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- Sam Darnold
- Minnesota Vikings
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SAN FRANCISCO — We’re on the ground and ready to roll from the Bay Area. Your takeaways, with six days, and just one game, left in the 2025 season …
Sam Darnold
There’s a lot you can take from Sam Darnold landing in this spot. And, it starts with the Seahawks moving quickly in a challenging situation last February and March.
There was some luck involved, too, to be sure.
The end result, of course, looks nice and neat and impressive. Darnold, making a little more than half of what Dak Prescott got in Dallas, finished the season fifth in the NFL in passing yards (4,048), tied for ninth (with Josh Allen, Jalen Hurts and Bo Nix) in touchdown passes (25) and 11th in passer rating (99.1). His team is in the Super Bowl, and he played his best game in the NFC title game, which was the second time this year he lit up the Rams.
Yes, the Seahawks are smart for having signed him. No, it wasn’t always part of the plan.
But, again, you can give them a ton of credit for pivoting when they did.
Moving on Darnold started with Seattle’s knowledge that Geno Smith was going to require a contract extension going into 2025. And while the Seahawks did make him an offer for around what Darnold got (three years, $100.5 million, $55 million guaranteed), it was more than $10 million per year less than where Smith wanted to be. So GM John Schneider and coach Mike Macdonald started to consider their options.
Having Smith’s old coach, Pete Carroll, on the hook for a trade for Smith, the idea of pursuing Darnold came into focus. The only catch was that it would require a leap of faith—the Raiders wanted to agree to a deal before free agency began. Schneider liked Darnold as a replacement, but also knew Minnesota was trying to keep him and that the Steelers would be involved, too. Still, Seattle had a combination of two things the others couldn’t match.
One was geography. The Dana Point, Calif., native and former USC quarterback liked the idea of going back to the West Coast. Second, was the chance to become the team’s long-term answer, which Pittsburgh, in theory, could put on the table, but Minnesota, with its investment in J.J. McCarthy, had a harder time doing.
My understanding at the time was there wasn’t a massive gulf in the offers. More so, for Darnold, this was about opportunity. With Smith gone, and a roster stocked with rising young talent, Darnold would have the chance to play really well, and establish himself as the team’s quarterback going forward, which is exactly what he did.
Of course, no one could’ve guessed it would go this well. However, the Seahawks liked that they were getting younger at the position and getting some untapped upside with Darnold at the price they wanted Smith to take.
And that, to me, is the first lesson you can take from Seattle’s shapeshifting move.
Another would be to consider a quarterback’s circumstances. Darnold came into the league raw, then his coach was fired after his rookie year, then another was gone two years later. That led to a trade to a rebuilding team that had fired its offensive coordinator, and a team that would fire its coach in midseason the following year, after trading for another reclamation project (Baker Mayfield) to replace him at the position.
That’s where the league gave up on him. But Darnold didn’t give up on himself. He spent a year working with Kyle Shanahan in San Francisco, then came the breakout year in Minnesota in 2024, and finally this run to the Super Bowl. What changed? The biggest thing was the circumstances around Darnold. He finally developed in a stable environment in San Francisco and then reaped the benefits of that in other stable situations.
And a third lesson, to me, is to beware of falling in love with the next great thing. Young quarterbacks are almost like new cars in the NFL. Once a team drives them off the lot, they lose value. The talent that made Darnold the third pick never went away. Going into camp in Minnesota in 2024, though, you wouldn’t have known he was the most talented quarterback on the roster. That’s because McCarthy had just been drafted, even if it was seven slots lower (No. 10) than Darnold was picked in 2018.
The difference? It was that everyone thought they knew what Darnold was at that point, whereas McCarthy brought the allure of the unknown (and that’s not saying he can’t play, because I haven’t given up on him yet). No one considered that Darnold might actually be better for having gone through all that he did to get the opportunity to start again.
Which, it turns out, he was.
Anyway, I think Darnold’s story is a pretty cool one.
Hopefully, everyone can take a little something from it.
Minnesota Vikings
The Vikings’ decision to move on from GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah was surprising, but only so much in its timing. For two years now, there have been rumblings of discontent within the Minnesota hierarchy with Adofo-Mensah. So the fact that this could eventually happen didn’t surprise me. When it happened, it absolutely, positively did.
It’s important to start first with the football reasons for the move, and there are a few:
• The deterioration of the quarterback situation—and an overreliance on Kevin O’Connell to make wine out of water at the position—came to a head in 2025. As we detailed above, the Vikings’ investment of a high first-round pick in McCarthy had a material impact on the team’s approach to retaining Darnold. And Daniel Jones, for that matter.
In both cases, despite competitive financial offers from the Vikings and the presence of McCarthy, both Darnold and Jones knew they’d have to win the job in 2025. They stood a far less viable chance of keeping it in 2026 than they would in Seattle or Indianapolis, respectively. As such, for each guy, the opportunity to emerge as a franchise’s entrenched starting quarterback drew them away from a potential stopgap situation in Minnesota.
Nearly 11 months later, Darnold is in the Super Bowl, and Jones legitimately changed the Colts (and is wanted/expected back in Indy, despite being in rehab for a torn Achilles). Meanwhile, Minnesota is preparing to find competition for McCarthy, who struggled in his second year after missing his rookie season with a torn meniscus.
• McCarthy hasn’t been the only question mark to come out of the Vikings’ most recent draft classes. He’s one of eight top-100 picks made the past four years. Lewis Cine, Andrew Booth, Ed Ingram and Brian Asamoah were the first four of those, who were all drafted in 2022. None of them made it on to the ’25 Week 1 roster. Jordan Addison, a ’23 first-rounder, was the one hit in that group, with the jury still out on McCarthy, Dallas Turner and Donovan Jackson.
Meanwhile, of the 18 Day 3 picks the team has had since 2022, there’s been only one real splash—Jalen “Speedy” Nailor. And those suspect drafts are starting to catch up to the Vikings.
• The free agent hauls have been more successful, with guys such as Andrew Van Ginkel, Jonathan Greenard, Blake Cashman, Byron Murphy Jr. and Aaron Jones among those who’ve worked out. The trade for T.J. Hockenson has been mostly a win, too.
But even there, Minnesota has taken a lot of risks with guys carrying injury histories. Some of it manifested with last year’s splurge on older linemen Jonathan Allen, Javon Hargrave and Ryan Kelly, and the addition of Will Fries and Jeff Okudah, who were younger, yes, but also brought medical questions, too.
Then, there’s the one caveat to all of this, which is that the Vikings tried with all their might to trade up for Drake Maye in 2024. O’Connell loved him. Maye was coached in high school by Vikings assistant Josh McCown and was a teammate of McCown’s son. Minnesota offered both of its first-round picks in 2024 (Nos. 11 and 23) and its 2025 first-rounder to the Patriots, with later-round pick swaps favoring Minnesota to move up to the third pick. O’Connell pushed them to go further. It wouldn’t matter, because the Patriots weren’t moving, sitting there as convicted in Maye as Minnesota was in the former North Carolina quarterback.
But if the Vikings had somehow gotten the Patriots off their spot with Maye, all of this might look different, and the aforementioned rumblings probably would have stopped.
Instead, they got louder. Whispers and rumors about the hours Adofo-Mensah kept intensified. Rival personnel guys questioned how a GM could take paternity leave during training camp (one of a few such stories). Maybe it’s a sign that the NFL’s sleep-on-the-office-couch mentality still exists. But the reality is that kind of grind is how most coaches and scouts make it. And, perhaps, it was another illustration of how Adofo-Mensah, a less traditional hire from the analytics side, was an outlier.
Fair or not, that’s why many saw O’Connell getting extended last January without an accompanying Adofo-Mensah extension as a sign the GM might not make it past the draft, and why the same people were surprised to see the GM (finally) get his new deal in May.
It’s gotten to the point where in discussions with folks ahead of the 2026 hiring cycle, I’d tell people that talking about the Vikings’ situation was starting to feel like the case of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Well, the wolf just showed up—and at the most peculiar time. Even if it wasn’t because of what was rumored (and I don’t think it really was about that).
It happened, as the team said, as the Wilf family concluded its assessment of its football operation coming out of 2025, and as Adofo-Mensah was wrapping up his week at the Senior Bowl in Mobile, Ala. This was the fourth full week of the Vikings’ offseason, meaning their personnel guys were already almost a month into the planning stages for 2026, on top of fall draft and free-agent meetings.
It’s also why it doesn’t make sense to launch a GM search now, and the Vikings won’t—they’ll carry out their offseason plan as is and hire one in May.
However, unless it’s an internal hire like Ryan Grigson, the new GM won’t have a hand in big decisions involving the quarterback room, how to address Addison’s contract situation, or how to go about taking advantage of having a quarterback on a rookie contract in free agency. What he’ll get will be a roster he won’t be able to change or shape much until 2027.
Which is why, again, the slow trigger the Wilfs had on this is the most surprising part of all.
And if they were waiting to complete their organizational review, well, maybe they should’ve gotten on that a little earlier than they did.
Las Vegas Raiders
The Raiders won in landing Klint Kubiak. There are a couple of things I know about the Seahawks’ 38-year-old offensive coordinator and Vegas head coach-to-be.
One is that he’s an incredibly sharp and self-aware offensive mind. His first shot at being an offensive coordinator ended with Mike Zimmer’s firing in Minnesota in 2021. His second came to a close with Dennis Allen being let go by the Saints in ’24. It would have been easy for him to chalk that up to wrong place, wrong time. Instead, he dove right into what he’d done wrong, particularly after a hot start for his offense in New Orleans in ’24 petered out.
You’ve seen the result of his self-examination this year in Seattle in his ability to keep adjusting on the fly, through lessons he got on how things were during an NFL season.
Two is that he is the ultimate team player. Maybe he won’t say it, but I know he was very reluctant to go on the interview circuit amid the Seahawks’ title run, not wanting anything to interfere with their pursuit of a championship. A lot of guys say that when they’re in this sort of position. I really believe Kubiak lived it, to the point where, even with the two second interviews on Saturday with Las Vegas and Arizona, I still thought there was an outside chance he might pull his name out of the running for both.
O.K., so why would this be the one for him? First, I believe it’s the clear path to a quarterback. In Arizona, you have guaranteed money left in 2026 and ’27 owed to Kyler Murray, and the third pick in what’s seen by many as a one-quarterback draft. In Vegas, you have a clean slate at the position and the first pick to get that quarterback (Indiana’s Fernando Mendoza). Second, there’s a familiarity there. GM John Spytek worked with Kubiak’s dad in Denver, and you have Tom Brady as a resource.
It should, by the way, come as no surprise that Vegas likes Kubiak. Spytek won a Super Bowl with his dad, and his dad had more success as a coordinator under Mike Shanahan against Tom Brady’s Patriots than any in football during the early years of Bill Belichick’s Patriots dynasty.
And in the end, after a rugged couple of years, the Raiders got a win that they’d badly needed to land Kubiak. Now, after a Super Bowl that still has all of Kubiak’s focus, we’ll get to see what he and presumably Mendoza can do.
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Buffalo Bills
The Bills’ decision to hire Joe Brady was about Josh Allen—but what won him the job was everything else. It’s impossible to separate Buffalo’s job search from Allen. The Bills were the ones that made the decision to put him in the room for the interviews, along with the Pegulas and top personnel execs Brandon Beane, Brian Gaine and Terrance Gray. And Buffalo had him out to speak for himself after the press conference introducing Brady.
Continuity for Allen does make sense. He’s an MVP finalist for the second consecutive year, and won it last year, his first with Brady as coordinator. The Bills have been top five in scoring in each of those two years, and scored 30 points, despite five turnovers, in their playoff ouster.
Brady, to be clear, did give a full-throated plan for continuing to evolve the offense.
But where he won the job, again, was on his overall vision for the team. It was in his plan to find a defensive coordinator who’d build a defense predicated on giving offenses different looks out of different fronts (3–4, 4–3, etc.) and coverages (he feels like he’s got one in Rex Ryan–bred Broncos assistant Jim Leonhard). It was about having the team embrace the expectations that wound up costing Sean McDermott the job—after a year in which everyone seemed to feel the pressure of them. It was about the CEO parts of the job, too.
When the GM Beane looked at Brady, he saw some of the same things that the Falcons did five years ago, when they were ready to turn to the then Panthers OC, had Arthur Smith chosen to go elsewhere. The upshot is since Brady wowed the Falcons in that interview with a lot of these sorts of ideas and this sort of vision, he’s been fired as a coordinator, had to work his way back up as a position coach and has all the lessons you’d get from that.
Here, then, is the reality: If this was another team making this hire, it’d be a pretty popular one, just as it would’ve been one for Atlanta in 2021. The Raiders liked him a lot, and most probably would’ve applauded Vegas getting him. The Ravens were looking at him to be their OC, too, had he not landed a head coaching job in this cycle. But because it’s an internal hire after how the past few years ended in Buffalo, it’s seen a little differently.
And that’s O.K. with Brady, who told Beane and Pegula that the high bar that’s set is one of the reasons why he wanted that job, specifically.
He plans to clear that bar, of course, and he gave the Bills good reason to think he will, too.
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Cleveland Browns
The Browns rolled the dice with Todd Monken. This was, to be sure, an outside-the-box hire for Cleveland, particularly after its fired coach, Kevin Stefanski, was one of the few belles of this year’s coaching carousel ball. Monken is neither young nor particularly magnetic from a personality standpoint.
But there’s a reason, obviously, why Cleveland chose to go this route with a guy who worked for them in 2019 and came from a division rival that was about to let him go to become John Harbaugh’s offensive coordinator with the Giants.
We detailed the Browns’ process both in last Monday’s column, and our Thursday Senior Bowl notes—drilling down on the pre-interview testing—to bring some logic as to why Cleveland was choosing to go a less-traditional route with its search. As part of that, the team’s brass has studied what’s worked and what hasn’t, and they found that references and performance track record were much more predictive of success than a good interview.
Those two elements, as you’d imagine, were the keys to the selection of Monken.
His résumé showed a really good track record for working with young players, which is important because the Browns hope last year’s draft class (Mason Graham, Carson Schwesinger, Quinshon Judkins, Dylan Sampson, Shedeur Sanders) and this year’s (the team has two first-round picks) will be the foundation for a renaissance. Also, on the offensive side, he’s shown diversity in scheme and style of quarterback deployed, which should give the front office flexibility in its QB planning, whether Sanders is the future or not.
He also had the Brad Stevens thing, having been a true difference-maker leading a college program with limited resources. Monken was the head coach at Southern Miss from 2013 to ’15. His first year, the Golden Eagles went 1–11. His second year, they were 3–9, and 1–7 in Conference USA for the second consecutive year. His third year, he went 9–5, and 7–1 in C-USA to earn a spot in the conference title game. He then left to become the Buccaneers’ OC.
Southern Miss, by the way, was 0–12 the year before he arrived.
Then, there were the references, which came back consistent—demanding, detail-oriented and authentic. It came from players the Browns reached out to like Jameis Winston, who was Monken’s quarterback in Tampa. It came from Georgia’s Kirby Smart, whom Monken had worked for. It came from Ozzie Newsome, who’d gotten to see how Monken worked from their chairs in the front office.
Six years ago, the same source of process, one less reliant on the interview, helped the Browns land Stefanski, who came into that 2020 search as the favorite because so much of the work had already been done. If Monken can match some of Stefanski’s early success, and the Browns can give him a better roster, then they might really have something in a coach who turns 60 this week—something that a lot of people aren’t seeing right now.
And on that age thing, Cleveland does believe this could wind up being a hire like Bruce Arians once was in Arizona or Curt Cignetti was at Indiana, where that number next to the name kept people from truly seeing someone who was a good candidate all along.
Atlanta Falcons
The Falcons got the guy they’d had eyes for all along, hiring Ian Cunningham as GM on Friday. The cool part to me, though, is that he really had to fight for it—because Texans assistant GM James Liipfert, a Georgia native, made this a pretty competitive one at the end.
The background here, we’ve been over before. Cunningham was the top lieutenant in Chicago to Bears GM Ryan Poles, who is close friends with new Falcons president of football Matt Ryan (Poles was one of the starting guards in front of Ryan at Boston College). Poles told Ryan, before Ryan even got the job, that he’d do well to land Cunningham as his GM. The connection was no secret, and one rumored as far back as late December.
And Falcons owner Arthur Blank easily could have just hired Cunningham. Because Ryan’s role, which Cunningham interviewed for, was considered the “primary football executive,” and the GM job was a “secondary football executive,” Atlanta could have hired Cunningham, without having to go through the normal Rooney Rule process.
But what I’d heard at that point wound up proving true—Blank wanted to have a real process, because he believed in the way the NFL had set it up. So, after hiring Stefanski, the Falcons had Zoom interviews with Cunningham, Liipfert, 49ers director of scouting and football operations Josh Williams, Steelers assistant GM Andy Weidl, ex-Jets GM/Eagles exec Joe Douglas and Chiefs assistant GM Mike Bradway.
Again, they could’ve stopped there. Instead, they kept going, having Cunningham and Liipfert, who blew them away in the first interview, in to meet with a group that would include Blank and Stefanski, who weren’t part of the Zoom interviews.
Liipfert again impressed. Cunningham won the job.
And that, to me, is pretty cool—that he held serve and got it at the end. The Falcons loved his background, having worked for Ozzie Newsome in Cleveland (where Newsome gave him, as a young college scout, the coveted Southeast region) and Howie Roseman, before becoming, more or less, a full partner with Poles for the Chicago rebuild. They also like how well-rounded he’d become, with experience both on the road and in the office, having seen all facets of the operation, going well beyond his scouting background.
Now, that doesn’t mean this is any sort of lock to work, of course. But it’d be tough for anyone to say the Falcons didn’t do all the legwork to get to the right result, even if it was the logical one all along.
NFL owners
The NFL will need to address the owners who appeared in the Epstein files. And it’ll actually have to happen Monday afternoon, with commissioner Roger Goodell set to stage his annual Super Bowl press conference in the Bay Area.
For those who missed the Friday news, emails surfaced from the records of the disgraced and deceased financier that showed the convicted sex offender connecting Giants co-owner Steve Tisch with a number of women. The names of Patriots owner Robert Kraft, Commanders owner Josh Harris and Vikings owner Zygi Wilf also appeared in the files, though in a far-less incriminating or detailed way than Tisch.
Tisch said in a statement: “We had a brief association where we exchanged emails about adult women, and in addition, we discussed movies, philanthropy and investments. I did not take him up on any of his invitations and never went to his island. As we all know now, he was a terrible person and someone I deeply regret associating with.”
Harris released a statement as well: “Josh Harris has never had an independent relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Harris sought to prevent Epstein’s attempts to develop a corporate relationship with Apollo. As these emails indicate, Harris sought to avoid meeting with Epstein, cancelling meetings and having others return his calls.”
Now, here’s the thing: If a player or coach was involved in this, one of the most horrifying scandals of the past couple of decades, the NFL would absolutely investigate it. The reason why is simple. Goodell’s “protect the shield” mantra mandates that everyone involved in the league will be held accountable for putting the league in any sort of negative light. Goodell hasn’t been consistent in upholding this with owners over the years.
Will he this time? How he answers the question Monday will be interesting.
Senior Bowl
I need to give the Senior Bowl people a shout out—and not only because it was another great week down there, my 18th in Mobile. And I have to do it with a nod to the game’s new executive director Drew Fabianich, who took the reins from Jim Nagy, who’s now Oklahoma’s GM.
Fabianich, a Cowboys scout for nearly two decades, came to the Senior Bowl after two years as GM at West Virginia, and none of that experience could prepare him for this.
The weekend leading into game week, a monster winter storm swept across the South and into Northeast, affecting the travel of millions of Americans—the 140 players invited to play in the Senior Bowl included. So on short notice, Fabianich and his staff had to rearrange the plans of more than half the people planning on coming to Alabama for the week. It started earlier in the week, with news that an ice storm would hit Dallas as part of the larger weather. Knowing Dallas like he does from his years there, Fabianich knew what was next.
He immediately connected with the game’s director of football operations, Jack Gilmore.
“I said, ‘Jack, are they for sure getting ice in Dallas?’” Fabianich recounted. “He said yes, on Friday. So I asked him when they were getting it Friday, and he said, ‘Midnight.’ So that’s when I called Scott Cooper and told him we had to change every damn flight out of there.”
That, of course, didn’t just affect guys training in Dallas for the draft. It also affected everyone flying through Dallas to get to Mobile. It wound up affecting everyone who flew through Charlotte, too. In totality, it wound up meaning 85 guys scheduled to come in that Saturday were coming in Friday, and a total of 127 flights were changed. It also meant lining up hotels and meals for all those guys on Friday night.
Some guys got creative. Georgia Tech OL Keylan Rutledge, Arkansas OL Fernando Carmona, Boise State OL Kage Casey and Baylor QB Sawyer Robertson were rebooked to take a 10 p.m. out of Dallas on Friday night, and didn’t want to risk it—so they hopped in a car and road-tripped on Friday afternoon. They made it to Baton Rouge on Friday night, then drove the remaining three hours Saturday morning.
In the end, only seven guys couldn’t quite get in on time, which was quite a feat.
So now Fabianich has something to remember his first Senior Bowl week by—but it won’t be the only thing.
Another move that every NFL person I talked to thought worked was the schedule change, which moved the interviews out of the evening hours and into the morning, which pushed practice to the afternoon. Fabianich said the idea initially, “Started with the players. Talking to the agents, the guys were going from 6:30 through interviews, which could be until 10:30, 11 at night. There was no downtime. It was such a grind.”
He wanted to give the players more of a chance to breathe during the week, and he figured condensing the schedule would do that. A nice byproduct of that was freeing up the scouts and coaches to socialize at night, which is part of where Fabianich would like to take this next—and give the event more of a coaches convention feel.
Then, there was the actual talent on hand. “If I were guessing, off the original 140, and not the guys we pulled in late, I’d assume every single one of them gets drafted.” And some of the guys that were called in late—like Texas A&M’s Dayon Hayes—gave themselves a chance to get picked. Which is, obviously, something at the top of a list of the game’s goals.
So all in all, it was a really good maiden voyage for Fabianich, even if he wasn’t yet ready to take a deep breath when we talked Sunday: “I’ll do that after they all get home.”
Baltimore Ravens
I’m excited to see what Declan Doyle will bring to the Ravens as their offensive coordinator. It wasn’t an easy call for the 29-year-old to leave the Bears—he had a year of good momentum coming from Chicago’s breakthrough 2025 season, a chance to learn more from Ben Johnson and a very real belief that the Bears’ run to the divisional round was no flash in the pan.
So why bolt?
I’m told it’s really no more complicated than getting the opportunity to call plays.
Doyle didn’t know new Ravens head coach Jesse Minter before interviewing for the job, and while he did get to coach against him in the AFC West in 2024, there wasn’t a relationship there that pushed him away from the Bears. And sure, Lamar Jackson is in Baltimore, but Doyle had a good thing going with Caleb Williams in Chicago.
That said, the chance to call plays with a head coach he respects and a quarterback who’s won two MVPs was tough to pass up for obvious reasons—the wunderkind will get the chance to run an offense for a defensive coach he respects and with an elite quarterback.
If it works, then he’ll probably be a head coach at 30 or 31 years old. If it doesn’t, he’ll have the experience of calling plays.
I’m excited to see how it works out. I’d also trust Minter knows what he’s doing here.
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Quick-hitters
Want some Super Bowl quick-hitters? Here they come …
• Mike LaFleur completed a wild head coach hiring cycle (though I feel stupid saying that because who knows what weird curveball could be next) on Sunday, landing the Cardinals’ job after Kubiak and the Raiders moved forward. We’ll have more on his hire over the next few days, but it will for sure set off a domino effect. It cleared the way for 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan to hire his good buddy Raheem Morris, who was a finalist for the Cardinals’ job. Had Morris landed the Arizona job, Gus Bradley likely would’ve landed the 49ers’ DC job. The Titans are after Bradley as well, but now the Cardinals, with LaFleur in charge, become the more likely landing spot (since Bradley would call plays in Arizona), potentially pushing Tennessee to hire Atlanta’s Mike Rutenberg as its new DC.
• Hiring Sean Mannion as OC is a gamble, but a good one for the Eagles. He’s only been coaching for two years, but he was a quarterback in the league for nine seasons, which is obviously really good training for the role. My question will be how this affects the players, who are going to be on their fifth coordinator in five years, and what Mannion does to meet them halfway when it comes to verbiage and players’ roles.
• My feeling is that Joe Brady’s going to have to have someone in the bullpen ready to replace DC Jim Leonhard—if the Bills win big, the 43-year-old former Ravens and Jets safety is going to get on the head coaching radar quickly.
• I’m glad to see Patrick Graham land the Steelers’ DC job. By all accounts, last year was a tough one for Graham—his scheme didn’t really match up with Pete Carroll’s in Las Vegas (similar to how Chip Kelly’s offense didn’t line up with Carroll’s philosophy), and that made for a tough year for the veteran coordinator. Going to a team with 3-4 personnel in Pittsburgh, and working for Mike McCarthy, whom he worked for in Green Bay, Graham should be a much better fit.
• The Pro Bowl looks like it’s on life support, with the NFL trying to pump life into it this week by putting it in the NFL Experience, and I think this is a result of the league trying too hard to turn everything into a revenue stream. When it was in Hawai‘i, it was a convention for the game’s stars and a reward for their families. The stories of Peyton Manning holding court at the pool bar were legendary. The guys could go there, relax together and be left (mostly) alone. Now? No such incentive for the players to participate exists. Which is why so many of them simply choose not to go.
• One winner from Senior Bowl week: Arkansas QB Taylen Green. Naturally, he’s a transfer, having started two years at Boise State before moving to the SEC the past two years. He’ll be an interesting one to dig into, since his final year wasn’t great—marred by a coach firing that complicates the evaluation for teams a bit.
• I have a hard time criticizing Hall of Fame voters, because I know how difficult their jobs are. That said, I think if you have five guys on a list, and you’re told to vote for three, those three votes have to go to the most emphatic yeses, and shouldn’t be gamed because it might be someone’s last shot. That’s my opinion, and going on that alone there’s no world where Bill Belichick is competing with Robert Kraft, Roger Craig, L.C. Greenwood and Ken Anderson and he isn’t one of the three most deserving names. To me, it’s that simple.
• I’d be pretty surprised if Matthew Stafford isn’t back playing for the Rams next year. I was way less sure about it at this point last year (because of the contract situation).
• The salary cap is expected to rise above $300 million for the 2026 season—and I think some folks missed the real headline on that. The cap is simply a percentage of the league’s expected revenues, via a formula that’s a little more complicated than that. So above anything else, it’s a really good sign of the growth of the league and how much money each owner is making, before they even lift a finger to generate business of their own.
• And FYI—sorry for the lack of it today, but we’ve got a ton of Patriots content coming this week, too.
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