Don’t quote me, but August could say a lot about NFL
Somewhere around the time summer’s heat transitions from a pleasant sharpening of spring to an oppressive force we look forward to abating in fall, the National Football League provides a promise of that change to come with the start of training camp.
In that midsummer moment, all things seem possible. Depth charts are mostly untouched by injuries. It is plausible to game out a team schedule and squint hard enough to see where 10, 11, 12 wins come from. Precisely how fortune and health will favor those 32 teams hoping for a Super Bowl LI victory is anybody’s guess.
But there are some early questions that will get answered in NFL camps, which begin this week. They are things we’ll know in August to help inform our September, October and beyond. Here are some quotes from the offseason of which we’re most interested in testing the veracity of between now and Week 1.
“You should expect to see me back on the field at the start of training camp in July and definitely on opening day against the Cowboys.” — New York Giants wide receiver Victor Cruz in July’s
Business Insider.
The perfect combination of reliable pass receiver (averaging 80 receptions per season from 2011 to 2013) and deep threat (few will ever forget his 99-yard reception against the Jets in 2011), Cruz hasn’t played a down since a tendon injury ended his 2014 season six games in.
The Giants, who have playoff aspirations in an up-in-the-air NFC East, really need him. A look at their depth chart has the two starting wideouts right now as Odell Beckham Jr., who is a legit No. 1, and Sterling Shepard, a promising rookie, but a rookie nevertheless. There’s Dwayne Harris, Myles White ... but a return to form from Cruz makes this an entirely different Giants offense.
The franchise has replaced its longtime head coach, Tom Cough- lin, with one of his assistants, Ben McAdoo, so more continuity from the Coughlin era would be welcomed, especially by fans who seemed as unhappy to see Coughlin go as virtually any fan base ever has been about a coach with consecutive losing seasons.
By the time August is over, we’ll likely know whether Cruz will be salsa dancing on the sidelines and in the end zone again this season.
“If you’re a coach, after every game, you self-scout after every season. What we did well, what we did poorly as a team. And I was in the process of that. I don’t think it was a self-scout, because I got fired. So I looked at it as more of an autopsy. I’m in the middle of the autopsy right now; we’ll send some toxicology reports out, when they come back I’ll give you a full report of what went on.” — San Francisco 49ers head coach Chip Kelly at his introductory news conference Jan. 20.
There might not be a more fascinating marriage of futures than that of the San Francisco 49ers and Kelly, formerly the coach, director of player personnel and then scapegoat of the Philadelphia Eagles. It is easy to diagnose that things have gone seriously wrong in both Kelly’s former city and the place he now calls home. The 49ers have gone from 12 wins to eight wins to five wins. The Eagles struggled to 7-9, including 6-9 under Kelly, after a pair of 10-6 seasons.
But leave aside that Kelly simply didn’t get the opportunity to see through his vision for teambuilding — like him or not, nobody believes 11 months is ample time to reconstruct an NFL roster
— and consider that Kelly apparently will be less involved in personnel moves and, in theory, can focus more on the coaching he mostly did well with the Eagles. And he is — in a way that infuriates his critics but should excite those curious about what comes next — experimenting, pushing the boundaries of offensive speed and protocol.
News reports had Kelly interested in one of his new quarterbacks, Colin Kaepernick, before he ever arrived in San Francisco. Kaepernick, too, is a once-successful stalwart who led a team to the Super Bowl. He averaged 8.6 adjusted yards per passing attempt in 2012. In 2015? Merely 6.2.
It is easy to see how Kelly and the 49ers fit together, and Kaepernick, a mobile quarterback who could thrive in a a fast-paced offense, revitalized.
“We thought Geno matured last year. It’s something you couldn’t see because he didn’t play as much, but you saw it in practice and you saw it in his demeanor in off-thefield stuff. Geno is still our quarterback, he’s still on our team. ... You learn from your mistakes. He went on and learned a valuable lesson. He was mature, and he applied himself, and he moved on from it, which was big. It was big to see that from him. That could destroy your team after going through something like that, but he’s a team player. ... I respect him for that.” — New York Jets coach Todd
Bowles on Geno Smith to ESPN.com on March 22.
It doesn’t look like Ryan Fitzpatrick is coming through that door, does it?
A year after Fitzpatrick led the Jets to an unlikely 10-6 record on the strength of 31 touchdown passes, the Jets and Fitzpatrick have deadlocked somewhere just shy of a contract to bring him back.
And that likely means we’re about to see Smith, and lots of him.
When we last saw Smith, he’d made a cameo in 2015, but everyone remembers the two years of struggle as a starter, the sucker punch by IK Enemkpali that shattered Smith’s jaw and, seemingly, the Jets’ belief in a Smith future.
Fitzpatrick wants a big contract and just completed his age-33 season. But for the Jets to build on last year’s surprising six-win improvement under Bowles, it will require at least a reasonable performance out of the quarterback. The receiving options, in Eric Decker and Brandon Marshall, supported by a Matt Forteled running game, are there. Whether Smith can find them or not is something we’ll get to watch, it appears, throughout August.
It’s almost August. The time to debate what will play out across NFL fields is almost over, and the watching begins.