With the 2025 season just two (!) days away, it’s time to unload my notebook and cover some of the news with a jam-packed set of MMQB Takeaways …
Jordan Love
The Packers are all-in now, and that puts pressure on Jordan Love. When I visited Green Bay in late July, there was this undercurrent of excitement, and a little tension—the Packers have a really good, young roster with balance and upside, and the question on how much of the rising young talent can elevate from very good to great.
Last week’s trade for Micah Parsons gives Green Bay a cornerstone that no one is going to have to wait on. He’s already there as a truly elite player at his position.
Now, we’ll see if Love can make it, too.
The good news is he’s a heck of a lot closer than he’s ever been to that, and the proof of that is in the work he’s doing now versus where he was coming out of Utah State five years ago. As an example of it, this summer, Matt LaFleur, Adam Stenavich and the Packers offensive staff had Love drilling down on throwing on-balance on out-breaking throws to his left. It’s normal quarterback minutiae on its face. If you dig deeper, it’s a sign of how far he’s come.
Entering the league, Love had run three offenses in four college seasons, all no-huddle, all tempo, with every call and adjustment coming in from the sideline. As he once described it to me, he probably had 15 plays in for each game he played. So it wasn’t that he couldn’t run an NFL offense. It was that he’d never been asked to do anything that’d approximate one.
That guy is now down to refining certain throws on certain routes to certain parts of the field.
“That’s been the most inconsistent thing for me, those out-breakers to the left where sometimes I’m on the money, sometimes I’m missing inside where that very well could be a pick-six,” Love told me. “There’ve been a couple plays where it should be an easy completion and I miss inside, and the DB has a chance to break it up. It’s just having that mindset where I gotta hit on every throw, if there’s a little separation then I gotta be able to put the ball on the money. If there’s no separation, how can I fit it in that type of window?
“All those things, what I need to focus on is the balance, not falling off my throws to the left and making sure I get everything open, and balance is a big part of that..”
Love then added, on the bigger picture piece of it, “You don’t want to have too many things coach gives you so much to work on—Well, which one do I focus on? They’ve done a great job coaching-wise of giving me different things to work on, and we can attack that thing, and once you get good at that, get more consistent at that, now it’s, what’s the next thing to focus on?”
The 26-year-old’s second season as starter gave him other things to refine, too.
In assessing his own season, he says, “It was inconsistent," and there is a story to that. He played most of the year hurt, and there was a process, he can concede now, to learning to play hurt as an NFL quarterback. There was the sprained MCL he suffered in the opener in Brazil that cost him two games, and lingered into midseason, which was then compounded by a strained groin suffered in Week 8 in Jacksonville that bothered him the rest of the year.
“It was one of those things where I’d come to practice feeling good, then one little movement might reaggravate it,” he says. “It was more annoying than anything.”
Still, he won’t use it to excuse some of the bumps he had.
And yes, there are throws that still keep him up at night—and, in particular, it’s throws where the fundamentals he’s worked so hard to refine have waned, leading to misfires and missed opportunities. One such throw came in Week 7 against the Texans. With 21 seconds left, and Houston up 22–21, the Texans sent heavy pressure after Love, and the quarterback drifted back, rather than standing in, and tried to give Dontayvion Wicks a shot on a post.
The ball sailed high and behind Wicks and, had safety Eric Murray had eyes on it earlier, very well could’ve resulted in a game-clinching pick for the visitors to Lambeau. Instead, Wicks adjusted, came back to it, Murray closed on him, and it fell harmlessly to the turf after the two jousted for it. Two plays later, Brandon McManus drilled a 45-yard game-winner, but the fundamental lapse stuck with Love.
“They had an all-out [blitz] coming, and pre-snap, I saw it perfectly,” Love says. “I picked up the protection, made the perfect call for it. We have a perfect play call on, Wicks was running a post. And I was running away, I have all the field over here to throw it, and it was off my back foot. I didn’t trust it, I threw it straight down the field, a little bit to the left, and it ended up being a jump ball. Could’ve been a pick, could’ve been a disaster.
“It was a play I’ve hit in practice, throwing to a guy across the field, and that’s the one where it’s like, Man, set your feet, don’t be drifting back, throw it across the field. You got all that field to work with. That’s a walkoff, game-winning touchdown right there.”
Which, again, is an example of a focus on little things, that implicitly acknowledges that the big stuff has been taken care of. That doesn’t mean he’s perfect, but does show he’s come a long way, and carries good fix-it experience that should serve him well in working through all the details that he is now.
And as he sees it, the more consistent he can be with that stuff, the better chance he has of avoiding the ups and downs—and being the quarterback so many in Green Bay have hoped he could become after his rocket-ship finish to the 2023 season.
As it stands, he’s already gotten ownership of the offense, which has given him license to become a more vocal leader with his teammate. They know how good he can be.
He does, too, and feels the same way about the group that’s around him.
“It’s just the consistency of every day coming out there and taking advantage, not having those moments where it’s like we do everything right and just miss on a play, and have that mindset of, Hey, we’ll get the next one,” Love says. “Nah, we gotta go out there and have that killer mindset of it’s now or never. We gotta capitalize on every opportunity we get, put that fear in the defense.
“We got a lot of guys, where we can create that fear where they don’t know who to cover, they know who’s gonna get the ball, who’s gonna be hot. We can keep that pressure on them. It’s definitely that consistency that we need, and not having so many highs and lows.”
The scrutiny only got more intense with last week’s trade.
Good thing Love sure looks ready for that.
New Lions Coordinators
The Lions coordinator situation remains one of the NFL’s most interesting storylines going into the season. And after sitting down and talking with all those involved, one thing was crystal clear to me in what coach Dan Campbell and GM Brad Holmes want their hires to accomplish—there would be no upsetting the apple cart here. Detroit’s culture and schemes have been tested on both sides of the ball, and there was nothing broken to fix.
Which goes a long way to explain why John Morton was the pick to replace Ben Johnson on offense, and Kelvin Sheppard was the right guy to take Aaron’s Glenn’s spot as DC.
“Brad talks about it all the time, it doesn't matter what it is—players, coaches—they can be at the top of their game, of their profession, but are they good teammates?” Campbell says. “Do they mesh with the rest of the guys? I had to know Johnny would come in here and mesh with Scottie [Montgomery] and Hank [Fraley] and Bru [Mark Brunell]. That's big too. You may be the best coach in the world, but if I don't think you're going to fit with the rest of our guys, you're not coming in. It doesn't make sense."
"The standard is set that there's no short cuts,” Holmes adds. “There's no easy way out. It starts with the work. From a coaching staff, it's always fundamentals. Don't just scream it. Know what the plan is. to actually work on it and have it come to fruition, that's what me and him believe in. It starts with the work. There are no shortcuts. There's no easy road.”
Both clearly fit that bill, with Sheppard having served a four-year apprenticeship under Glenn in Detroit, and Morton having been with the Lions in 2022, and having worked as a staff-mate of Campbell’s in New Orleans in 2016.
But there are differences in Campbell’s picks, too. And we can dive into those …
• Morton is not Johnson. He’s 56. He bounced on and off NFL practice squads for four seasons in the 1990s before latching on with Jon Gruden to start his coaching career in 1998. That makes this his 28th season as an assistant coach, 23 of them spent in the pros, with Gruden, Sean Payton and Jim Harbaugh among the guys he’s worked for (Campbell plucked him from Payton’s Broncos). Yet, he’s only been an NFL OC for one of those years.
That was 2017 under Todd Bowles with the Jets, and that one, he’ll tell you now, was a learning experience.
"I wasn't ready, but I had to take it,” he says. “I was put into a situation where I couldn't hire anybody. That's tough, when you feel like you're on an island. If they don't buy in, it's a tough deal. All you want is when you come to work and work with these coaches, you want to have some trust. You want to feel like you got a brotherhood—I got their back, they got mine. That was a tough deal for me. I learned a lot. Now, I know these coaches.
“They're unbelievable." The Detroit area native then added, “Dan and I are cut from the same cloth. We’re the same dude.”
Having a staff he’s comfortable with, and not just with Campbell, but also guys like Brunell, Fraley and Montgomery, will go a long way. So too, he thinks, will the year he had with Jared Goff—he spent a good chunk of his time in the quarterback room as a senior offensive assistant that fall—three years ago. As such, he knows how the offense was run and how the quarterback was coached. He sees himself as coming from a school of offense that emphasizes getting the ball out and create mismatches, which might show up in his scheme.
But overall, he says, “I don’t think much changed.” And that’s something that Goff can feel already, having known and trusted Morton before.
“Being able to speak freely with somebody and not having to walk on eggshells not knowing how you can speak to somebody yet is massive,” the quarterback says. “In our world, there are going to be highly-pressured, high-tension situations where he's not being a d---, I'm not being a d---, and we need to speak very concisely on how we want things done. … It’s nice to have that camaraderie already.”
• The learning curve for the defensive players going to Sheppard is even shorter.
Glenn legitimately groomed him to be his replacement over the last four years, with Sheppard having broken into coaching in Campbell’s first year in Detroit—he and the head coach were together in Miami in 2014 and ’15. He started as outside linebackers coach in 2021, and by '22 Glenn had identified as having a real future in coaching. So that fall, with the Lions 2–6 and in Chicago to play the Bears, Glenn surprised his young assistant.
“He was like, I want you to talk to the team tonight,” Sheppard recounted. “I’m like, Oh, s---t.”
He spoke from the heart, relaying his own experiences as a player. That, for what it’s worth, was right around when Glenn’s defense started to turn the corner after a pretty shaky year-and-a-half that had some folks calling for his head. That team finished 8–9 after that 2–6 start, and the rest of the story, since then, is history.
Glenn also kept putting a little more on Sheppard’s plate. After a year, he promoted him from outside linebackers coach to linebackers coach. In '23, Glenn added the edge rushers to Sheppard’s linebacker room, and last year he had Sheppard become the first coach to address the defense in the unit meetings every week. He also gave him responsibility in game-planning and calling first and second down.
“I owe everything to him,” Sheppard says. “I was with him twice this summer. He's more like a big brother. Dan is one of the closest guys I have in this profession to me. He was the guy that came and got me off my couch in 2019 and said, You should go try this coaching thing, just trust me on this, you're built for it. You're ready. To have guys like that, that I look up to, have this type of faith in me, it allows me to step into these shoes.”
So for as comfortable as Goff and the offensive players who’ve been around awhile are already with Morton, there’s almost no adjustment for the defensive players to make.
That’s why Campbell and Holmes are pretty comfortable with where they’re at going into the year, even with respect for what Johnson and Glenn accomplished. They knew this day was coming. They’re prepared for it, and haven’t been haphazard with the planning.
"It's intentional,” Campbell says. “We've known for a while. We thought we were going to lose Ben after ’22. We beat Green Bay out there, went 9–8, went on that little run. There was a chance we were going to lose him them. I knew it was a matter of time. I thought we were going to lose A.G. [Glenn] after '21. You're always thinking about it.”
But having that much runway, the Lions weren’t going to lose sleep over it. They still haven’t. Now, we’ll see what happens when the actual games begin.
C.J. Stroud and Nick Caley
The C.J. Stroud-Nick Caley pairing is another one I think we’ll be talking about. But before we dive in on this, I think it’s at least worth reexamining what a lot of folks were considering a come-back-to-earth year for the Houston Texans quarterback.
• At 23 years old, and in what would’ve been his final season of college eligibility Stroud completed 63.2% of his throws for 3,727 yards, 20 touchdowns and 12 interceptions. His passer rating was 87.0, despite an offensive line situation that devolved to the point where Houston traded its left tackle to try and essentially start over with the position group, and lost Nico Collins, Stefon Diggs and Tank Dell for chunks of the year.
• The Texans won the AFC South for a second straight year.
• The Texans blew the Chargers out in their wild-card round game, and, in the divisional round, entered the fourth quarter in Arrowhead against the two-time defending champion Chiefs down just 13–12.
Bottom line: A lot of folks would take that for a down year.
But unsatisfied with the direction of the offense, and wanting to build a culture on that side of the ball like the one that’s been established on defense, Texans coach DeMeco Ryans sought a hard reset with the unit around Stroud in firing OC Bobby Slowik, who came with him from San Francisco two years ago. Just before that, Stroud got an unsolicited text from ex-Rams receiver Ben Skowronek, who spent the 2024 offseason with the Texans.
“Sko texted and was like, Hey, if you guys are able to get Nick Caley, he’s a great guy, loves ball, great dude,” Stroud says, in a quiet moment after practice in August. “It was spot on.”
Ryans was able to get Caley, landing the rising 42-year-old assistant who came up under Josh McDaniels in New England, before spending the last two years as a top assistant on Sean McVay’s staff in Los Angeles (which is where he worked with Skowronek). And now, as Stroud said, every part of that text exchange is coming to life for him.
And interestingly enough, it actually starts with the personal part of it. Before they even talked much football, Stroud says, “He wanted to learn about me.”
“It was just to tell him, I’m here to try and allow him to be at his best, which ultimately will help our offense,” Caley says. “If you can get a quarterback to be at their best, your offense has a chance to be at its best, starting off there. And honestly in the spring, before we got into it, it was getting to know each other and finding out what’s important to him, what’s his why, how is he wired, how am I wired. We both love football, we both care an awful lot about it, and that kind of sparked our relationship.”
Caley also knew that to tap into that love of football, he’d first have to earn Stroud’s trust.
“That’s everything,” he continues. “You gotta pour in, you gotta invest. There’s gonna be some tough times, and I believe the stronger you can have a genuine relationship, the stronger that relationship is, it’ll allow you to weather some storms.”
So once they got that going, in the spring, they could dive in on football, with Caley’s teaching progression being a step-by-step process. Once Stroud, and the crew around him, showed they could handle a concept, the staff would build that up. And in Caley’s words, things moved fast enough to where they started Phase 2 of the offseason program with 200-level classes, and by the time they got into Phase 3, they were at a 300 level.
Along the way, the hope was they could give Stroud more power to adjust things at the line, a responsibility he had in college at Ohio State, but didn’t as much the last two years. Caley’s New England background gives him the experience doing just that—quarterbacks in that offense are expected to control a lot of things from the line of scrimmage—and is powerful combined with the work he did under McVay (which meshes with what Slowik’s offense was a bit). Still, he knew he’d have to earn it, which was the other side of the trust equation.
“It’s gonna make me a lot better, just knowing the situations, knowing that there are a lot of things that I need to do pre-snap and post-snap to get our guys in position to make plays,” Stroud says. “We take care of each other. Not every play-call is great, not every decision I make is going to be great. We just have to have each other’s backs. For me, to have that challenge, to see how I can handle it, I think I’m ready for it. I did it a lot in college.
“It’s like today, when it’s a new scheme, I’m seeing it pretty good. They called a couple blitzes, I picked a lot of things up, and that’s credit to Jerry [Schuplinski] and Jerrod [Johnson] helping as well. Then it’s me balling it. That’s what we say, Nick calls it, we ball it.”
The hope, as Stroud sees it, will be that he can fix stuff on the fly in a way the Texans simply couldn’t last year—Caley says he’d love to have the quarterback “be able to solve problems, see things, maybe get you into a different play based on a look, and that’s where he becomes extension of us as coaches. We’re not out there on the field.”
And as for the progress thus far, Stroud sees it coming.
“The ability to do some of that run-and-gun stuff that the Rams did, a lot of motion, to add some of the scheme that the Patriots did during the dynasty, it’s a little bit of both,” Stroud says. “The protections have been solid, we know what’s going on most of the time, I’m not throwing hot every play, which is nice. So yeah, it’s been a good mixture of both. Nick’s done a nice job with the balance.”
To me, that’s where there’s a lot to like with the Texans. There are, of course, ifs attached to his side of the ball … If Aireontae Ersery is a revelation at left tackle … If the running back situations works itself out … If rookie receivers Jayden Higgins and Jaylin Noel emerge …
But the quarterback is in a good place now. And that showed at the end of an August practice when Stroud hit veteran Christian Kirk for a touchdown in a red zone drill. The ball was thrown into a tight window near the corner of the end zone. It was designed to allow for Kirk to make a play on it. It needed to be in a spot, and Stroud hit the mark.
As the ball hit Kirk’s hand, Caley was in a dead sprint down the field to dap Stroud up.
“Yeah,” says Stroud, smiling, “He get turned up, boy!”
Caley smiled, too, in recounting it, “I get excited.”
I think everyone else has reason to, too, about this new pairing.
Russell Wilson in New York
Russell Wilson seems like he’s in a good place, and the Giants should be as a result of it. I wasn’t sure about this marriage at the start. Clearly looking to level up at the position, with Daniel Jones on the way out, New York took a swing on Matthew Stafford, then tried to land Aaron Rodgers, before choosing not to wait on Rodgers and taking this bird in the hand.
If it seemed like a union born of convenience then, that notion might not be totally off.
But it’s working so far, and the best symbol of that is probably the extra room that Wilson rented out at the team hotel during training camp. He set it up as his own personal rehab and recovery hub, then invited teammates to check it out whenever they saw fit.
“It’s just trying to create a space for guys to understand that we always gotta take care of ourselves, our mind, our body, all that stuff,” Wilson says. “For me, I want to play 20-plus years, a lot of it is just constant treatment, constant work. You gotta be like a Formula 1 race car, there’s all the parts to it, you gotta take care of all them. I think that’s really important.”
And as they’ve come to check it out, and consider their own interest in diving in on some of his methods, Wilson’s gotten the chance to get to know guys on a more intimate level.
One big visitor to the room over those weeks was sophomore star Malik Nabers, who had over 1,000 yards receiving as a rookie. He’s engaged in the body work, yes, but also trying to find chemistry with Wilson—which is an example of how this arrangement works for everyone. And Wilson and Nabers have progressed to meeting off-site now, too.
“He’s super passionate about the game,” Wilson says. “We got our lockers right next to each other, we spend a lot of time there, we spend a lot of time off the field. He comes over [my place] pretty much every night. We get extra time together, he gets extra work.”
The other thing all this showcases is the positive outlook Wilson’s taken to being a Giant, which seems to be rubbing off on others. And while swears he’s not wrapped up in what people have said about him, doing this stuff, at the very least, speeds up the relationship-building process, which can, in turn, break down what others think of what’s been said about Wilson over the last few years.
And as for that rosy view of things, here’s a cool little detail—Wilson’s got the same locker at the Giants practice facility that he had for Super Bowl XLIX week, as the Seahawks chased their first Lombardi Trophy title. It’s a daily reminder, for him, of who he is, where he’s been and what he’s still shooting for.
A lot has changed since then, of course. But some things haven’t.
“A big part of it is my love for the game has never changed,” he says. “I still know who I am, even when people try to talk about you and try to tear you down. My first year in Denver I played hurt, tore my lat pretty bad. Second year, I felt like I played well, and a big part of was I still threw 26 touchdowns and I felt like it was one of those situations where, OK, if God’s got something different, then let’s go … Pittsburgh was great, I loved it there, loved my teammates, the guys you played with.
“And being here, I’m just focused on now. I love the city, I love where I’m at. I’m grateful for this team.”
It probably feels good that they’re grateful for him too.
Pete Carroll’s Sabbatical
Pete Carroll’s got some fun stories from his year off. I’d heard before I went to Raiders camp that the 73-year-old, 24 years after his last sabbatical, again took his gap year as a challenge—and looked to reshape his plan for building a football team the way he did after being fired by the Patriots at the end of the 1999 season.
The result was finding that the plan needed less fine-tuning than it did a generation ago.
But there were, he explained to me, on another 100-degree Vegas morning, some things he picked up along the way. He got to see his sons coaching last year—with Brennan at the University of Washington and Nate coaching for Dave Canales with the Panthers. But the most interesting stories he had, I thought, came from Carroll watching his grandson playing for the junior varsity at a high school back in the Seattle area.
At first, he was just there to watch. Then, the coach in him got the best of Carroll. “It was remarkably obvious that, Wow, I’m seeing things,” he says. “So I just kept taking notes.”
He’d already been taking notes in studying football at the higher levels, both through watching his sons’ teams and otherwise. One example was how he’d always valued the turnover margin—and preached the game being “all about the ball”—but saw other coaches’ detail in teaching ball security on offense, and how to go after the ball on defense, and says now, in his teachings, “there’s more substance to it.” He also spent a lot of time working on the ins and outs of the new kickoff rules in the NFL.
But maybe most impactful were the broad things he took from watching those JV games.
“Probably as important as anything that I’m teaching is how to be a great teammate,” he says. “I don't believe there’s anything more important than that. I’ve always talked about it and shown examples—Bill Russell coming in and talking to our team—but I see it differently than ever. And every player has a responsibility: This is what he can do for his team. So we’ve emphasized the hell out of that, and try to get more from themselves and how they have to give of themselves to be a really good teammate.”
Believe it not, there was scheme stuff too that Carroll saw at that level, too.
“You can see how the trends of plays and concepts and principles are so evident,” Carroll continues. “And we have to stop those from happening [on defense], we don't need those trends to continue, we have got to put a frickin’ stake in the ground right here and stop the ways things are going.”
And as Carroll explained it, his voice escalated, and it was so incredibly obvious there was another thing he learned quickly in going through all that—he didn’t want to be done yet.
Yeah, he’ll be 74 in a couple weeks (he doesn’t like the age thing being brought up, by the way), and, of course, there was a lot of it, at this time last year, that he knew would be out of his control. “I didn’t know if anyone would give me the chance,” he concedes.
But he knew where he wanted to be if someone did. And it’s easy to see that now in how he bounces around a practice field at a stage where a lot of folks just head for Palm Springs.
“I took a good look at what it was like to be retired, and I can do that later,” he says. “The way I can phrase it to you, is the pursuit of passion, getting back into doing things at this level, with this kind of intensity, trying to help people do things that they’ve never done before, there's just so much there.”
He then mentioned the class he’s taught at USC’s business school called “The Game Is Life.”
He explains how insightful it’s been because, in helping a group of mostly college seniors prepare for their next steps, he found himself building a culture, and trying to set them up for success. For Carroll, it was incredibly rewarding. So, now, he’s trying to do it again.
And maybe build a little bit of what that JV team had.
Geno Smith’s Rapport With Carroll
While we’re there, it’s worth just touching on the coach-player relationship I saw on display there between Carroll and Geno Smith. We’ve covered, over the last few months, the tight bond those guys have, which is a major reason why Smith finds himself in Vegas now. But what was left, I thought, to explore here was how Carroll actually helped Smith through the 2024 season, which wound up being the quarterback’s last one in Seattle.
I knew they’d been conversing through the year. I didn’t know it actually started in training camp, for a very specific reason.
“I was frustrated with my situation there—I was severely underpaid and thinking, I should be getting the market or something close to it,” Smith says. “I had talks with John Schneider, and he had talks with the higher-ups, and it just wasn’t gonna happen. And it disappointed me so much, and I didn't know who to reach out to or to talk to. So I reached out to coach [Carroll], and he was there for me,”
Smith says, deep down, he was probably looking for Carroll to say, Hey, I understand. But that wasn’t the response he got.
“He was like, No, you gotta go do it, G,” Smith continues. “That was I needed.”
The running conversation the two would probably have anyway kept going from there. Carroll would text Smith after games. He’d also send him random things—like, at one point, house listings with “this would be a good investment” attached as a message. Some stuff was serious. Some was less so.
And that only confirmed what Smith thought of Carroll.
“As a head coach, it’s rare to see that, where a guy is there for his guys like that,” Smith says.
“I mean, it’s just who he is and I think having a coach like that makes you want to play 10 times harder for him because you know that he really has your best interests at heart.”
Smith still thinks of a speech Carroll gave when he first got to Seattle, and had considered his football mortality. The coach played Aerosmith’s “Dream On” for the team, and talked to the players about using the chorus from the song as a guidepost—Dream until your dreams come true. “I left that meeting, went in my room, and cried,” he says. “I swear to God, it makes me want to cry right now. … That changed it for me.”
So when Carroll got the Raiders job, and Smith’s extension talks with Seattle stalled again, the quarterback wondered if, just maybe, he’d find his way to Vegas. And he had a feeling that, after all those conversations last year, the sentiment might be mutual.
It indeed was. But those talks last year were never about a reunion. Like Smith said, giving a guy that help is just who Carroll is.
“Yeah, I don't leave my guys because I’m not coaching them,” Carroll says. “I’ve never done that. I talk to guys all over the country, and I’m available to them, because I love them and I want to see if I can help them. And this one has been very much an in-depth relationship, because I have so much respect for how he handled what he did, all those years he wasn’t playing, it was remarkable, him having that kind of focus. ...
“So to have a chance to have him come here, it's not so much about the culture. It’s about he and I, and our ability to communicate. And hopefully I can bring out the best in him and he can bring the best out of me. And we will do this thing, arm-to-arm, shoulder-to-shoulder.”
As they have before, both on and off the field.
Cowboys’ Rebuild
The Cowboys’ decision on Micah Parsons might be the start of something bigger. No one is going to want to use the word rebuild, and I don’t think it’d really be accurate to. But a deal like this requires more examination, and there’s a fair conclusion to come to that really brings this one to life from Dallas’ perspective.
That conclusion: This is the Cowboys’ biggest trade since Herschel Walker.
Jerry Jones flat-out doesn’t trade stars. He has traded for stars—acquiring guys like Roy Williams, Amari Cooper and Joey Galloway—over the years. But when the Cowboys find one, generally, Jones won’t let that guy go willingly, at least while he is in his prime, which is part of what made the deal such a stunner, even with all the build-up of the last month.
A peek behind the curtain can show what happened. When the divide between team and player became clear on this one, the Cowboys brass had big-picture discussions on all their options, which led to the idea of reimagining how they’d assemble their roster. With Brian Schottenheimer’s focus on what building what he’s called “the greatest culture in professional sports”, that discussion eventually got to the idea of leaning into that.
We detailed last week some of the questions that have surrounded Parsons internally over the last couple years, and if Parsons couldn’t fit into what Schottenheimer was building, then the Cowboys wouldn’t have offered him the deal they did in the spring. Still, there was the thought that dealing Parsons could further empower other leaders, like Dak Prescott, and even Schottenheimer himself, in trying to carry out the team’s new vision.
So it was that when talks between the Cowboys and Packers escalated, Dallas honed in on landing Kenny Clark, perhaps the best leader/guy on the Green Bay roster, as a target. Clark does give Schottenheimer and new DC Matt Eberflus the help they need on the interior of the defensive line. But beyond just that, he was referenced internally by Dallas people as a “grown man”— a guy who can help set the tone for a locker room—as the deal came about.
The result, the Cowboys hope, is a locker room that’s more aligned, if less talented, and capable of raising up the young talent that Dallas has on hand, and should be able to bring aboard with four first-rounds picks in the bank for 2026 and ’27.
Will it work? We’ll see.
But I’d applaud a franchise that hasn’t been to so much as a conference title game in 29 seasons (the NFL’s third-longest such drought, behind only the Dolphins and Browns, who didn’t exist for three of those years) for trying something new. And beyond just trading Parsons, that’s exactly what Dallas is doing.
Arch Manning Expectations
The Arch Manning conversation over the weekend illustrates why his dad, Cooper, and the rest of the family raised him the right way. This is what was always waiting for him, from the time he showed the ability to play quarterback at the highest level with the last name he carried. And this shows why the hype around him, while fun, was never warranted, not yet at least, even if it was inevitable in our algorithm-driven society.
Ask yourself this—When has a quarterback with two college starts ever been projected to be the first pick in the draft? I’ve racked my brain on this. There’s no one.
That’s for good reason, by the way. You can flash in a couple starts. But you can’t show all the things it takes to be a great NFL quarterback, especially if those starts come against a directional school and the worst team in your conference. You can’t display the ability to win against a defense that’s game-planning specifically for you. You can’t show the number of throws you’ll need to make, or situations you’ll need to face, or adverse situations you’ll have to overcome, in eight quarters of ball. It’s impossible, which we tried to relay in May.
But that didn’t stop folks from seeing a 67-yard touchdown run against UTSA last fall and assuming that Arch was Peyton/Eli with wheels—as if all the things that those two had as quarterbacks were automatically passed down to their nephew—and making him the favorite to be the No. 1 pick in the 2026 draft, even if the same family history that those people were drawing on would give you no indication Arch would leave after a single year as a college starter (Eli and Peyton exhausted their eligibility, Arch has three years left).
So, now, you may understand why the Mannings were so protective around Arch when he was a high schooler, wanting him to have as normal an experience as he could playing at the same school his dad and uncles. It might make more sense why, over the last two years, you rarely heard much from Arch publicly, as he developed quietly behind Quinn Ewers, who, by the way, was actually more highly-rated coming out of high school than Manning was.
This, of course, is no indictment on Arch. In fact, he saw the reaction to his first real start on Saturday coming. In a story old colleague Ross Dellenger did at Yahoo! this summer, Longhorns safety Michael Taaffe says, “He told me, I can’t wait ’til I throw a pick and everyone goes from I’m the best player in the world to the worst player.”
Which isn’t far off from what happened.
I was in the stadium Saturday. Arch wasn’t awesome. He was also playing the defending national champions, in a new defensive system under a Super Bowl-winning coordinator, in one of the loudest environments he’ll ever be in, louder than any he’d face in the NFL. The pick he foreshadowed came, and a second nearly followed (it was overturned on replay). He also battled through to make high-level, fourth-quarter downfield throws to Parker Livingstone for a 32-yard touchdown and Jack Endries for 30 yards on the final drive.
There’s plenty to pick apart, of course. On the pick, he was late, and that gave corner Jermaine Matthews Jr. time to get to the ball. He dirted a couple throws over the middle. And while he made things happen with his legs, some of it was because he had a hard time making out what Matt Patricia was throwing at him from a coverage standpoint.
Not great, but in context? Cam Ward, the No. 1 pick in this year’s draft, threw seven picks in his first four starts against FBS competition at Washington State, and he’d already started 19 games at Incarnate Word before that. Jaxson Dart, who the Giants traded back into the first round for, threw for 154 yards, a touchdown and a pick in his first start at Ole Miss (he got his feet wet the year before at USC), and that was against Troy.
Those guys worked things out over time, and there’s no reason to think Manning won’t. That doesn’t guarantee that he’ll be the first pick in the draft, or even a first-round pick, but he certainly has the measureables and pedigree of a guy who could get there in time.
But that, of course, won’t change the course of discussion around him. The interesting thing, to me, is how some of the same people indicting him now have spent the last four months crowning him—as he predicted—and, in doing so, are actually indicting themselves. Because his name is an SEO darling, it may not matter to any of them. It does explain plenty of things, though.
And, again, most of all, it shows that the Mannings did a pretty good job mapping out his formative years as a football player. Which, if you’d just turn down the volume a little bit, you’ll notice are still ongoing.
Vikings Trade for Thielen
The Vikings trade for Adam Thielen is interesting in its price. Last year, before the trade deadline, the Rams were reluctant to move Cooper Kupp for a Day 3 pick—basically as an acknowledgment of his place as a franchise icon. And their reluctance, in that case, brought a payoff when the team came alive later in the year, and Kupp played a role. But the whole thing also provided a stark reminder: 30-something skill guys don’t have much trade value.
Which means Minnesota going to the lengths it did to bring Thielen home says something.
In a way, it’s sort of the reverse of the Kupp situation, in that the team trading for the player, and not the one potentially trading him away, was the one with all the history with him. But the 2024 numbers of the two are relatively similar—48 catches, 615 yards, five touchdowns in 10 games for Thielen; 67 catches, 710 yards, six touchdowns in 12 games for Kupp. And Thielen is actually three years older, so the risk in dealing for one or the other would be comparable.
The Panthers got a 2026 fifth-round pick and a 2027 fourth-rounder for a conditional 2026 seventh-rounder and a 2027 fifth-rounder. You can look at it as the Vikings as trading away a fourth-rounder, value-wise, or moving one pick down for two rounds this year, and another down a round next year (the conditional pick is a seventh if Thielen’s healthy, since it’s dependent on Thielen either being active for 10 games, or on the 53-man for 14 games; otherwise it becomes a sixth-round pick).
Either way, the Vikings had to push to get Carolina to deal him back home, and the price reflects that (particularly with Minnesota already down the fourth-rounder it traded for Cam Robinson last fall). So it also says something on where Minnesota is.
First, it shows the Vikings acting with urgency to fill an immediate need, with Jordan Addison suspended for the first three games of the year, that should resolve itself later in the year. That screams “win now”—putting a premium on the first month-and-a-half of the season and what it could mean for playoff positioning. Second, I think it shows support for and belief in J.J. McCarthy. Simply put, if you don’t think you can win with him, I don’t think you’re pressing this sort of short-term need this way.
Which, to me, says the Vikings like where their roster is right now.
Quick-hitters
Time for our last preseason set of quick-hitters. Let’s jump in on those …
• The Ravens’ four-year, $100.4 million deal with Kyle Hamilton is a good indicator that they got it right in taking the former Notre Dame star 14th overall. It also shows Baltimore’s ability to think outside the box in taking the 6' 4”, 225-pound safety, who didn’t really neatly fit into any NFL prototype, much of an athletic freak as he is. And Hamilton, in getting here, helped pave the way for a guy like Seattle rookie Nick Emmanwori, who’s being coached by a guy, in Mike Macdonald, who coached Hamilton in Baltimore.
• LSU’s Garrett Nussmeier probably had the best day of any of the prospective first-round quarterbacks over the weekend. Long way to go …
• While we’re there, the Saints’ call to go with Spencer Rattler, rather than Tyler Shough, will push even more focus to what New Orleans might do in the 2026 draft at the position. And while there’s already been dot-connecting with Manning, it’s worth mentioning, in case you didn’t know, that Nussmeier’s dad, Doug, is the Saints offensive coordinator.
• The Terry McLaurin contract is a nice compromise between his camp and the Commanders. There really wasn’t much way that Dan Quinn wasn’t going to have McLaurin on his team—if based on nothing else than how much Quinn values all the different things the receiver brings to the table. For a fan’s purposes, what you need to know is that it’s basically a two-year deal, with team options for 2027 and ’28.
• The Trey Hendrickson agreement was a little different, in that things had gotten pretty acrimonious. That said, giving him a $13 million raise without making him sign the rest of his professional career away to the team did signify both sides giving a little. The nice thing for the Bengals is they have the tag for 2026, but no real obligation after this season ends.
• The Chiefs’ failure to do an extension with Trent McDuffie wasn’t wholly unexpected by the team. They took a swing at it, but always figured it’d be the more difficult of the deals they were working on this offseason, tougher than getting George Karlaftis or Trey Smith or Nick Bolton would be. So they’ll try again, with McDuffie still signed through 2026.
• The Patriots’ release of Jabrill Peppers is another sign of the departure, under Mike Vrabel, from Bill Belichick’s way. The team previously tried to move Kyle Dugger, a year after signing both Dugger and Peppers to new deals (while Jerod Mayo was still in charge). Belichick collected those sorts of hybrids, but having a crew of them, in most defenses, would be redundant. And the Patriots shopping one, then cutting the other, shows it.
• The Washington Post’s Jim Irsay story is about as wild a piece of sports journalism as I can remember. It was also sad reading it—and getting that sort insight into what addiction does to a person, and the people around him.
• Trey Lance winning the backup QB job with the Chargers is a really nice story. Lance needed someone to invest in him. Jim Harbaugh has.
• So does this mean we don’t have to talk about the Browns backup QBs again for a while?
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as NFL Takeaways: How Jordan Love Is Taking His Game to the Next Level.