Back at the airport, wrapping up the West Coast leg of my NFL training camp trip, and emptying out the notebook on a Tuesday morning …
• The situation that unfolded in Foxborough on Monday certainly merits attention—with star pass rusher Matthew Judon showing up to the New England Patriots’ first padded practice in sweats, and then having animated conversations with coach Jerod Mayo, and then top front office guys Eliot Wolf and Matt Groh before leaving the field.
It was unusual to hear, especially from that particular address.
And it does make you wonder, just a little, about how the internal spending the team did might be impacting the roster. Christian Barmore signed a new deal at $21 million per year earlier in the offseason. He’s a really good player. But it’s fair to wonder about the impact his contract has had on the two best, most consistent, most dependable players on the team’s defensive front—Judon and defensive tackle Davon Godchaux. Judon is making $7.5 million this year, Godchaux is at $8.3 million, and that’s pretty far off from Barmore.
Of course, the Patriots aren’t alone in these sorts of circumstances. It’s probably not a coincidence that Matthew Stafford went to the Los Angeles Rams for a raise with three years left on his deal, having seen Aaron Donald do the same two years ago; or that Trent Williams is rattling cages with the San Francisco 49ers after seeing Christian McCaffrey get a bump. It’s also a reason why teams can be so militant about contract precedents.
• Last year, there were questions about Chase Young’s drive and down-to-down consistency that seemed fair. He was a couple of years removed from the catastrophic multi-ligament knee injury he suffered in 2021, and he was in a contract year. He was spotty for the Washington Commanders, and the Niners before flashing in the Super Bowl.
The New Orleans Saints had to consider all of those factors before pursuing him in free agency. Then, they dug into his neck condition a little more. He was initially hurt against the Cleveland Browns in the preseason last summer, with what he thought was a stinger, but it was worse. Eventually, he worked his way back onto the field, and played the season out. But the neck injury was bad enough that, before San Francisco traded for Young, and after seeing his scans, the Chicago Bears backed off a potential deal.
His scans after the season scared off a lot of teams. In fact, one team considered signing him but only if he signed a waiver—something that a lot of players would take as a bit insensitive given the seriousness of such injuries. The Saints’ deal was, to be sure, a make-good deal (with $7.99 million in per-game roster bonuses), but they didn’t ask him to sign a waiver. And in the process of doing that deal, they learned exactly what he was playing through in 2023.
The Saints have found Young’s work ethic and drive to be exemplary. Bottom line: He’s come off as someone who wants to get out there and prove everyone wrong. And the Saints stand to be the beneficiary of having an open mind, and acting with some compassion for his situation.
• For what it’s worth, and with all of the noise accounted for, and after writing what I did Monday morning, I should add this—the Cowboys believe they have a chance to be really, really good.
“We think we’ve got a great football team,” Dallas COO Stephen Jones told me after Friday’s practice. “We’ve got 14 Pro Bowlers and 12 All-Pros that are out on this field. I know everybody wants to be critical that we didn’t do a lot in free agency, but we feel like we had a hell of a draft and plugged a few holes, like a [Eric] Kendricks [signing]. We feel like this team is a top-of-the-line football team that can play with anybody.”
Talent hasn’t been an issue in Dallas for a long time. They’ve had really good rosters going all the way back to the Bill Parcells era. We’ll see if they got the rest taken care of soon enough.
• And while we’re on the subject of self-belief, or belief in team, consider Kyler Murray right there, too.
At Arizona Cardinals camp Sunday, I recalled a conversation with him that we’d had a couple years ago, about how he’d never lost before he got to the NFL, and how hard it’d been on him, and how it was motivating him. He remembered the conversation. After enduring a lot of criticism over the past couple of years, for a variety of reasons, he told me that he sees the light at the end of the tunnel with a very young team coming together.
“Winning cures all,” he said. “We will win. I’m very confident in that. People are going to say what they want to say. It’s social media for a reason. You laugh at it. It is what it is.”
Oh, and his reason for saying it that definitively? He’s in lockstep with his teammates and coaches, and that starts with second-year head coach Jonathan Gannon, who won Murray over quickly, and has proven to him that they’re in a massive rebuild together.
“Honestly, I kind of compared it to when you meet your best friend,” he continued. “We hit it off instantly. It was a couple days off his Super Bowl, tough loss in the Super Bowl. The way he came in, the way he approached it, I could tell off the rip, within a minute of us talking, he knew ball. He understood the game. That’s my type of guy. I love what I do, and I know he loves what he does. That competitiveness we share. I understand what he’s saying. He wants to see me be who he knows I can be and who I know I can be.
“That relationship there, we’ve built a great one.”
Which should give the team a chance to be that way, too.
• I was in Seattle on Monday, and seeing Sam Howell reminded me to update the status of the 2022 draft class. At this point last year, four quarterbacks from that group were starting—Howell in Washington, Kenny Pickett in Pittsburgh, Desmond Ridder in Atlanta and Brock Purdy in San Francisco. Purdy remains the Niners’ starter. The other three were traded this offseason (Ridder is a Cardinal now, and Pickett is an Eagle).
And if you roll the clock back a year before that, you have just one quarterback left starting from the 2021 class—Trevor Lawrence. The other four first-rounders (Zach Wilson, Trey Lance, Justin Fields and Mac Jones) have been traded by the teams that drafted them.
So between consecutive classes, just a few years in, you have two starting quarterbacks, and five of six first-rounders traded. That’s a staggering rate of failure. Of course, the 2020 class now has five players—Joe Burrow, Tua Tagovailoa, Justin Herbert, Jordan Love and Jalen Hurts—making more than $50 million per year on second contracts. Which is interesting because that class was widely considered as inferior to the ’21 group.
That shows, again, that we all know a lot less than we think every April.
• For whatever it’s worth, I don’t think there’s a Davante Adams trade on the horizon. My sense is the Las Vegas Raiders don’t want to put head coach Antonio Pierce in a position where the front office is saying, with its actions, that this just isn’t the team’s year.
But before the trade deadline? That’d be more feasible, as I see it, if the Raiders’ season is circling the drain. Doing it at, say, with a 1–6 record, would be a lot easier to explain to the locker room than doing it at 0–0. And at that point, the Raiders consider the reality that the cash in Adams’s deal jumps from $17.5 million this year, to $36.25 million in 2025, and $36.25 million in ’26, making it less than likely he’s with the team after the season.
• Decisions by the Green Bay Packers and Miami Dolphins to go all in on their quarterbacks, despite Jordan Love’s short track record and Tua Tagovailoa’s injury history, only underscore the stomach the Minnesota Vikings showed in March letting Kirk Cousins enter free agency. They had, of course, a quarterback with a track record, who had respect in the locker room, and a playoff pedigree. And most teams would never let a guy such as Cousins test the market partially out of fear of what lies behind door No. 2.
Minnesota did that, and landed Sam Darnold in free agency and J.J. McCarthy in the draft to vie for Cousins’s old spot. If one of the two hits, Minnesota’s going to look pretty smart. If that happens, no one should ignore the gumption head coach Kevin O’Connell and general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah showed to put the Vikings into a new era.
• Also not to be ignored: The job Love did as a first-year starter to set up that payday without a ton of veteran talent around him. David Bakhtiari was hurt again. The line had its issues. The receiver group, while talented, was loaded with recent draft picks such as Christian Watson, Romeo Doubs, Dontayvion Wicks and Jayden Reed that were growing on the fly, and under fire. Same goes for Luke Musgrave and the tight end group.
Bottom line: Love had to be a leader pretty quickly, and he obviously responded in a resounding way. And now all of those guys get to keep growing together.
• With the pads now on across the league, it’ll be interesting to see the new kickoff in real practice. From what I’ve seen through the first week, there’s still a lot of teaching and experimentation. I’ll reiterate that I think the teams that are engaging in joint practices in the coming weeks will have an edge.
• And we’ll wrap with this fun fact—Saints DE Cam Jordan is hitting a pretty significant milestone this year. His dad, Steve, played his entire 13-year career (1982 to ’94) with the Vikings. This year is Cam’s 14th … with one team, New Orleans. So for dad to get to that sort of number with one team is remarkable enough. For his son to top it is wild. Congrats to both of them.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as How Patriots’ Spending Is Impacting Matthew Judon.
