Matthew Stafford Is Healthier Than He’s Been in Years

Plus, notes on a Bengals contract, the Titans’ offense, positionless Falcons, approach to playing rookie QBs in the preseason and much more.

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We’re rolling—14 teams down on my camp trip—so here are my takeaways from the trail …

I’d be encouraged with where Matthew Stafford is if I were a Rams fan. Sometimes, if you’ve been covering these things for long enough, you can pluck a subtle difference in a player’s or a coach’s demeanor, or outlook, this time of year that carries over when the games start to count. And I had one of those moments with Stafford on Saturday out at Rams camp on the campus of UC Irvine.

Sean McVay had used the word “reenergized” in describing where his quarterback was two weeks into camp, and I relayed the thought to Stafford himself.

“I would agree with him,” Stafford says. “I mean, it was two years of battling through something that made doing my job really painful and not fun. It’s difficult when you’re out there and you’re in a lot of pain. It’s nice to feel healthy again and feel good enough to go out there and spin it like I want to with all these guys. And just operate like I want to.

“It’s also fun being a little bit of an elder statesman and having a bunch of young guys around to try and teach them and coach them up as fast as I can, because we’re gonna need those guys. We’re gonna rely on them.”

Stafford is in a much better position to prepare for the season than he was this time last year :: Kirby Lee/USA TODAY Sports

As Stafford spoke, I noticed the sleeve over his right arm—when I brought it up to him, he explained it was just a cautionary thing. It was significant to me, really, in that it was the only trace of all that went wrong a year ago.

Remember, at this point last year, Stafford was being carefully managed through camp. He wasn’t practicing much and, worse, it wasn’t like this was something new. More so, it was the crescendo of a couple of years of pain, which only made an already troublesome injury (any injury to a quarterback’s throwing elbow is) even scarier. It was fair, at the time, to at least wonder about his future.

Which is why he addressed it aggressively this offseason, through a lot of trial and error.

“Rest, rehab, a lot of work,” Stafford says. “A lot of things I try that either worked or didn’t work, helped a little, helped a lot. A lot of work from me, the training staff, a lot of people to try to get back to feeling good.”

And on this day, he told me this is the best he’s felt in …

“Three years? I don’t know,” he says, laughing. “It’s not a huge number, but it’s been a while. It’s really been a while. It’s the last four of five offseasons. I had a fractured back in ’19. After ’20, I came here, I had thumb surgery. After ’21, I had elbow stuff going on. So it’s been quite a few offseasons since I’ve felt like I could operate and get a full offseason under my belt and go play.”

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The result, for me, was easy to see. Stafford was bouncing around during practice. He was smiling afterward. For him, even training camp is fun again.

“Yeah, I like doing my job again,” he says. “I feel good doing it. It’s a whole lot of fun when it’s like that.”

Getting Logan Wilson’s contract done is a significant piece of business for the Bengals. I know, I know. Everyone is waiting on the much, much bigger contracts for Joe Burrow and Tee Higgins, so a four-year, $37.25 million extension for an off-ball linebacker won’t move the needle much. But I do think it does a couple of things for the team, beyond just having a really integral player signed for the long haul.

One, it creates cost certainty—and gives the Bengals additional clarity on what they’ll be working around to get Burrow and Higgins done this year, and (probably) Ja’Marr Chase done next year. Add that to the fact that the foundation pieces of the offensive and defensive lines are on veteran deals, and the team now should be able to fit the outsized pieces that are coming into the larger puzzle.

Two, it sends a strong, positive message to the locker room. Wilson’s respected in the locker room, a leader on defense and a guy who quickly ascended from a third-round pick from Wyoming into a legit playmaker. It’s a good sign to other young guys, and the Bengals have plenty of them, working toward second contracts that the team will reward guys, which is important, because of the chance of ups and downs in the quarterback and receiver talks.

And, of course, the bottleneck of big contracts coming would qualify as a champagne problem. There will be challenges in how the roster changes in the coming years, but when I asked Zac Taylor about that last week, he was resolute in saying he believes in both the team’s ability to keep building and the players’ makeup to keep going after getting paid.

“This team has been built on players that have a permanent chip on their shoulders,” Taylor says. “It’s just something that our team always feels. It doesn’t matter what our success has been, what people publicly perceive us to be, we just have this built-in chip on our shoulder that we have to keep proving ourselves. …. They keep showing up and showing up. It just confirms that we’ve added the right players because they’re about the right stuff.

“They’re doing a good job.”

Don’t expect the same old offense in Tennessee this year.  :: George Walker IV/Tennessean.com/USA TODAY Network

The Titans’ offense might look a little different this year. Ryan Tannehill explained it to me the other day and, honestly, I hadn’t really heard Tennessee was pivoting like this—not with the new offensive coordinator being a promotion off last year’s staff.

When Mike Vrabel arrived in 2018, he hired Matt LaFleur to run a version of the Shanahan West Coast offense. Arthur Smith took the reins when LaFleur got the Green Bay job a year later, and Todd Downing was promoted from within two years after that when Smith landed the Atlanta job, with both guys carrying over principles of the offense LaFleur installed.

What the Titans are doing now is not that, and the change could end up affecting any shot the young quarterbacks on the roster have of playing. New OC Tim Kelly came up under Bill O’Brien, working first with him as a grad assistant at Penn State before going with him to the Texans, where he met Vrabel and worked his way up to OC. So while Kelly worked as pass-game coordinator in Tennessee last year, his roots are almost entirely in the New England type of system O’Brien ran, and that’s the system he’s putting in now in Nashville.

It’s a change, to be sure, Tannehill’s on board with.

“There’s a touch more freedom in his offense,” he says. “Being able to make adjustments on the fly, make changes at the line of scrimmage, a little more freedom within the route trees. … Whether it’s leverage or a hole in the defense, being able to make some adjustments there. And it’s not just me. It’s the receivers as well. With that freedom, you have to be on the same page. It’s a responsibility where you have to be on the same page.

“If you’re adjusting your route to something where you haven’t really talked about before but you see it, you have to be on the same page. Just going through that in training camp and learning from what we see on tape and being able to communicate that in the meeting room and make it happen once we go out on the field.”

Indeed, the level of control the quarterback has is one stark difference in the two schemes that are arguably the NFL’s most prominent over the last 25 years. In the Shanahan system, a lot of responsibility comes off the quarterback (the center, for example, calls protections) to get the quarterback playing fast. In the Charlie Weis–McDaniels-O’Brien system, a quarterback, as Tannehill alluded to, is basically a quasi-coordinator out there, responsible for adjusting and changing things as merited, and receivers’ and linemen’s assignments are more fluid.

For obvious reasons, such a system would favor a veteran over a rookie (Will Levis) or second-year pro (Malik Willis). And that’s not say a young guy couldn’t run it. Deshaun Watson did as a rookie in Houston. It’s just that it won’t fire on all cylinders without having a heady guy taking the snaps.

That’s good for Tannehill, too, considering that he’s in a contract year and the team has spent significant draft capital on his position the last two years. He has a lot to play for, and, at least for now, he’s confident that Kelly’s offense will put all his experience to work.

“I didn’t need the motivation,” he said. “I can see what they’re trying to do here. It’s not like I’m oblivious to what they’re trying to do. Now it’s my job as a competitor, as a veteran, to go out and make it hard, make it to where they can’t do that because I’m playing good football, and that’s not going to be the best thing for the team. That’s my goal right now, go out, play really good football, lead this offense, lead this team. Right now, I’m prepping to win games.”

The positionless-offense thing in Atlanta continues to fascinate me. I had a fun talk with Arthur Smith about it Wednesday. We did, of course, discuss the whole concept of acquiring guys with positional flexibility, as the Falcons have the past three years in drafting Kyle Pitts, Drake London and Bijan Robinson in the top 10, and continuing to invest in Cordarrelle Patterson’s evolution.

From there, the conversation went into two interesting sorts of subtopics.

The first was on the root of this. Back in the spring, we mentioned how Smith had an admiration for the way the Warriors were built (that’s two Warriors references in one NFL column), with less regard for traditional roles and more focus on making things tough (or impossible) on the opponent. And when Smith and I went there, he went even deeper into what he thinks is happening in all sports.

In fact, Smith says, “I think it probably starts with the youth sports.” He made the two-sided point that, because of early specialization (I have plenty of thoughts on that), the injury and burnout rate has increased, and the skill has, too—so while players now aren’t necessarily more talented than their predecessors, they may be more developed.

“Imagine when we were growing up and all of a sudden you start launching threes, the coach would be like, Get the f--- out of here,” Smith says. “Now, the skill level on these kids that just play all these different positions, I think that’s why—more than anything in sports, these big guys that shoot threes in the NBA show it. … Their spatial awareness now, that’s probably had a bigger impact in the way college football is played. There’s a lot more hybrid players now, 210-pound linebackers who play safety …”

And running backs who can catch the ball, like Robinson. And tight ends who can play all over the formation, like Pitts. And receivers who can play inside and out, like London.

Then, there was the second point, and that’s on how this all sounds good until you actually have to do it—and New England is a good historical example of why. The Patriots, at their peak, didn’t want smart players to run their offensive scheme. They needed them, or else it wouldn’t have worked, a dynamic that became even more important as Tom Brady’s experience made the system more complex, and intricate, to best fit his strengths as a quarterback.

No coincidence then, that Smith raised his respect for the system Josh McDaniels ran in New England, in trying to explain what the Falcons are looking for in players.

“The way we want to play, with different personnel groups and multiple-positional players,” Smith says, “you have to be football intelligent.”

Which meant, in putting the plan in action, getting there required a lot of vetting of guys like Pitts, London and Robinson. Pitts, for his part, said there was similarity in how Dan Mullen moved him around at Florida to what he’s been asked to do in Atlanta—and both demand a player “dig in your book a little more and learn it.”

“It’s being able to know the offense,” Pitts says. “Skill-wise, not just one specific position, it’s knowing it by concept and knowing everything so that you can play any role.”

And the vision for all this—taking a smart, flexible player with a diverse set of skills and leveraging his intelligence—is what Desmond Ridder told me he often saw when Atlanta broke the huddle last year, without many tells on where the five skill guys would line up.

“You see fear, communication, stress, confusion,” Ridder says. “And that’s everything that we want from a quarterback and offensive standpoint.”

Like I said, the Falcons should be fun to watch.

I haven’t watched all the Hall of Fame speeches, but the best quote I saw from the weekend in Canton, unsurprisingly, was DeMarcus Ware’s. I covered Ware as a beat writer in 2007 and ’08 and, as well-regarded as he is, I still think he was a little underrated. As I see it, he is comfortably in the group of the very best football players I’ve seen play in 19 seasons covering the league. So maybe I’m a little biased.

Either way, the story he told about appreciating life was a powerful one. Here it is.

“There’s something in our lives that pushes us to make a real change,” Ware said to the crowd. “For me, that one single frightening moment was when I was in college. I was attending a parking lot party when I was visiting home. My uncle was in his car and, without warning, was knocked across the head with a gun and a knife dropped to the ground, and I picked it up.

“And when I looked up, all I could see was the potential shooter’s eyes and a gun barrel pressed against my head. All I heard was my family say, ‘Don’t kill him.’ There was an eerie silence. After which I simply said, ‘This isn’t me,’ and I dropped the knife. At the moment, I knew God gave me a second chance, and I had to do something with it.”

Fair to say he did plenty with it, becoming one of the greatest pass rushers of all time and, in my humble opinion, the rare true game-wrecker.

Congrats to Hall of Famers. Always a special weekend in Canton, and, based on all the pictures I saw, and stories I heard, it sounded like this year was no exception.

There is a science to determining how much a rookie QB should play in the preseason :: Jim Dedmon/USA Today network

One of the highlights of the first full weekend of preseason games is always the chance to watch the first-round quarterbacks let it fly. Along those lines, Panthers coach Frank Reich has already announced that Bryce Young will start Carolina’s August opener against the Jets. Meanwhile, both the Texans’ C.J. Stroud and Colts’ Anthony Richardson have been gobbling up first-team reps.

And as Reich himself said this week, one thing coaches want to do with young QBs this time of year is build their mental libraries of things seen—and getting reps is the way to do it.

That said, there are different ways to get reps, and I do know in the case of one team, the Colts, the idea will be to pull every lever available. Indy has joint practices with both the Eagles and Bears, and the plan through those weeks is to get Richardson a ton of work in those competitive sessions, then decide how much to play him in the game to follow based on how practices go. The Texans and Panthers will have opportunities to do the same, with Houston practicing with the Saints and Dolphins, and the Panthers practicing with the Jets.

It’s also a reminder that bringing these young guys along isn’t just about what happens in the game. It’s a mosaic encompassing everything they do from May until Week 1.

(We already know Young will start Week 1, and my guess would be the other two will, too.)

Good on Tristan Wirfs—one of the league’s best tackles—for opening up to reporters on his willingness to go see a psychologist after switching over to the left side. Fair to say anyone who’s had anxiety at work can relate to what Wirfs was going through, wondering what a pretty significant change in his job description would do to his job performance.

So he enlisted Joe Carella to help.

“I was very reserved in talking about how I was feeling. I’m still trying to get better at it. It seems so minuscule like, Oh, you’re just flipping sides. But I was having breakdowns about it,” Wirfs said. “I decided I can’t sit here with these thoughts anymore. I was setting myself up for failure. I would just think about, I am going to suck or like, I’m not going to be able to do it all day long.

“So being able to talk to Dr. Joe and just get those thoughts out of your head, just being able to say them helps tremendously. … I’m still trying to get better at saying what I am thinking and feeling.”

It’s interesting, too, because one of the knocks on Wirfs coming out of Iowa, and a reason he went behind Andrew Thomas, Mekhi Becton and Jedrick Wills Jr. in 2020 was that he was “just” a right tackle. He played that side at Iowa, and when a tackle plays exclusively on the right, where he’ll more often have help, the question of why he didn’t play on the left uniformly comes up.

In the case of Becton, he stayed on the right side and quickly became pretty easily the best in that class. He still is, though Thomas has closed the gap on him. But that still doesn’t assure the transition to what’s a more athletically challenging position will be smooth. So good for him for getting ahead of that and also helping to normalize athletes getting help.

Oh, and by the way, it turns out the guy who was playing left tackle at Iowa was pretty good, too. That’d be Alaric Jackson, who was a class ahead of Wirfs (but stayed five years, while Wirfs was there only three), and is now pushing Joe Noteboom for the starting left tackle spot with the Rams.

Matthew Judon’s hold-in shows the route players need to take in 2023. I respect any player who’s willing to walk away from the amount of money Chris Jones is—the Chiefs’ star defensive tackle is up to $800,000 in fines now for his holdout—to take a stand on their worth. I’m just not sure it's the right way to do it.

And this week, Judon provided a good test case.

On an average per-year basis, Judon’s Patriots contract, signed in March 2021, is at a rate that’s less than half of what T.J. Watt got from the Steelers later that year. Judon’s not Watt, to be clear. But he’s also better than half of Watt—as a guy who’s been in the Defensive Player of the Year conversation for a while in each of the last two years and a disruptive force for Bill Belichick’s front seven.

So to remedy that, Judon showed up and really didn’t do much of anything. It’s not like the other players didn’t know what was going on. And his presence at practice, and in the meeting rooms, was a constant reminder that it hadn’t been resolved. That, to me, puts more pressure on a team than a guy staying away, especially with a guy as respected as Judon, and eventually (and good on them for this), the Patriots did right by him.

He’d been set to make $12 million this year, with $2 million of it guaranteed. He’s now guaranteed $14 million, with a shot to make up to $18 million.

Meanwhile, Chiefs camp goes on without Jones, who’s stuck in a hard-to-solve negotiation (he wants Aaron Donald money, understandably, and the Chiefs are looking to a deal closer to where the rest of the market took guys like Jeffery Simmons and Quinnen Williams). And he’s losing money by the day, money that, because of a rule the owners pushed for in CBA talks that’s actually pretty sinister, he can’t get back.

My trip slows a little this week. But my notebook’s still full. So here are some quick-hitters from my last seven days …

• The one thing that always seems to crop up this time of year is the need for more offensive linemen across the NFL. Of the seven teams I saw this week, I’d say four (Bengals, Titans, Rams and Chargers) would tell you that how their line comes together will be the swing factor in their seasons.

• And I’d carry that over to the other side of the ball, too. There’s definitely a need for interior defensive line depth across the NFL. A handful of teams I’ve visited will be looking for help there, either on the trade market or off waivers, as we get closer to cutdowns.

• A fun one to watch in the preseason: Bengals receiver Andrei Iosivas. The 6'3", 213-pound native of Hawai‘i was a heptathlete on the Princeton track team, while also starring on the gridiron. He’s a little older for a rookie (he’ll turn 24 in October), but he’s flashed early in camp, with better hands than the team expected. I’ll be interested to see him play.

• It sounds like Raiders slot receiver Hunter Renfrow has bounced back nicely this offseason, after going through a bumpy indoctrination to the new program in Las Vegas. With Jakobi Meyers aboard now too, it’s fair to think it’ll be tougher for defenses to just take Davante Adams away, which should really help Jimmy Garoppolo and the whole operation there.

• Another player not to be slept on: Josh Palmer. He had a breakout year for the Chargers last year, which followed a really strong training camp. Well, he’s had another great summer and may not be a loaded receiver room’s best route runner. If the Chargers line hold ups health-wise, they’ll be a handful on offense.

• I’ve heard Kyler Murray’s been solid working with his new coaches and has embraced the challenge of learning a new offense for the first time in, well, forever. Kliff Kingsbury ran a variation of what Murray’s college coach, Lincoln Riley (a former teammate and former-and-current staffmate of Kingsbury’s), did, and those offenses weren’t far off from what Murray did in high school. It’s hard to say when Murray will be ready physically, but, a year after news of the video-game contract clause broke, he’s poised to be ready mentally.

• An interesting point made to me in Seattle: Is it possible there are more Geno Smiths out there? In other words, is there another guy or two who started as a young player, sat, benefited from the time to reset and is now ready to run his own team again? It’s a good question, and worth asking since the Seahawks, and Smith himself, feel strongly about how much the quarterback gained from getting the time to sit and learn.

• It was good hearing Mike Tomlin, who presented Ronde Barber with his Hall of Fame jacket in Canton over the weekend, compare Minkah Fitzpatrick to Barber from an intellectual standpoint. No wonder Fitzpatrick was one of Nick Saban’s favorite players, and Tomlin and Kevin Colbert were dogged in pursuing him four years ago.

• That point about the rookie quarterbacks’ snaps in preseason games being determined by how joint practices go? My sense is the Packers will take a similar approach with Jordan Love. Green Bay has joint practices with the Patriots set for next week.

• On my docket: Broncos Monday, 49ers Tuesday, my son Drew’s seventh birthday Wednesday, then Patriots-Texans on Thursday. After that, TBD.