What to Watch at NFL Training Camps

The 2023 NFL season is officially underway: We know this because our social media feeds are full of videos of your favorite stars parking their cars and walking into their facilities. Camp is in session not just for NFL players, but also for NFL fans, as we all look to orient ourselves to what’s happening now—and what might happen next—in the early days of the 2023 season.

I’ve got big questions. Here is what I’ll be watching closely as NFL training camps kick off.

Will we see Josh Jacobs?

There was little that was pleasant about the Las Vegas Raiders’ 2022 season. The trade for Davante Adams skyrocketed expectations for an offense that ultimately failed to meet them, as Adams decelerated from astronomical numbers in Green Bay to just very, very good ones in Las Vegas. The offensive line struggled, as it has for years now. Derek Carr was benched, cut, and has been replaced by Jimmy Garoppolo—which is the rough equivalent of Carr returning to the offense but with a fake mustache. Oh, and Darren Waller is a Giant now.

The brightest spot on the Raiders’ 2022 offense was Josh Jacobs, who delivered a career year: 340 carries, an NFL-best 1,653 rushing yards, 12 touchdowns, and 53 catches for another 400 yards. Jacobs’s 393 touches last year also led the league—all of this after the Raiders declined to pick up his fifth-year option.

So the Raiders did what all NFL teams do after running their rookie-contract backs into the ground with an absurd number of touches: They didn’t pay him. That fifth-year option that the Raiders declined was only about $8 million, and the franchise tag—which would secure Jacobs for the 2023 season—is about $10 million. So they swallowed the extra $2 million, hit Jacobs with the tag, and figured they’d see whether Jacobs’s body held up for another 400 touches in 2023 before they’d consider giving him an extension next offseason.

Jacobs was one of three running backs who were given the franchise tag this offseason. He joined the Cowboys’ Tony Pollard, who is going into his first year as a starter, and Saquon Barkley, a franchise cornerstone for the Giants. While Pollard signed the tag fairly quietly earlier this offseason, Barkley voiced his frustration, echoing the sentiment of RB Austin Ekeler, who spent months asking the Chargers for an extension or a trade. Running back frustration has cascaded through Twitter (excuse me, X) for over a week now, and Jacobs’s account provides a good summary. Retweets of Najee Harris and Jonathan Taylor and Christian McCaffrey voicing their support; cryptic, but also eminently clear tweets of “Bad business” and “Sometimes it’s not about you. We gotta do it for the ones after us.”

Read between the lines: Josh Jacobs is upset.

Jacobs did not report to Raiders’ camp on Tuesday and reportedly has no interest in playing for the Raiders anytime soon. He no longer has company, though—as training camp begins, Barkley has signed a new one-year deal with the Giants, and Ekeler is under contract with the Chargers. They’ll return to their teams while Jacobs, the final holdout, tries to burn out the clock on the Raiders’ patience and force them to up the one-year deal, similar to what Barkley got from the Giants.

Jacobs will not be fined for missing camp—he has not signed his franchise tender with the team, and is accordingly not yet under contract, and accordingly not yet breaking his contract. His plan is seemingly to take that one bright spot away from the Raiders—to force them to take a long, hard look at an offense feeding all of his touches to Ameer Abdullah and Zamir White. I don’t think the Raiders will like what they see, and Jacobs very well could be enticed back to camp with a larger deal before the season begins. If this holdout makes it to September, things really will start to get ugly.

… or Zack Martin?

Speaking of holdouts, I initially wasn’t very interested in guard Zack Martin’s holdout from Dallas. I figured the best player on the Cowboys wanted his contract restructured, and the Cowboys would say “Well, we should do that,” and they would do that, because that’s all very easy and makes sense. And even if Martin’s holdout lasted a few days (and indeed, he did not report to camp on Tuesday), it would be a matter of dotted i’s and crossed t’s.

Then the Cowboys signed cornerback Trevon Diggs to a very big extension.

Now, there’s a difference between the actual thing and the optics of the thing. It could very well be the case that the Cowboys have been working on this Diggs extension for a while, and it finally got done; that they had no intentions of announcing the extension on Tuesday, and it leaked outside of their control. As team owner Jerry Jones said of Martin this week: “He’s in our plans.”

That may be the reality of the thing. Here are the optics of the thing: Zack Martin asked for more money, and the Dallas Cowboys went and gave a lot of money to Trevon Diggs, who is really not Zack Martin.

Again, reality vs. optics: Martin has two years left on his deal, and an extension would likely come with an accompanying restructure that could actually create cap space for the Cowboys in 2023 and 2024, making it easier to do something like a massive Diggs extension. That’s why, as Jones says, Martin is likely in their plans. But for Martin to see the Cowboys give Diggs this money still must be understandably frustrating, and the longer this goes on—the Cowboys want to get receiver CeeDee Lamb extended, too!—the more easily the relationship can fracture. I’m not anywhere near the panic button yet—remember how long the Dak Prescott deal took?—but I am watching Martin’s camp holdout a bit more closely now.

How smart will Jordan Love make the Packers look?

In the summer of 2008, a young upstart quarterback named Aaron Rodgers took his first snaps as the bona fide starter for the Green Bay Packers. Rodgers brought three years and 59 professional pass attempts into that training camp and endured the expected scrutiny that comes with being a new starter who was replacing a legend that had been traded to the New York Jets.

Fifteen years later, the details aren’t exactly the same, but they’re close. Jordan Love has two seasons and 83 career passes under his belt. His predecessor, Rodgers, made it to the Jets under different, but arguably even messier circumstances. But the key nuts and bolts of the transition remain in place: Love is, like Rodgers was, a former first-round pick with multiple years spent on the bench learning one offensive system, waiting to take over the offense from a future Hall of Fame quarterback.

The success that the Packers had when they transitioned from Brett Favre to Rodgers undoubtedly played a part in their decision to draft Love three years ago. The drama of Rodgers’s departure and the picks they got from the Jets in return for Rodgers would be looked upon with far more scrutiny if Green Bay didn’t have the escape pod of Love. But now it’s put-up-or-shut-up time. The Packers need Love to be what they drafted him to be: a franchise quarterback.

But expectations are higher than that, as unfair to Love as that may be. Since 1992, Packers fans have known just two quarterbacks: Favre and Rodgers (and also that one season of Brett Hundley when Rodgers was injured, but we don’t talk about that). That’s 30 years of Hall of Fame quarterbacking.

Nobody will say aloud that Love needs to become a Hall of Famer, because he doesn’t. But Packers fans aren’t accustomed to seeing anything less than league-defining quarterback play, and after an offseason restructure, Love has only two years left on his contract. His opportunity to prove himself as the next great Packers quarterback starts now, and it probably won’t last very long.

The limited game reps we’ve seen from Love have been promising. His start against the Chiefs in 2021 was about on par for what you’d expect from a quarterback making his first start. Last season, he played in relief of Rodgers at the end of big losses or big wins, so the production was essentially empty calories—but the film still looked good.

But anything we’ve seen from Love—at Utah State, in the preseason, in spotty game appearances—matters little when compared to what we’re about to see. In his first training camp as the starter, he’s preparing to lead the Packers into a new era of football. That’s a rare sight in the history of the NFL, and if Love does it well, it may be another 15 years until we see it again.

Can Sam Howell and Desmond Ridder save the 2022 quarterback draft class?

The class of quarterbacks from the 2022 NFL draft has quickly become something we don’t talk about much. Why bother? Kenny Pickett was selected at no. 20, and the next quarterback did not leave the board for another 54 picks.

In 2022, not a single rookie QB entered Week 1 as the starter, which made for a boring training camp. Save for Pickett, who was drafted early enough to presumably get some starting time in his first year (battling Mitchell Trubisky for the job helped as well), there wasn’t much training-camp news to track for Desmond Ridder, Malik Willis, Matt Corral, or Sam Howell.

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But as the dust has settled, Ridder and Howell have both grasped starting gigs—however tenuous their grips might be. Ridder got the final four starts last season for Atlanta, looking much like a rookie adjusting to the NFL—shaky at first, but getting better week over week. He showed the Falcons enough to keep them away from big quarterback markets—they passed on the Lamar Jackson sweepstakes and spent the no. 8 pick in the 2023 draft on running back Bijan Robinson. The Falcons could have swung for the fences on a big upgrade over Ridder, but elected to put their faith in the young pro.

Of course, they hedged their bets. Taylor Heinicke, once a young, plucky darling of a quarterback in his own right, joined the Falcons on a two-year, $14 million deal—solid backup money for a player who has enough juice to win a few games on a good offense. If the Falcons have to bench Ridder for Heinicke, they will—but this is clearly Ridder’s job to lose. With Drake London and Kyle Pitts headlining one of the league’s biggest receiving corps—and heck, with the entire Falcons offensive philosophy predicated on general largeness—the pieces are in place for Ridder to manage an offense that can run well without much influence from the quarterback.

Heinicke came to Atlanta from Washington, where the rudderless Commanders continue to flounder. The sale of the team and ousting of Daniel Snyder was the first step on a long path back to relevance for Washington, and that journey can be kick-started by Howell, a fifth-round pick out of North Carolina who showed enough in one start—just one start!—that Washington is willing to hand him the controls.

An aggressive quarterback, Howell launches deep balls like his arm is much stronger and tucks and runs like his body is much bigger—but he has accuracy and quickness and a willingness to make big plays, which makes for an exciting brand of football. Howell certainly brings more juice than Jacoby Brissett, now the league’s poster child for veteran stopgap, who joined Washington on a one-year, $8 million deal.

There’s nothing wrong with starting Brissett for a full season as you plan for the future—Brissett started 11 games for the Browns last year as they waited for Deshaun Watson to serve his suspension, and he played just fine. But Howell will be given every opportunity to “win” the starting job in camp. (So long as he looks halfway competent, he may well be handed the job by default.) Between Howell and Ridder, the 2022 class has a chance to salvage another starter from what seemed to be an unsalvageable class.

How will new offensive coordinators shape the AFC playoff race?

A lot of training camp is hoopla. Sometimes someone actually is in the best shape of their life, but usually, they’re just in good shape. A veteran on a team might look rejuvenated, but often isn’t. Much of what we want to be able to take away from training camp, we can’t actually take away.

One thing that we can observe to meaningful ends is how players are fitting into new systems. Are practices slow and mistake-riddled? Which playmakers are fitting in what new roles? There are two new offenses I’m most excited to read about this year: the Chargers and the Ravens.

In Los Angeles, the new offensive coordinator is Kellen Moore, who coordinated some dynamic Dallas offenses over the past few seasons. Moore’s offense, which is one of the few left in the league inspired by Scott Linehan’s system and language, asks its quarterback to sit in the pocket, diagnose blitzes, and dice up coverages. It has a lot of optionality and requires tight middle-of-the-field throws. All of these features dump a lot on a quarterback’s shoulders—previously, that was Dak Prescott. But now, it’s Justin Herbert—him of the shiny new $262.5 million contract.

Herbert is one of the league’s most cerebral passers from the pocket. He gets through reads with unreal speed and is rarely wrong. Throw in the arm strength, and the marriage between him and Moore is easy to understand. The meek passing game deployed by last year’s coordinator, Joe Lombardi, has long kept the best version of Herbert from us; Moore’s offense could very well unlock that Herbert.

But Moore’s offense also needs more speed and separation at receiver than was afforded by an aging Keenan Allen and jump-ball specialist Mike Williams. Enter first-round pick Quentin Johnston, who has the frame to win in contested situations, but also brings surprising quicks and burst for a big man. The best version of Moore’s offense doesn’t just maximize Herbert; it also maximizes Johnston as a true three-level receiver that lets Allen and to a lesser degree Williams fall into more specialized roles.

The Chargers have a new OC and a new wide receiver. The Ravens have a new OC and, like, five new receivers. The transition from Greg Roman’s heavy personnel and orientation on the run to the spread-n-shred sensibilities of Todd Monken demanded an overhaul at the position in Baltimore, and GM Eric DeCosta delivered. The team signed free agents Odell Beckham Jr. and Nelson Agholor, and spent a first-round pick on Zay Flowers, a walking explosive play out of Boston College. Those three join the ever-enticing Rashod Bateman, who has struggled to stay healthy as a pro but looks great when he can play, as well as star tight end Mark Andrews, in what has quickly become a solid receiving room—if the chips fall right.

Monken has made no bones about his intentions to chuck the ball around the yard a little bit. That’s what he did in Tampa Bay, where he was the offensive coordinator for three seasons with Jameis Winston at the helm, and in 2019 with Baker Mayfield in Cleveland. Monken has roots in the Air Raid offense from his early days as a coach at Louisiana Tech and Oklahoma State, so the pass-happiness is intuitive. But Monken was most recently the offensive coordinator for the Georgia Bulldogs, where his offense won consecutive national championships with Stetson Bennett IV at the helm—and they did not run the Air Raid. More of a traditional under-center-into-play-action passing game made sense in Georgia, and that’s what Monken ran.

It’s always a good sign when a coach successfully adapts his offense to fit his personnel. With all of the wide receiver upheaval in Baltimore, as well as the unique skill set of Lamar Jackson, who has not been given a true NFL passing offense in his entire career, Monken can run … well, just about anything. No offense in the league has more of my attention than the one brewing in Baltimore.