The Glitchy Minicamp Matrix

Aaron Rodgers? Stefon Diggs? Alvin Kamara? Justin Herbert? If you are experiencing deja vu all over again, you are not alone.

Minicamp season makes me feel like I am trapped in The Matrix for Stupid People. Sure, what reaches my computer/phone/bloodstream looks and sounds like NFL news. But it’s all repetitive, predictable, inconsequential and a little ridiculous.

Take this article that crawled into my newsfeed and died a few days ago: “Dejected Keenan Allen clip from Bears OTAs proves he misses Chargers, Justin Herbert,” by Jason Reed at the Chargers’ FanSided outpost. The premise of the story: Caleb Williams underthrew former Chargers receiver Allen badly in a routine drill, prompting Allen to shake his head and grumble in disgust. Someone in attendance posted a video of the affair, and Presto! Inspiration for a 538-word masterpiece.

Reed is just doing his job, of course: he must feed the insatiable content beast and somehow drive traffic to a Chargers fansite in June. Reed wisely harnessed the awesome search-engine optimization power of Herbert by pretending that anyone who no longer basks in the not-elite-but-let’s-all-pretend quarterback’s divine luminescence is consigned to languish in eternal despair like a soul in the first ring of Dante’s Inferno. When artificial intelligence really does gain sentience and go rogue, sometime around the Chargers bye week, it will take the image of Herbert the way some Star Trek alien might take the form of Apollo so our mortal brains may comprehend it and be more inclined to serve it.

Allen, I am guessing, does not lie awake each night wishing that he took a pay cut to watch Herbert heroically take intentional grounding penalties on the final drives of close losses. There’s more to my assumption than money, teammates and expectations. For example, music can clearly be heard in the background of the “dejected” clip, which means the Bears are running a normal 21st-century minicamp. Jim Harbaugh, on the other hand, has banned music from Chargers practices.

NFL Network’s Bridget Condon described the scene at Chargers OTAs earlier in the spring: "There was no music," she said. "In every other Chargers practice that I've been to before without Jim Harbaugh, they played a lot of music. So that's an interesting note … [There was an] emphasis on conditioning. The last 10 minutes of practice we watched them do sled pulls. They were doing medicine ball carries."

It’s disappointing to hear that Harbaugh has fallen sway to tough-guy coaching tropes. Harbaugh should be spawning new tough-guy coaching tropes: a full military brass band along the sideline, perhaps, or Tibetan throat singers performing an endless loop of “Hail to the Victors” while players try to bare-knuckle punch their way out of individualized coffins.

It’s hard to ban music from practice without sounding like Sal from Do the Right Thing. It’s hard to claim you are being old school when Tom Coughlin was piping music into Giants practices 10 years ago. Hannibal probably allowed a little drumming and singing to keep spirits high when his lads were waist deep in Alpine snow and elephant poop. There’s a thin line between “tough” and “grouchy.” Harbaugh has reached the age at which many men cross it.

As for the medicine balls: Harbaugh’s player performance director is Ben Herbert, no relation to Justin but possibly to Frank, the author whose ponderous sci-fi novels and the sand-blasted movies based on them are an old-fashioned endurance test for readers and viewers. (If you enjoy these new Wonka-of-Arabia Dune adaptations, I invite you to trudge across the Wildwood beach on a windy summer day while listening to a genealogy of 12th century French monarchs.) Herbert has never been an NFL conditioning coach; three guesses what college he worked at before joining the Chargers. The team website claims he’s bringing a “data-driven” approach to conditioning. No word on what decade he drew the data from.

So if Allen is shaking his head and muttering about a rookie blunder, imagine how he might react to a brisk sled pull in Southern California in June.

My issue with Reed’s article is not its existence or its content but the fact that my Android smartphone carefully curated it, placed it atop the launch page I am not allowed to uninstall and kept it there for two days.

Furthermore, other aggregators picked up the story, with one headline stating “Keenan Allen blows up against Bears QB Caleb Williams for mistake never seen by Justin Herbert.” (Again, note how Herbert is wedged into the headline for search-engine fetishization.) There may be little going on in the NFL in June, but not THAT little: there are quotes, contracts, position battles, and so on. The aggregators that aggregate the aggregation and decide what gets shoved in my face when I check my phone simply decided that I needed to know about one throw, against air, in June, by a rookie quarterback, in a story framed to be about everyone except said quarterback.

Hence my theory that I am trapped in the Matrix for Stupid People. I’m sure you feel the same way at times. We were not blue pilled nor red pilled, little purple pilled (yowza) or Jagged Little Pilled (a simulation where it is always 1995 and your girlfriend is pissed at you). No, we were plied with cheap rotgut and tossed into the glitchy freeware version of the Matrix with pop-up ads and in-app purchases. Justin Herbert is supposed to be Neo here, but he’s more of a Fixit Felix. The aliens and AI are feeding us what we think we want. And I may be getting a little too comfortable in my little pod.

Nix in the Mix

Earlier in OTAs, ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler reported that Zach Wilson is “in the mix” for the Broncos starting job. “Reported” may be too strong a term. "They're trying to regain his confidence again. I'm told he's in a positive state of mind," Fowler said before offering his very vague endorsement.

The source was almost certainly Wilson’s agent. “In the mix” is technically true, as Sean Payton has given Bo Nix, Jarrett Stidham and Wilson more-or-less-equal starter’s reps throughout the early offseason.

Wilson’s name clicks: New Yorkers think of him as one of their many wayward nephews, while the rest of us are fascinated by failed quarterback tales and his Mormon Milfhunter reputation. Fowler is an insider whose reports/insights/fever dreams blur the lines between journalism, news in its own right and wishcasting. The “in the mix” story got aggregated by New York, Denver and national sources, providing valuable podcast fodder and making it even more newsworthy than even Keenan Allen’s innermost thoughts about Justin Herbert.

Back on planet earth, Sean Payton was calling Nix, Stidham and Wilson “orphan dogs,” making them sound more like an indie band than a quarterback competition. (Let’s perform Counting Crows covers: the ladies dig ‘em! Wilson tells a confused Nix and Stidham.) Stidham took first team reps each Tuesday, Wilson on Wednesdays and Nix on Thursdays, but the press was only allowed to see Tuesday sessions until last week, when NFL rules require teams to open all minicamp practices to the media. Payton then canceled a minicamp practice, lest anyone get too long a gander at his skunkworks. So all anyone outside the coaching staff had seen when Fowler made his remarks was Wilson working with the third team.

Payton says and does nothing by accident: Stidham is the least newsworthy of the Orphan Dogs, so he was least likely to cause a media kerfuffle by taking first-team reps in front of the press pool.

Here are some remarks from Henry Chisholm of something called DNVR.com. I don’t know Chisholm or his outlet, but he has clearly been tracking every throw of Broncos OTAs, unlike the legions who amplified the “in the mix” story: “I feel dumb for thinking Payton could reinvent Wilson in the month between joining the Broncos and starting the offseason program. I didn’t expect him to look like a superstar, but I thought he had a chance to keep up with Nix and Stidham.”

See? I’m not the only one who feels dumb.

Jetsy Jetsy Jetsy Jets

Just as reality was setting in at Broncos camp, Randall Cobb stirred the Zach Wilson pot on a podcast appearance.

The Jets, you may recall, were forced to start Wilson when Aaron Rodgers got hurt in the season opener, then benched Wilson for putrescence, then had little choice but to reinsert him because their other quarterbacks were worse and Rodgers would not let the team sign anyone who might damage the flattering Jets are lost in the wilderness without their Facebook Philosopher King narrative. Wilson reportedly balked, at least briefly, when asked to return to the lineup.

Cobb, who is only tangentially NFL relevant at this point in his career as a packing peanut for Rodgers’ porcelain ego, blamed the media for the Wilson story. Or the Jets for leaking the story. Or both. It’s not the clearest pull quote in journalistic history:

“I think that they had told him that they were gonna trade him in the offseason, and then they benched him, and then they wanted him to play again,” Cobb said, per Ryan Glasspiegel at the New York Post. “And then they tried to blame him for not wanting to play, but you just told him that you were gonna trade him.

“It was a lot of politics, a lot of stuff in the media, it was a lot of like, ‘Come on, man, like what are we doing here?’ A lot of meeting with the media, feeding them stuff.”

It sure sounds like Cobb is saying: yes, everything was true, but you weren’t supposed to hear about it. Fair enough: I am sometimes “reluctant” to scrub the toilet when my wife asks, but I don’t want the Post detailing the conversation so it can then be aggregated by SportsBurp.com, FanSpooge and Pro Football Network.

Glasspiegel dutifully ended his article on Cobb’s podcast remarks by noting that ESPN reported that Wilson is “in the mix” for the Broncos starting job.

You can really see what goes into the sausage grinder this time of year, can’t you? Podcast musings, agent favors, nothingburger videos scrutinized like tiny fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a desperate effort to shoehorn clickable names into stories.

Rodgers did the media an inadvertent favor by skipping mandatory minicamp last week. Rodgers attended non-mandatory OTAs earlier in the spring, participated in team drills and even mumbled through a non-noteworthy press availability in May. When he didn’t show up for work last Wednesday, the Jets panicked as only they can. He’s unexcused! No: he’s officially unexcused, but he’s unofficially excused! He’s attending an event! It’s, um, his parents’ anniver (no that won’t fly) a political ral (ixnay, ixnay) a trip! No, not that kind of trip! NO FURTHER QUESTIONS!

The programmers of the Stupid Matrix also leaped into action. Mike Florio entered The Avatar State and posted roughly 246 updates in the space of three hours on Pro Football Talk on Wednesday afternoon. Hours later, New York radio personalities Mike Francesca and Chris “Mad Dog” Russo took the Kendrick-vs.-Drake approach:

“What he did yesterday just set them back again because it shows that he has zero respect for this organization and this head coach,” Francesca said on his BetRivers podcast.

“Rodgers misses a mandatory minicamp — I mean, what’s the big deal?” Russo asked on whatever the hell outlet carries him now. “Would you rather have him show up at the mandatory camp this week, or would you rather have him go 28-of-38, 285 [yards], three touchdowns in a win against San Francisco on that Monday night in September? Which one would you rather have?”

The quotes above were compiled by – you guessed it — the tireless Ryan Glasspiegel,

I have a touch of oppositional defiant disorder myself, so game-recognizes-game when it comes to Rodgers. The mandatory part of mandatory minicamp caused him to downshift into you’re not my real dad mode. He skipped minicamp to remind the Jets who is in charge.

Here’s my analytical breakdown on Rodgers’ next move:

• Show up for training camp next month as if nothing strange happened: 20%

• Show up for training camp with a shaggy-dog tale about spending three weeks upside down in a cave: 30%

• Show up for training camp two days late to read off a 44-page manifesto of his many grievances against the Jets/media/society: 35%

• Sudden retirement, not because his foot still hurts but because he’s just too pure for this world: 5%

• Vice-presidential campaign: 10%

Nightmarish political scenarios aside, Rodgers’ minicamp absence was like the death of a sperm whale, nourishing the denizens of Bikini Bottom for days as the carcass of his story slowly drifted to the sea floor.

Life on the Mississippi

One symptom of being trapped within a glitchy free-to-download version of The Matrix is a feeling of deja vu. Haven’t I written about Herbert 100 times before? Isn’t a Rodgers controversy a rather tired offseason tradition at this point? A new forum like Substack should bring fresh material with it.

Saints contract shenanigans? Now THERE’S a topic I haven’t bludgeoned into submission over the last three years.

The Saints extended Taysom Hill’s contract again last week. Hill now has an $18-million cap figure for 2025, a wee bit hefty for a gadget specialist and third-string quarterback who turns 34 in August. Hill’s contract is like the student loan for the two years you spent as a medieval music major before switching to accounting: you will be paying it off forever, but it was initially a fun experiment, and using the TaysomCat to squeak out a win against the Panthers is like breaking out the lute and blowing people away with “Greensleeves” at the annual holiday party.

At least Hill would be a bargain at about one-fourth the price. Alvin Kamara carries an $18.5-million cap figure this year, a $29-million whopper in 2025 and is no longer any better than the average third-round draft pick. The Saints want to renegotiate, but because of all the phony money they stuffed into the tail end of Kamara’s contract, “renegotiate” essentially means “rip up the old deal and give you something much smaller.” The Saints used a similar trick to Houdini out of Michael Thomas’ contract last year. Kamara, however, left Saints minicamp when talks broke down. He is apparently calling general manager Mickey Loomis’ bluff. His zany cap figure makes him uncuttable, giving Kamara the closest thing to leverage that a 29-year running back can get.

Three years ago, Saints bloggers would have written impassioned soliloquies about Loomis’ ability to remain two steps ahead of the salary cap. I’m not sure there even are Saints bloggers anymore: all the Kamara stories I could find were based on initial reporting from veteran beats Jeff Duncan and Nick Underhill. The Saints press pool was always tiny, but if it’s down to two people the organization will wield some amazing information-control power. Assuming there’s any information about the Saints worth controlling, that is.

Many of my colleagues, it should be said, are exhausted this time of year. Spinning speculation and minutiae into clickable gold is grueling work, and it’s not like a Chargers fansite can afford to go dark for three weeks and give its creators a breather just because nothing at all is happening. Heaven forbid.

No faction of the NFL press is more weary than the Vikings media, who have been run ragged since the start of the calendar year keeping up with this lockstep schedule:

January: Discussing the ramifications of Kirk Cousins potentially leaving.

February: Discussing the ramifications of Cousins potentially staying.

March: Kirk Cousins. The Man. The Epoch. The Retrospective.

April: Discussing how much draft capital it would take to get J.J. McCarthy, and why that is too much.

Late April: Briefly wondering whether spending winter and early spring in a state of moderate anxiety over a B-tier quarterback and his C-plus-tier replacement was worth it.

May: Hand-wringing over the Justin Jefferson extension.

Early June: Panicking over the Jefferson extension.

Mid-June: Trying to say something relevant about the Jefferson extension.

Sam Darnold operated as QB1 in Vikings minicamp, and Skol Country sounded too pooped to kick up a fuss about it. Not that a fuss is appropriate – Darnold is a higher bar to clear than Stidham, and IT’S F**KING JUNE – but it’s generally a reliable content model.

At least the Vikings media, unlike the Chargers media, doesn’t have to manufacture dramas about former wide receivers to keep the content supply chain humming. Not that it stops them.

Stefon Diggs, per Albert Breer at Sports Illustrated, was asked about his relationship with Josh Allen, and the Vikings organization caught a few strays as Diggs took us on a tour of the cloudy corners of a diva wide receiver’s mind:

“At that point when I left Minnesota, I was a good player, but I [wanted] more for myself, I felt like I was better than that, that I could be better than that,” Diggs said. “And up to a point I was like, Shoot, I’m gonna bet on myself. And they sent me to Buffalo. I don’t know if they sent me to Buffalo with the kindest intent, but all’s well that ends well. When I got to Buffalo, Josh was my guy. People really understand what it’s like to be out there. He really embraced me, kind of had that Southern hospitality.”

It takes some deconstructionist literary analysis to extract anything from Diggs’ “kindest intent” phrasing besides than residual snippiness from the kind of perma-malcontent we have all been stuck working with a dozen times in our lives. But ‘tis the season for analyzing press conference quotes like jilted lovers re-reading a text message for the 2,000th time at three in the morning. Diggs’ remarks reached my feed as something like Stephon Diggs Claims Vikings Tried to Sabotage His Career.

Overpaying and Loving It

Minicamp season is also contract season, making it an even sillier season.

The Jaguars announced Trevor Lawrence’s obligatory $275-million regret warhead on Thursday. There is only one possible response to such a deal: that is too much money, but the Jaguars had no choice. Try expanding that to 538 words!

Sure, a savvy writer could spin some speculative prose based on an alternate universe of unicorns and hippogriffs: the Jaguars should just let Lawrence’s rookie contract play out, draft Deebo/CMC/Kittle clones, draft a Brock Purdy in the seventh round and do the easy-peasy totally-repeatable thing the 49ers are doing. Anyone who understands that the driving force behind NFL personnel decisions is not the Super Bowl but self-preservation realizes that there are no brakes on the quarterback market, and no one is volunteering to kick through the floor of the bus and drag their own feet to stop it.

Granted, the Dolphins are being much more daring in their game of chicken with Tua Tagovailoa. Friend-of-the-Zone Matt Verderame broke the South Beach Standoff down in detail for Sports Illustrated, with the help of some insights from insiders.

“I would definitely stretch it out,” a former NFL general manager says. “I couldn’t pay him the $50 million [per year] at this stage with the information we have. Play this year out, then tag him next year if you have to. Just because he played one full season, that doesn’t alleviate everybody’s doubts about durability. Plus, I felt like at the end of last year his talents grew a wart or two.”

That reasoning is sound. Chris Grier may be following that plan with the blessing of Stephen Ross, who probably thinks signing a 40-something-year-old Rodgers out of a measles-plagued libertarian thinktank in Idaho would be a feasible alternative if Tua doesn’t shake out.

I just cannot help but note the “former” part of that source’s title. As a former teacher, I often say things like, “I would tell the superintendent to f**k off, deliver the A Few Good Men speech to the school board and continue to teach Tropic of Cancer to fifth graders. In math class!” Were I still in the classroom, I would probably be meekly asking my supervisors if the Pythagorean Theorem was too “woke.”

With Lawrence off the table, Tagovailoa is the only quarterback with a buzzworthy contract wrangle of note during the long, hot, quasi-downtime between Father’s Day and Bastille Day. Tyreek Hill is also chirping a bit, so the Dolphins media has drawn the short straw while everyone else gets to enjoy fireworks and barbecues for a few days. The Vikings media definitely needs a few cold beers and hot brats. Everyone else might benefit from the NFL shutting off and rebooting, though they might not be given the chance to do the same.

There’s a reason Too Deep Zone covers pro football history this time of year: if I am going to write 1,500 words about a quarterback while my wife is lounging by the ocean, I’m gonna to be one guy writing Ken Stabler Nailed Groupie’s Undies to the Wall During 1970s Training Camps, not the 2,000th guy writing Here’s What a Tua Extension Would Look Like.

Once you realize you are in a simulation, after all, it’s easier to make up your own rules.

Some Housekeeping Items

The All-Time Top 5 QBs series continues later in the week with the Raiders. The Chargers arrive next week, so I get to talk about Justin Herbert again. (Yay.) Now that my work on The Periodical Formerly Known as Football Outsiders Almanac is done and release of the book is imminent, I also plan next week to share some thoughts on the NFC East and AFC West teams I wrote about. I will also offer some prop-betting thoughts as we get closer to the Almanac release.

The All-Time Top 5 QBs will then barrel into the NFC, starting with the NFC North, so I can: a) get the Bears out of the damn way; and b) save the teams in the East and West until closer to the start of camp, when more readers might be interested.

Walkthrough, the most respectable, least respected Monday NFL column on the Internet, returns on July 29th with something training camp preview-flavored. The Top 5’s will probably still be ongoing, probably as late-week features.

Finally: happy belated Father’s Day to all who observed it. I thought Father’s Day was next weekend and planned to remind subscribers that my novel Long Snapper’s Blues makes a great dads/grads gift, but it’s too late now.

Michael J. Tanier graduates from high school on the day that this is published. His brother C.J. drives back to his new apartment in Central Jersey after the ceremony. C.J. bought me a Father’s Day 12-pack! Or at least, I drank all the beer he stored in my fridge. Either way, this was a time of great reflection and introspection here in the Zone. Instead of sharing deep, somewhat bittersweet thoughts on parenthood and the stages of life with you, I went with Justin Herbert slander, followed by Ken Stabler Nailed Groupie’s Undies to the Wall During 1970s Training Camps later in the week. Please respect my commitment to my brand.