Great organizations pay what their players are worth. Super Bowl MVPs go to the Chiefs. Second chances matter. Ten things I am watching this week.
Jaxon Smith-Njigba is 24 years old and he just became the highest-paid wide receiver in the history of professional football. Four years. $168.8 million. $42.15 million a year. The number surpasses Ja'Marr Chase's record by almost two million dollars per year. And Seattle made it happen without drama, without a holdout, without a single day of negotiating theater. They saw what they had. They paid for it. They moved on.
You want a winner. That is what Kubiak said. Nine days to the CFL Combine. Six days to Lane Kiffin's first LSU practice. Rodgers by end of month. Ten things.
Fernando Mendoza won the Heisman Trophy. He threw 41 touchdown passes and 6 interceptions. He led the Indiana Hoosiers to an undefeated regular season and a national championship. He is 22 years old and he has already done something that the state of Indiana will talk about for the rest of its life.
That is a man who knows where he is and who he is coaching for. Meanwhile in Athens, Gunner Stockton walked to the huddle and nobody had to say whose huddle it was.
Lane Kiffin rode in the Baton Rouge St. Patrick's Day parade today. I want you to understand that sentence completely. Lane Kiffin — the head football coach of the LSU Tigers, one of the most scrutinized jobs in college football, in his first spring in Baton Rouge with 51 new players on his roster and a quarterback recovering from a Lisfranc injury — got on a float in a parade and rode through a city that has been waiting for him to arrive for four months.
The kid from Jennings, Louisiana signed with New Orleans on Friday. Georgia opens spring practice tomorrow. Pittsburgh's quarterback question is coming. Ten things to watch this week.
Travis Etienne is home. I want to say that again, because I think some people read that transaction line on Friday afternoon and moved on to the next item. Travis Etienne — the kid from Jennings, Louisiana, who drove two hours to Baton Rouge to play college football, who became one of the best running backs in the country, who got drafted by Jacksonville and played five years in Florida — signed with the New Orleans Saints and is going home.
He grew up in Jennings. He went to Clemson, got drafted by Jacksonville, spent five years in Florida. And now he is home. That is the whole thing right there.
Travis Etienne drove back to Louisiana. I want you to think about that for a second. He grew up in Jennings. He went to Clemson, four hours away. He got drafted by Jacksonville, four more hours in the other direction. He spent five years in Florida, which is fine, Florida is fine, but it is not home. And now he signed with New Orleans, and he is going home.
Kenneth Walker won the Super Bowl MVP and is already proving something to a new team in a new city. Nobody ever stops having something to prove.
The new league year is here and I want to tell you something. Right now, across the country, players who agreed to terms with new teams over the last forty-eight hours are making phone calls. Some of them are calling their parents. Some are calling their wives or their college coaches or the high school teammate who told them to keep going when it was hard. They are saying: I got a deal. They are saying it in the voice they use when they are trying to sound calm and cannot quite manage it.
Every player who signs tomorrow walks into a new building for the first time. Every depth chart being rewritten right now has names. The names are people.
Tomorrow, the new league year begins. Tomorrow, players who shook hands over the phone with a general manager in the last forty-eight hours will officially become members of a new team. Tomorrow, the depth chart of every organization in the league looks different than it did on Monday. I want you to understand what that means, concretely.
Fernando Mendoza threw at Indiana today. The receiver market is about to produce a surprise. And somewhere, a lineman is finding out he gets to chase a ring.
The negotiating window is open. Players are finding out where they're going to play next year. And here is why that should matter to you even if you find the business side of football tedious. Every player who signs somewhere this week — every lineman who picks a team, every receiver who finds a new home, every linebacker who decides to chase a ring instead of a bigger contract — is going to show up to a new building for the first time in his professional life and have to prove something. That proving is what the next eight months are about. The proving is what training camp is about. The proving is what the first week of the season, when the schedule gets announced and the games get circled, is about.
Caleb Banks. Dillon Thieneman. Three hundred young men who traveled to Indiana and earned the right to play the games you'll watch this fall.
The combine wrapped up Sunday in Indianapolis, and here is what I want you to carry out of it with you. I want you to remember that a defensive tackle from Florida jumped so explosively off the snap on Thursday that three of the scouts standing nearby made the same involuntary noise at the same time. I heard it. I was standing close enough to see their clipboards shake. That's Caleb Banks, and he is going to play on Sundays for a long time and he is going to be very good at it.
Nebraska opened spring practice. A freshman lined up against upperclassmen for the first time. The combine numbers went quiet. Football was just football again.
Nebraska opened spring practice Saturday, and let me tell you why that matters more than it sounds like it does. Football went away. It went away after the bowl games and the championship game and the portal frenzy, and then there were weeks of combine numbers and draft projections and contract disputes and all the things that are about football without actually being football. And now, in Lincoln, Nebraska on a cold late-February morning, someone snapped a football to a quarterback and a linebacker had to make a decision and a receiver ran a route and football was happening again.
A 245-pound linebacker leaping out of the gym in Indianapolis. Stop what you're doing and understand what you just watched.
Here's the thing about watching Sonny Styles post a 43.5-inch vertical jump. You see a number, and then you think about what the number means, and then it takes a moment before it actually registers. That's the highest vertical jump by any player 6-foot-4 or taller since 2003. He is a linebacker. He weighs 245 pounds.
The second-year quarterback plays with a poise that's hard to teach — and an offensive line that's finally giving him the time to show it.
Here's the thing about Jayden Daniels that gets lost in all the analytical conversation: the kid plays football like he enjoys it. That sounds simple. It isn't. The NFL has a way of taking the joy out of young quarterbacks. The system gets more complicated. Defenses get better at what they've studied about you. The mistakes get more expensive. For a lot of young quarterbacks, the first couple of years are about survival — about not getting killed physically and not getting killed mentally. You see them out there running for their professional lives.