The biggest news of the week is that the Steelers finally have their starting quarterback, and I have a separate piece on Aaron Rodgers arriving in Pittsburgh that’s up on the site now. For the rest of the NFL, and the Steelers, too, it’s a big week with mandatory minicamps here. And away we go with the takeaways …
Cam Ward
The early returns on Cam Ward’s leadership have been really, really good. It’s interesting, because the Titans’ new quarterback is probably the least-scrutinized No. 1 pick at his position I can remember. There was little fanfare in late April to Tennessee taking him—with the expectation of it happening having been in place for weeks. There’s been even less over the month-plus since then.
That’s not a bad thing. It’s just sort of a strange reality to emerge from this year’s draft.
So it is that I had to dig a little for a pretty interesting detail on Ward’s early NFL days. And by early, I’m not just referencing that he’s a rookie.
On the Saturday of the team’s rookie minicamp weekend, which ran from May 9 to 11, coaches started filtering into the building during the 5 a.m. hour and noticed an occupied meeting room. In there, Ward had gathered the rookie skill-position players. As the coaches popped by, they asked what the guys were doing so early. It turned out, they were going over the script for the day and watching tape, with Ward himself running the show.
It wasn’t a one-off situation, either. Every day the Titans have had a practice since, either in Phase II or through OTAs, Ward and the rookie receivers, tight ends and backs are in there, bright and early, to set the table for what’s ahead.
Now, it doesn’t mean Ward’s a lock to win Offensive Rookie of the Year, or be an All-Pro in two or three years. But it’s a pretty good sign that the Titans hit on the football makeup piece of their evaluation on Ward, and also that he’s taking some of the instruction he’s gotten, both predraft and postdraft, from Tennessee’s coaches to heart.
One specific piece of it stems from Ward’s 30 visit to Nashville during the draft process. What the Titans found was that Ward really knew football, but he just hadn’t honed the ability to talk the game the same way he saw it. For example, he would know when he was “hot”—football parlance for when an offense has more rushers coming for the quarterback than it has guys in to block them—and was able to anticipate it based on the look, he just couldn’t fully explain why.
So the Titans knew before they drafted him that they’d be able to build a language for him to relay to his teammates what he was seeing. He could decode what a defense was doing to him in his head, but it was just a matter of going through the process of doing that.
In a way, those meetings, where Ward leads the room, were his own way of working to put that new language to work and get his own practice at using it. Of course, it’s not the only way the challenge is being attacked in Nashville. He also has a meeting with coaches every morning where the staff puts one protection in, going through the rules and the what-ifs in-depth on each one. In the afternoons, the coaches have him run another meeting with the rookies to give him full ownership of what they’re teaching.
All of it points to accelerating Ward’s ramp-up. While the quarterback competition is open, he’s taking roughly two first-team reps to every one that Will Levis gets. He still has work to do, of course—footwork is a big focus for the next couple of months, because until he got to Miami last year, Ward didn’t have much training in that area, and Brian Callahan’s offense is predicated heavily in marrying a quarterback’s drops with the protection and the timing of receivers’ routes. Still, it’s fair to say the expectation is he’ll start Sept. 7 in Denver.
And it sure looks like he’s earning the right to now.
Frank Ragnow
Frank Ragnow’s retirement drew a really consistent response from Lions people, both those there and those now gone. And we can start with the general manager who drafted him—now Browns executive Bob Quinn—who fell hard for the Arkansas prospect in the fall of 2017. Ragnow lost the last five games of his college career to a high ankle sprain that kept him out of the combine, too, but by then, the Lions were well into strategizing how to get him.
Coach Matt Patricia was new, brought aboard by Quinn, and a belief he was pushing internally, to “build from the ball out,” in his words, married perfectly with Quinn’s evaluation.
“He was a guy, when I watched him in November, I knew I really liked him,” Quinn said Sunday. “Then he got hurt, no combine, no testing, but he was such a clean prospect. So after our combine interview, we didn’t have one point of contact with him. We tried to keep it as quiet as possible. … We knew he was a little under the radar because of the injury.”
When the Lions took him with the 20th pick, it stunned plenty of folks—Ragnow included.
Little did those people know that Ragnow would become one of the most important Lions of the seven years to come. Last week, three All-Pro selections and four Pro Bowls later, Ragnow hung up his cleats, just a few weeks after turning 29. He said on Instagram that, “I’ve tried to convince myself that I’m feeling good, but I’m not.” And the sentiment matches the discussions he had with Lions coach Dan Campbell over the past few months.
The Lions wanted to give him his space. Ragnow agreed to get them an answer before the summer break. He wound up using about all that time to decide, which Campbell thinks relates back to the guy Ragnow is—“You’re not going to find a better human being than Frank Ragnow,” the coach says.
“The type of person that he is, he doesn’t want to let anybody down,” Campbell continues. “That’s why this was such a hard decision—it was for us and not for him. Trying to hold on, I’m going to play another year, he was thinking about us and not himself. He’s an unselfish human being. He’s an unselfish teammate. He’s salt of the earth.”
It didn’t take long for Campbell and GM Brad Holmes to identify that when they arrived in 2021. What they knew just in studying the team, without knowing the guys yet, was the foundation for a really good line was in place, with Ragnow and left tackle Taylor Decker. What they found out was those guys would be the types to build around, something highlighted only by how Ragnow stayed all in through a 4–19-1 start to the Campbell-Holmes era.
“Frank’s always going to be a part of this,” Campbell says. “It’s hard when you put in the work and you don’t win. When a new coach comes in, you’re trying to get buy-in, [players] got to put on the blinders and got to trust. He was able to do that. He’s one of the reasons why we have our program to where we got it. We’ll be forever grateful to Frank for that.”
Then, when the Lions did turn the corner, Ragnow became the nerve center for an offense that ranked top five in scoring and yardage three consecutive years. He unlocked the versatility and creativity that Ben Johnson and the offensive coaches were implementing.
“The mental and communication aspect, he was the best I’ve ever been around,” said Johnson, now the Bears coach, via text. “We were able to be diverse in the run game and sound in protection because he could handle all the multiplicity of schemes and defensive looks. Extremely consistent, you knew what you were going to get out of him every week and he elevated those around him. Can’t say enough good things.”
So a guy drafted to be the foundational piece for one program would become the rock of another. But maybe most remarkable is how consistent what you hear about him is from those across both Lions regimes.
There’s about zero disagreement.
“The thing is, he’s so authentic,” Patricia says. “He’s one of those guys, offensive linemen are all big and tough, but he’s also a sensitive guy, he’s an emotional guy, he relates to people. My relationship with him is still really strong; we’re well-connected. There’s a lot … we have a lot there that we went through together, we care for each other pretty deeply.”
Patricia then added, “He’s also really, really good. I mean, smart, tough, the anchor, the snap, the protections. He’s one of the top guys I’ve been around, and I’ve been around really good ones.”
So happy trails to a guy who made the right decision for himself and the people around him, and one who, like Campbell said, will have his fingerprints all over whatever the Lions accomplish going forward.
Indianapolis Colts
The Colts’ quarterback situation is murky at best after the news of this week. First, let’s go back over how this happened. On May 29, the Colts’ second day of organized team activities, Anthony Richardson complained to coaches that he was experiencing pain in the throwing shoulder he had surgically repaired in October 2023. They sent him to be evaluated and it was, indeed, the AC joint again.
His timeline for return to the field is still uncertain. But my sense is that the hope is he’ll be good to go within the first two weeks of training camp. Maybe he can be there by Day 1. Maybe he’ll be back at some point in early August. The main thing, for the team, is that this doesn’t recur again. So they’ll be patient and follow the recommendation that he rest the shoulder.
Richardson will also visit this week with Dr. Neal ElAttrache, who did the surgery in 2023, to try to gather more information in trying to build the best path forward.
Regardless of which way that path takes Richardson, I’ve learned that any sort of injury like this to a quarterback’s throwing shoulder, elbow or wrist is not to be dismissed as “maintenance.” This one, along those lines, should most certainly be taken seriously.
The backdrop of the whole thing is that the sands in the franchise-quarterback hourglass for Richardson are starting to run thin. If he doesn’t prove himself to be the guy, and Daniel Jones doesn’t, either, I’d mark the Colts down as a team in the market to take a quarterback in the first round in 2026.
This is also another example of the toll taken when you predetermine a year in which you get a big investment in a quarterback wrong—presuming Richardson doesn’t turn things around this year. The Colts were, more or less, operating under a mandate that 2023 was the year they’d stop the post–Andrew Luck revolving door that included Jacoby Brissett, Philip Rivers, Carson Wentz and Matt Ryan. They crumbled down the stretch under Jeff Saturday in ’22, pushing them to fourth in the draft order to facilitate that.
But having a high pick doesn’t ensure there’ll be a quarterback worth taking when your number comes up, which was a lesson teams such as the Vikings (Christian Ponder), Bills (E.J. Manuel) and Steelers (Kenny Pickett) have learned the hard way on taking the position rather than the player. As it turns out, it sure looks like the Colts wound up with the third quarterback in a two-quarterback (at best) draft. Indeed, of the 14 taken in 2023, only Bryce Young and C.J. Stroud will enter training camp as their team’s starter.
Jones will get his shot now. That the Vikings tried to bring him back, and were willing to pay him $15 million for the year, is a good indicator of what they thought of him after having him for the last month and a half of the 2024 season. He’s picked up the Indy offense fast, and has looked good in OTAs. Maybe he’ll wind up being a suitable answer. Maybe Richardson will come back strong from the injury.
But there definitely aren’t any sure things moving forward. It should be an interesting summer in Indy.
Jaire Alexander
The Packers’ divorce from Jaire Alexander was months in the making, and shouldn’t really surprise anyone. Alexander was never making the $17.5 million in nonguaranteed money he had on his contract for 2025, and that’s not a reflection of his play—last year, first-year DC Jeff Hafley called games differently with Alexander in there, a reflection of the impact he’s still capable of making. The issue, of course, is he wasn’t in there nearly enough.
Alexander missed 10 games last year and 10 more in 2023.
So the cold reality was that the Packers simply weren’t ever going forward with the contract as it stood. Green Bay shopped him in March, trying to find a suitor that’d be willing to take on the money. No one was, and Alexander’s stance had been that he’d rather be cut, and get to pick his next home, than agree to a reworked deal to facilitate a trade. The Packers tried again over the weekend of the draft, but to no avail.
They did try to keep him, too. Alexander’s contract locked him in with Green Bay through 2026, and the Packers offered to lop off the last year of the contract and allow him to become a free agent next March if he accepted a reduced, incentive-laden deal. Alexander didn’t like the structure of Green Bay’s proposal, which led to this situation dragging into June.
Now, he’s a free agent, with most teams’ cash-and-cap budgets spent. If someone else was willing to give him what he was slated to make on his Packers contract, Green Bay likely would’ve found that team and made a trade. It’s fair, then, to guess that Alexander’s next move will be to go somewhere on an incentive-heavy, one-year deal to reestablish his value ahead of next March.
Again, he can still play. No one’s really doubting that. What he has to prove is that he can stay healthy enough to stay in the lineup. And, yes, it sucks to see it happen to such a good player. But such is life for veterans with this sort of medical history in today’s NFL.
Lamar vs. Rodgers
The Lamar Jackson–Aaron Rodgers dichotomy from 2024 should at least color how we look at offseason workouts. It’s also something that some Jets people, and Rodgers himself, were frustrated by a year ago, when Rodgers missed the team’s mandatory minicamp, traveled to Egypt and generated a storyline that bled into the fall.
The background for those who don’t remember: Rodgers was in attendance for the great majority of the first eight weeks of the team’s offseason program, then skipped out on the minicamp to go overseas. Robert Saleh contemplated moving the dates of the minicamp to accommodate Rodgers. The decision to keep it where it was centered on it being at the end of the team’s offseason program, and that if the minicamp was a week earlier, and Rodgers wasn’t coming the next week, most of his veteran teammates would start summer early, too.
Really, that’s all simple math. Would it be better to have just the quarterback missing that last week (if you made that the mandatory minicamp week), or dozens of guys out early (if it was a voluntary week after the minicamp)? Saleh chose the first option, for obvious and logical reasons, then told Rodgers he’d have to mark it as unexcused to avoid the appearance of special treatment, which Rodgers agreed with.
But that, of course, wasn’t how the story was digested. I looked back at a CNN story from last June, and that Rodgers was there for the previous eight weeks of the offseason program was buried 13 paragraphs in—a footnote to the presumption that Rodgers was putting himself above the team.
And what some of the Jets folks would point out after that was how Lamar Jackson missed eight weeks of the Ravens’ offseason program, then showed up for the veteran minicamp, and there was far less coverage of it. They were right, too, to ask why these two situations were perceived in such different ways, and how it was possible that Jackson would’ve accomplished more in showing up for one week than Rodgers did in eight.
This, of course, is no affront to Jackson, who has figured out how to have himself ready for an NFL season. His two MVPs are certainly a testament to that.
More so, it’s a simple question on why these things are covered this way. Again, as someone who does think the offseason work is valuable, I think these are fair questions.
For what it’s worth, both Jackson and Rodgers are taking the same approach this year, getting to their teams in time for the veteran minicamp. We’ll see, soon enough, how it turns out for the two of them in 2025.
Cleveland Browns
Browns GM Andrew Berry gave us a little insight into where his team is this week. It came on the CBS Sports First Pick podcast, which features ex-Titans GM Ran Carthon, and had Berry and Jaguars GM James Gladstone on to discuss their blockbuster draft-night trade that changed Travis Hunter’s destination, and perhaps the trajectory of two franchises.
For the Jaguars, of course, it indicated that the new regime doesn’t think the roster Gladstone and new coach Liam Coen inherited is that far off.
For the Browns? It’s a little more complicated.
“We knew we were due for a little bit of a strategic pivot,” Berry said on the podcast. “That can be in a variety of ways when you’re sitting with the No. 2 pick. Probably the most direct path is you take a young quarterback, hit on him and it’s the most important position in sports. One of the alternative paths is you take a nonquarterback. In this position, potentially the best player in the draft with Travis and someone that the league hasn’t really seen before in terms of a two-way player.
“And then the third avenue … you’re able to take a very good player but significantly increase the amount of resources that you have to build the team over a multiyear time horizon.”
Left unsaid: Cleveland’s core is aging. Myles Garrett will turn 30 in December. David Njoku will be 29 next month. Denzel Ward turned 28 in April. Joel Bitonio is 33, and Jack Conklin and Wyatt Teller are 30. Nick Chubb, who will be 30 in December, is now gone.
The cold reality is that the Browns were at risk of getting old all at once, and without a safety net of young talent behind that core—which is a byproduct of the Deshaun Watson trade draining picks and limiting draft flexibility for the team in 2022, ’23 and ’24. Bottom line: There aren’t a lot of guys in their mid-20s on the roster who you’d expect to be on the team a couple of years from now, a problem that would only grow as the stars got older.
So, now, with the Hunter trade, they get, as Berry said, the resources to turn the tide on an aging roster, with four top-70 picks (Michigan DT Mason Graham, UCLA LB Carson Schwesinger, Ohio State RB Quinshon Judkins and Bowling Green TE Harold Fannin Jr.) coming in, plus two first-rounders on the horizon in 2026. These things don’t come with any guarantees, but they’re at least a start on work that needs to be done in Cleveland.
And it takes Berry being honest with himself and his people to do something like this.
Rashod Bateman
Rashod Bateman’s contract is a good example of a team not giving up on a draft pick when the waters got choppy. Bateman’s case coming out of college was interesting. He contracted COVID-19 and became one of the first opt-outs in college football in the summer of 2020 when he was widely seen as a first-round lock. He reversed that decision when the Big Ten pressed on with that season, then opted out again in November after a so-so five games, fearful that he’d catch the coronavirus a second time.
All that played into him slipping into the Ravens’ laps at pick No. 27 the following April.
The bumps in the road didn’t stop there for Bateman. His rookie year began with a groin surgery. His second year ended with surgery on his foot. Finally healthy, he made some progress in 2023, carving out a role as Jackson won the MVP and the Ravens went an AFC-best 13–4, earning a Band-Aid extension in lieu of the team picking up his fifth-year option in early 2024. Then, last year, he posted 45 catches (one shy of a career high), with career-best totals in yards (756) and touchdowns (nine). And even with two years left on his deal, the Ravens rewarded him for it.
His three-year, $36.75 million extension won’t break any records, and didn’t turn a lot of heads last week. But it is a testament to the job the Ravens do developing players, and knowing which guys to keep and which to cut bait on. Since taking Bateman in 2021, they’ve brought in high-profile vets such as Odell Beckham Jr. and, this offseason, DeAndre Hopkins. They even drafted another receiver in the first round, in Zay Flowers.
But they kept chipping away at it with Bateman, and found a pretty productive, reliable pro in there. And it’s another reason why that franchise is what it is.
C.J. Stroud
C.J. Stroud is about to get one thing he’s wanted—a level of control. And the interesting thing is, not having it may have helped him as a rookie, but held him back last year.
What we’re talking about here boils down to offensive philosophy.
In Bobby Slowik’s Shanahan-styled offense, the offense Stroud ran the past two years, the quarterback generally goes to the line with two calls, with the ability to “can” the primary call and go to a secondary call, based on indicators in the defense. Generally, coaches from that family put the protection calls on the center, rather than the quarterback, to allow for the quarterback to go out and play.
Slowik’s replacement as offensive coordinator in Houston, Nick Caley, comes from a Josh McDaniels–centric background with a vastly different approach in that area—routinely calling for the quarterback to call protections, handle Mike points and change plays or make adjustments based on what the defense is showing him. Caley also brings the benefit of spending the past two years with Sean McVay, who was retrofitting a Rams offense with roots like Slowik’s.
Which is where Stroud comes in. The Slowik offense got him up and running quickly as a rookie. But last year, there were whispers that he wanted more of a voice on-field, and wanted the offense to evolve, and going to Caley would certainly represent a chance to do all that.
The idea’s not without merit, either. At Ohio State, the offense was probably structured a little more like Slowik’s than Caley’s, but the coaches did things to highlight Stroud’s football IQ. He had the power to change protections. He had autonomy from Ryan Day to get the Buckeyes into better calls. And his ability to absorb more information than most college quarterbacks allowed for the coaches to morph the scheme week-to-week.
“We could put a play in Wednesday, and it’d work on Saturday,” said one of his coaches. “His football knowledge and recall was unbelievable.”
It’s clear, too, that more than just being what Stroud was good at, it was also what he loved. In spring and during fall camp, there were times when OSU would go live on a play from the 10, with third-stringers in, to determine whether the offense or defense won the day. Without fail, Stroud would jump in and ask to be the offensive play-caller.
So putting the pieces together, Stroud and Caley should be a match. And if the line winds up fixed, the Texans offense could bounce back in a very big way.
Terron Armstead
Terron Armstead made the right decision to retire. The five-time Pro Bowl tackle, who made three with the Saints and two with the Dolphins, detailed his thinking to the Nightcap show. And let’s just say it’s easy to see why he walked away.
“I’ve been dealing with a knee since my third year in the league,” Armstead said. “I didn’t see a practice field at all, and not because I didn’t want to or the Dolphins just wanted me to rest. It’s like I literally couldn’t walk. After a game on Sunday, I wouldn’t be able to walk on my own, under my own power, until Wednesday, Thursday.
“So I was only able to play under the pain meds. I couldn’t put any pressure on my knee, so it was like, I can’t keep doing that to myself.”
Sometimes, those of us on the outside can lose track of just what the game takes out of these guys. It’s a lot. And there comes a point for a lot of guys where enough is enough.
The questions they ask themselves are the same most people would.
Am I going to be able to pick up my kids as they get older? Can I play pickup basketball with them in the driveway? Will I be able to golf in my 40s or 50s?
These sorts of simple lifestyle questions come into focus as players who are good enough to last as long as Armstead did age. And I’d imagine throwing the dangers of painkillers into that mix probably made the decision a little more straightforward for Armstead than it might’ve seemed to the general public.
Quick-hitters
It’s minicamp week! And the quick-hitters are here to get you primed …
• As we detailed last week, the James Cook situation is pretty complicated—and whether he shows up for the Bills’ minicamp will be interesting. Regardless of whether he does or doesn’t, I’d hope Cook goes back to the table and something gets worked out. Money at that position is too fickle, and, as such, I think going into the season without a deal would be really risky for the 25-year-old.
• The Terry McLaurin negotiation is different. No, it’s not in a good place now. But I just think, in the end, he’s too important to what Dan Quinn and Adam Peters are building in Washington, and he’s waited too long to win big in Washington for this not to get resolved. So even if he skips minicamp to make his point, I have a hard time not seeing a new deal getting done.
• I’m with Derrick Henry—big Adam Sandler fan. And that’s a pretty good deal, too, that Dan Patrick helped broker, where if Henry goes for 2,000 this year, he’ll be in a Sandler movie.
• The Steelers officially being out of the Kirk Cousins business (like I said in my Rodgers piece, they had reached out to the Falcons previously) leaves Atlanta without an obvious suitor and Cousins without a place to start. So now this comes down to a potential injury elsewhere. And whether the QB would waive his no-trade clause later in the summer or in the fall to leave Atlanta, with his family still rooted in the area.
• J.K. Dobbins had a pretty decent offer on the table to return to the Chargers and passed on it, at which point Los Angeles pivoted to Najee Harris. You’ve got to wonder if there are some regrets there, with the productive, if beat-up, Dobbins still looking for a job.
• It was interesting hearing Saquon Barkley say, implicitly at least, that he’d like to go out on his own terms—raising the notion of Barry Sanders’s retirement as an example of what he might do. I’m not wishing him out of the NFL (I love watching him play), but, as we said with Ragnow, it’s great to see guys having the flexibility to make those sorts of decisions.
• Here’s hoping for a speedy recovery for Oregon WR Evan Stewart, who tore his patellar tendon last week. Stewart’s big-play ability had him on the NFL radar for the 2026 draft. And that’s a tough injury, tougher than an ACL, to come back from.
• The Jags posted a video of an absolutely spectacular pick Hunter made at OTAs last week, an indication that his defensive work’s coming along, after Jacksonville initially focused him on offense. How he’s deployed at minicamp this week will be interesting to track.
• Justin Jefferson’s level of engagement in the Vikings’ offseason program over the past couple of months is notable. And you can see, too, his investment in getting J.J. McCarthy going in the little things he’s doing (like going to a Minnesota Timberwolves game together last month) to build up a rapport with his new quarterback.
• Conor and I covered this on the podcast, and I agree with him—after what the schedule-makers did to them last year, the Jets have to feel like Aaron Rodgers coming to MetLife in Week 1 is some sort of bad joke. With the joke, of course, being on them.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Takeaways: Cam Ward Is Learning to Talk Football, Not Just Play It.