Over the past few months, Rodgers has been open with people around him on his renewed appreciation for what he had for 18 seasons in Wisconsin. / Mike De Sisti/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel/USA TODAY NETWORK / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

A week out from the NFL owners meetings, and we’re all still talking about one particular thing. We’ll address that and a whole lot more in the takeaways. Let’s roll …

A lot of folks are waiting on Aaron Rodgers. But you knew that. So Rodgers took his first visit Friday, spending the day with the Pittsburgh Steelers—getting to the team facility around 9 a.m. and leaving at about 3 p.m. Throughout that time, he met with GM Omar Khan, and head coach Mike Tomlin, spent time with offensive coordinator Arthur Smith, and met with a few other coaches.

While money is always a factor in the NFL, I don’t really get the idea it will be in this particular case, with either the New York Giants or the Steelers. At this point, my sense is that whatever Rodgers decides will come down to what he sees as the best football situation.

And along those lines, I’ve heard Rodgers is looking for a culture such as the one in Green Bay.

I get it if that sounds a little strange after the drama of the four-time MVP’s final years as a Packer. But over the past few months, Rodgers has been open with people around him on his renewed appreciation for what he had for 18 seasons in Wisconsin. Call it a grass-is-greener dynamic if you want, but it definitely has felt, to some of those around him, like spending a couple years as a New York Jet made Rodgers view the situation he had more favorably.

That’s also one area where the Steelers have an edge—Pittsburgh has a long-established culture, a family-business feel, and stability, just like Green Bay. It also helps, I’d think, that the roster is stocked with decorated veterans such as T.J. Watt, Cam Heyward, Minkah Fitzpatrick and now DK Metcalf, who are deep into their careers and presumably would carry a similar win-now urgency to Rodgers.

The Giants have some, but not all, of those elements. There’s also the possibility of retirement or that Rodgers wants to wait the Vikings out. No one has a timeline. This, it appears, is all going to come down to what one guy and one guy alone want to do.

Rodgers has earned that, of course—and I think he’s genuine in his desire to win.

So what’s next? Well, Steelers folks seemed to think coming out of their meeting that he’d probably do a similar day with the Giants to get a vibe for their building, and what head coach Brian Daboll and GM Joe Schoen have built. Unlike the Steelers, the Giants would look to Rodgers to do what the Jets envisioned him accomplishing and lift a growing, young core brimming with potential within a franchise that’s fallen on hard times.

The Steelers meeting did come together quickly, and I heard that Rodgers was planning to spend some time at his home in the New York area, so getting over to see the Giants wouldn’t be overly complicated. Whether it happens will, obviously, be telling.

With his $10 million guarantee for 2025 vested, Kirk Cousins is now looking at potentially slow-playing his next move. If, say, Rodgers picks the Steelers this week, I’d expect that the Giants and Cleveland Browns would have at least some interest in making a move for the Atlanta Falcons’ very pricey backup. Ditto for the Steelers if they strike out.

A big key, then, becomes Cousins’s possession of a no-trade clause in his contract.

Why would Cousins block a trade to a place where he can start? My understanding it would be chiefly to avoid the situation he found himself in last April when he was blindsided by Atlanta’s decision to take Michael Penix Jr. with the eighth pick. And that could be where the draft position of the aforementioned teams comes into play.

Rather than taking anyone’s word for it, Cousins has already signaled to teams that he would likely want to wait to see what happens over draft weekend before accepting a trade. In a way, that should also work for the teams, allowing them to go through a full draft process—and make decisions on guys such as Colorado’s Shedeur Sanders and Ole Miss’s Jaxson Dart independent of Cousins’s destination.

There’s risk involved here, too, from Cousins’s side in that he’d probably be able to get at least a one-year commitment as a starter somewhere, ahead of a team deciding to draft a quarterback—and such opportunity could dry up after the draft.

The other issue here is that Falcons owner Arthur Blank really doesn’t want to pay $90 million, or close to it, for a single year of Cousins. That will affect how much of Cousins’s $27.5 million for 2025 the Falcons are willing to take on to facilitate a trade and essentially buy a draft pick back from the team acquiring Cousins.

One thing I have heard Cousins’s camp would be amenable to is working out the particulars of a trade ahead of the draft, on the contingency that a team trading for him not take one in the first round. Of course, that would require working the money and compensation out ahead of time, and a lot can happen between now and the end of April.

So, there are a ton of moving parts here.

How they come together remains anyone’s guess. And at least in part, at the mercy of whatever decision Rodgers makes.

Sanders on Hunter playing offense and defense: “What else would he do, just sit there by the water cooler while the offense is getting their butts kicked, and you’ve got the best receiver probably on your team over there with the coach waiting for his turn to go back on the field? That doesn’t make sense to me.” / Troy Taormina-Imagn Images

I really can’t wait to see Travis Hunter play in the pros. I felt that way in the fall. I think that way more and more every time I talk about him or hear someone else talk about him.

And no less an authority than Deion Sanders took the mic to do just that this week, particularly on NFL Network. He did it to highlight the drive that the star he coached at both Colorado and Jackson State has to play the game—and play it all the time,

“He doesn’t know any other way,” Sanders said. “What else would he do, just sit there by the water cooler while the offense is getting their butts kicked, and you’ve got the best receiver probably on your team over there with the coach waiting for his turn to go back on the field? That doesn’t make sense to me. “Just because a person hasn’t done this in the majority of the NFL, don’t say what another man can’t do. …

“Travis Hunter loves the game. He’s not in like with it, he’s in love with the game. He don’t really care about the accolades he possesses, this guy loves to play the game of football.”

So that’s where we can dive into how a team can use the guy.

At Colorado, the challenge for the coaches wasn’t finding a way to use him on Saturdays so much as it was to allocate his time the rest of the week. How, in other words, do you deploy him in practice, in meetings, in a way where he’ll be ready to play well over 100 snaps at two positions with entirely different demands, challenges and game plans.

The Buffaloes staff chose to have him practice and meet chiefly as a defensive back, since it’s easier to incorporate a player into a place piecemeal on offense than it is on defense. That meant he’d be a full-fledged part of whatever the defensive plan was in a given week, while getting work in on offense to create packages for him to play in. Then, on Saturday, Colorado would use him in those packages, and then signal in routes to him otherwise.

It worked to the degree where the Buffaloes had Hunter out there for 714 offensive snaps, 748 defensive snaps and 21 special teams snaps, plus another 65 negated due to penalty. Taking out snaps lost to injury, he was in on 93% of CU’s defensive snaps and 94% of the offensive snaps. He had four picks, 11 pass breakups, 36 tackles and 96 catches for 1,258 yards and 15 touchdowns.

He won the Heisman, the Bednarik (national defensive player of the year) and the Biletnikoff (nation’s best receiver), among other trophies.

Which is why, for most teams, the plan would probably be to work him into the team the way Colorado did, with his focus on defense, and work down to incorporate him more and more over time into the offense. I’d see, for example, the Giants, Browns and Tennessee Titans getting started with him.

But there’s also the option, if you want, to do it another way. Take the New England Patriots, who are picking fourth. They have two really good corners, Christian Gonzalez and Carlton Davis III, and a huge need at receiver. So the Patriots could conceivably start working with him as a receiver, where he has a ton of room to grow, and slow-play assimilating him on defense.

So you legitimately get a handful of cracks at getting this right, and getting Hunter to an elite level as a pro. Which lessens the shot you’ll be wrong.

As for comps, I’ve heard Stefon Diggs, DeVonta Smith and Garrett Wilson at receiver, and Darius Slay on defense. It doesn’t seem that crazy for a top-five five pick until you think about what it would take for all of that ability to be in the same dude.

I still have a lot more work to do on this.

But I feel O.K. saying that if you take anyone other than Abdul Carter or a quarterback over Hunter, you’re probably making a big mistake.

You should always­—always—wait for the details of a deal before really assessing what it means for the team and player involved. We can start with the fact that both Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins scored life-changing contracts. Both have an opportunity to create wealth for generations of their families, and that’s certainly to be celebrated.

But one thing is that these deals weren’t the same.

Chase’s deal was almost a sequel to Joe Burrow’s in that the Cincinnati Bengals saw him as such a transcendent talent that they were willing to go to contractual lengths they’ve, by self-enforced rule, avoided over decades. Higgins’s deal, on the other hand, is more along the lines of their standard operating procedure.

Which is about a willingness to guarantee money in future years for these deals. Here’s how that manifests in both of these circumstances.

• Ja’Marr Chase got $73.9 million fully guaranteed, accounting for all but $1.1 million (those are per-game roster bonuses) of the $75 million he’ll get in 2026. He’s due another $30 million in ’27, and $28.9 million of it is fully guaranteed in March ’26. That means Cincy would be on the hook for $73.9 million for a year, $103.9 million for two, or he’s getting all $105 million written in over the first three years of the deal, plus another $7 million for ’28 that becomes fully guaranteed in March ’27. So, it’s nine figures in guarantees that vest over a year ahead of time, and with virtual assurances, he makes $122 million.

• Tee Higgins’s deal, on the other hand, has $30 million in fully guaranteed money—a $20 million roster bonus he’s already collected and a $10 million roster bonus due next March. As a practical matter, he’s not guaranteed the $13.8 million he’s due this year, but he’ll get that, plus a $100,000 workout bonus and, if he stays healthy, $2 million in per-game roster bonuses, bringing the 2025 total to $35.9 million. But all he’s guaranteed is $10 million beyond that, and that roster bonus is subject to offsets, mitigating the team’s risk.

And in the weeds of both deals, there are some twists. One in Chase’s deal is there’s $44.816 million due in 2029—that’s the biggest single-year cash figure in the contract, which helps boost the overall APY (average per year) to a record level. One in Higgins’s deal is the $2 million per year in per-game roster bonus, which protects the team against injury with a player who has missed 10 games over the past two years and hasn’t made it through a full regular season without missing a game since his rookie year.

Again, these are both really good deals.

But both are a little different than you may have initially been led to believe.

I think the Houston Texans’ handling of their offensive line issue is really smart. After the Laremy Tunsil trade, we took you through what happened in Houston to push the transaction. In short, DeMeco Ryans feels like the culture he wants across the board is in place on defense but not on offense and that a toxic atmosphere in the offensive line room was a root cause. And while Tunsil wasn’t a bad guy (he was actually well-liked), he wasn’t the type of leader to turn the ship—and needed to be as one of its captains.

So he’s gone in a move that took a lot of stomach from Ryans and GM Nick Caserio, and Houston’s looking to rework the position group. They’re doing this by giving themselves a lot of options—with more potential to come in the draft.

Last week, they signed veterans Cam Robinson and Trent Brown to one-year deals. Both have football-character questions. Both are also on a short leash as talented guys without many options and no long-term security. They also have 2024 second-round pick Blake Fisher in the mix and can move former first-round Tytus Howard from guard back outside to tackle if necessary. They have four picks in the top 90 in April.

To be clear, none of those guys are Tunsil, nor is there someone in this year’s draft class who’s regarded the way Tunsil was coming out.

But the Texans won’t be asking these guys to be that.

The reality is that the offensive culture fix, if they wanted to pursue it, wasn’t going to be easy, regardless of which path the Texans took. I’d applaud Caserio and Ryans for taking a tougher road, with the idea that it’ll lead to more sustainable results.

A Texans staffer on Diggs after he visited with the Patriots last week: “I would sign him if I was them.” / Gregory Fisher-Imagn Images

While we’re there, I think it’s worth addressing the perception of a guy who was there just last year—Stefon Diggs. There’s this idea out there that 31-year-old four-time Pro Bowler is a pain in the rear, and I’m not going to say he hasn’t been at times. Obviously, strained relationships with Kirk Cousins and Josh Allen didn’t happen without some blame falling at the feet of the supremely talented Diggs.

That said, here’s what else I know: Most who’ve worked with him love him. Not like. Love.

In fact, those were the extra words I remember getting over text when things first got bumpy for Diggs a couple of years ago. A coach who’d been with him in Buffalo said, “I f—ing love him.” That sentiment isn’t rare, and kept coming up over the weekend when I asked folks, from those who had him in Minnesota to those who were with him in Houston.

“Absolutely,” texted one coach who had him as a Viking, when asked if he liked working with Diggs. “He’s one of the most competitive people you’ll ever meet. The guy is a warrior.”

“Loved him,” a Texans staffer texted. “Loves football, practices hard and with purpose, wants to be coached. Didn’t have any of the gameday stuff that people talked about. He’s a much warmer person than the stigma that follows him. I’ll be hopeful about where he lands.”

“He was great,” another Texans staffer texted. “Super competitive. Great practice player.”

This staffer then added, with Diggs was visiting with the Patriots as we texted, “I would sign him if I was them.”

So that, of course, is the positive. The negative is there, too—you don’t play for five teams in 11 years (he’s now looking for a fifth team as he heads into his 11th season) without there being some issues, and there have been for Diggs.

The best way to boil it down, for these guys who’ve worked with him, is to say that his competitiveness has a way of getting the best of him. He badly wants to win and, like a lot of great receivers, long had a deep belief that the best way for the team to do that was to get him the ball—leading to frustration when that wouldn’t happen. That can lead to Diggs having issues managing his emotions, particularly if things aren’t going well for the team.

Last year, a bit of a different Diggs emerged, in that he was willing to take on a lesser role in large part because he recognized the talent of young No. 1 target Nico Collins. As such, he was a good mentor to younger guys such as Collins and Tank Dell, and even took C.J. Stroud under his wing before he tore his ACL in late October. And because they had that level of talent around him, the Texans could carve out the type of role that may suit Diggs best at this stage of his career, using a complementary role out of the slot.

Therein may lay the key for Diggs’s success this year—with the likelihood that he won’t be fully cleared until at least training camp. The best place for him, it seems, would be with a contender where he wouldn’t have to be the guy, which would mitigate potential issues with his desire for the ball and also alleviate the frustration that losing can bring a guy with his sort of makeup.

Is that place out there for him? San Francisco would make sense, at the right price. Dallas might, too, with his brother already there.

And at this point, those teams would have a pretty good idea of what they’re getting. He can be mercurial. He can get caught up in his emotions and his numbers. But ultimately, he’s actually a really good guy who badly wants to win and works his butt off to do just that.

Which, for the right team, should be manageable.

Pro day season rolls on this week, and Tuesday’s workout in Austin, Texas, should be memorable. We laid out the reasons coming out of the combine to be intrigued by the draft stock of Longhorns senior Quinn Ewers—who arrived in 2022 as one of the most decorated high school recruits in the history of the sport.

His final season on the Forty Acres was a disappointment, and a lot of it stemmed from his injuries, both the oblique and, later in the year, a high ankle sprain.

When he and I talked at the combine, the former had finally healed, and the latter was getting there. Now, a little more than three weeks later, he’ll be as healthy throwing the ball as he has been since Texas’s early-September win at Michigan (his oblique was initially injured in that game). He plans to go through a 60-throw script that he worked on with ex-NFL OC Rich Scangarello, throwing to Isaiah Bond, Matthew Golden, Gunner Helm, Jaydon Blue and Silas Bolden.

Just as newsworthy is what’s happening around Ewers’s pro day. The plan is for him to meet with the Jets and Las Vegas Raiders today and have dinner with the New Orleans Saints brass tonight, with all three teams expected to send big crews to Austin. He’s already has 30 visits set up with the Dallas Cowboys, Indianapolis Colts and Raiders for early April.

So, yes, there’s a lot of intrigue here. And rightfully so.

I think the death of the 2025 San Francisco 49ers has been greatly exaggerated. I’ve used the 2023 Los Angeles Rams and 2024 Buffalo Bills as examples over the past few years of perennial winners who consciously decided to take a bunch of their medicine after rolling up cap debt chasing championships. And you can see it, for sure, in the amount of dead money the 49ers are accumulating—it’s nearly $78 million in cap charges for players no longer on the roster.

But there’s also a nuance here that’s worth paying attention to: This is more roster churn than any sort of teardown.

While a good chunk of the core of the 2023 Super Bowl team is gone now, the Niners did get ahead of a few potential losses, signing Brandon Aiyuk (four years, $120 million) and Deommodore Lenoir (five years, $88.9 million) to long-term contracts, and Jauan Jennings (two years, $15.4 million) and Colton McKivitz (1 year, $5.85 million) to shorter-term deals. That’s with Nick Bosa, Fred Warner, Trent Williams and Christian McCaffrey intact as All-Pro foundation pieces to build around, and with a big contract for Brock Purdy coming.

We’ll have more on this in the coming weeks, but the reality is after spending $334.5 million in cash on the 2024 roster, the 49ers are still at $223.3 million committed for this year, per the cap-tracking site Over The Cap.

The bottom line: If they hit on draft picks and get good coaching, such as those Rams and Bills did, the Niners will be just fine.

There was one team that kept writing Godwin blank checks to sign him in free agency. / Nathan Ray Seebeck-Imagn Images

Chris Godwin’s decision to stay in Tampa shows Tom Brady’s lasting impact on that place. And, really, how what’s been built there, a process that started well before Brady landed in Tampa, has very, very real staying power.

I bring it up here, because it’s the first thing I thought of when I saw Tampa Bay Buccaneers GM Jason Licht’s comments to WDAE last week, on Godwin taking a three-year, $66 million deal.

“There were several teams that inquired but there was one that kept writing him blank checks,” Licht said. “We got to a point of what we could do in order to keep everything together and add some pieces here, and he took it. … [Godwin is] a man of character. We’re so fortunate to have him.”

My understanding is that the blank check team was the Patriots, and it wasn’t the first time the Bucs had gotten such affirmation from a star receiver. Last year, in fact, Mike Evans agreed to a two-year, $41 million deal to stay in Tampa after the Rams upped the ante and went past where the Buccaneers were financially.

This, of course, mirrors how Brady would work with the Buccaneers and the Patriots before them in doing deals that would make sense both for the player and the team. It wasn’t always taking less, but it was working within a framework that allowed Tampa to continue to build around the stars it had.

That’s a pretty cool legacy and a pretty cool thing the Bucs have built—and a reason why they’ve come out of their Brady era in much better shape than the Patriots.

Our quick-hitters this week are coming fast. And we’ll bring ’em right now …

• I like the Brandin Cooks reunion in New Orleans—he’s become a great pro over the years and can be a pretty nice leader for Kellen Moore’s program. It won’t hurt to have him around Chris Olave and Rashid Shaheed, either.

• I’d be a little surprised if the Jets took a quarterback in the first round. I’ve heard that Justin Fields’s camp did a lot of homework and really prioritized having a spot where he could be the clear-cut starter. I don’t know if his new team gave him that assurance, but he obviously felt good about the opportunity he’d have there.

• As I understand it, the Giants’ decision to sign Jameis Winston will not impact their pursuit of Rodgers. It does make signing Russell Wilson less likely though—I’m really not sure where Wilson finds a landing spot, given the current landscape.

• The price keeps rising on Micah Parsons. With Chase and Myles Garrett now both over $40 million per year in new money, it’s pretty clear that Parsons’s next contract average will start with a 4. And that 4 won’t be followed by a 0.

• Shout out to Brandon Graham. He’s a great guy who had a great career. I’m glad he’s celebrated as he should be in Philly, where he spent all 15 of his NFL years.

• While we’re there, a year out from the retirements of Fletcher Cox and Jason Kelce, it’s still bananas to look back and see how those two, Graham and Lane Johnson, were together for 11 years. I said it on social media last week—I can’t imagine there’s much precedent for four linemen being together for that long, and it’s a good window into what makes Philly great.

• On the rules changes—I’ll dive in more in the Tuesday notes, but my initial reaction is to be opposed to banning the Brotherly Shove and changing the playoff seeding. My reasoning? On the former, I don’t like the idea of outlawing something because one team is great at it. On the latter, I think the scheduling formula makes it so there should be real value to winning your division since teams’ records are close to being apples to apples.

• A lot of accomplished, veteran, third-contract free agents are still out there because the market isn’t what they thought it’d be. And the truth is it can be challenging for a player to wrap his head around making less than what he has. But it happens every year.

• Good note from Big Cat Country mentioning that the Jacksonville Jaguars are the only team in the NFL that hasn’t signed any of its unrestricted free agents. If that’s not a signal that Jacksonville (eventually) did the right thing in dumping GM Trent Baalke, I don’t know what it would be.

• Ryan Tannehill makes a lot of sense as an insurance policy for the Vikings at quarterback. I also think that he’d be good for J.J. McCarthy.

Published Mar 24, 2025|Modified Mar 24, 2025