whereas in Miami, outside of Renaldo Hill, Fangio’s defensive coaches were all inherited. And, again, if what those players said last week is any indication, so far, so good.
I hope all our veterans had a peaceful Memorial Day. A few years back, I learned about not just the true meaning of Memorial Day, but how difficult it is for so many of our veterans by talking to Army Ranger and ex-Seahawks long-snapper Nate Boyer. He was eloquent, and powerful, in talking about it. So I figure it’d be good to reprint what he said to me—this was five years ago.
All the best to our vets and their families. Here’s Boyer …
“Memorial Day can be a really hard day for a lot of people, a lot of veterans, a lot of family members. But at the same time, I think it’s important for veterans to shift the focus to being a day of celebrating guys. For any of us that served, that lost buddies, we know that all those guys wouldn’t want us feeling guilty or bad today. Survivor’s Guilt is a big deal, and that’s probably the last thing they’d really want us to feel.
“So to think about them, and think about what they’d really want us to do today, I’d imagine most of them would want us to enjoy the day and celebrate them. Honor them, remember them, but have a good time with those of us that are still here. I think that’s the best way to honor them, with the way we live our lives as veterans. And for a lot of the civilian community that doesn’t have a direct connection to that, it’s never offensive to thank somebody for their service, but it is important to understand the difference between Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day.
“This is a day that we’re honoring those that paid the ultimate sacrifice. So you don’t really need to thank us. Maybe spend time with us, think of us, let us know that you support us, but also it’s good to let us know that today might be a tough day for us. This is the day that we set aside to remember our brothers and sisters in arms that didn’t make it back, they laid it all down for us so that we can live freely and enjoy days like today, enjoy the freedoms that we have here in this country.”