Tag: NFL

Two retired Indianapolis Colts disagree on how things went down leading up to Andrew Luck‘s franchise-altering decision to retire in 2019.

Former tight end Eric Ebron, during an episode of his “On My Soul” podcast, said general manager Chris Ballard pressured Luck, issuing a mandate to play, leading to the QB’s abrupt retirement.

In an email to Fox 59’s Mike Chappell, Luck refuted Ebron’s claim.

“Chris and I had a wonderful partnership, especially through my decision to retire, and we remain close,” Luck wrote Chappell. “Any notion of internal pressures that influenced my decision are without merit.”

News broke about Luck’s retirement during the third quarter of a preseason game against the Chicago Bears in 2019. After the contest, the QB held an emotional press conference, in which he said he wanted to get out of the injury cycle that had engulfed his career.

Ebron, who had his lone Pro Bowl season with Luck in 2018, said last week that the Colts were frustrated with Luck bringing in his own staff, and that the GM insisted the QB play through his latest injury.

“Andrew then decides that he’s so tired of injury and he doesn’t want to do the surgery, and you know the man around there that gets on everybody’s nerves, ‘Big Drawers’ (Ballard) over there behind that desk, he tells Andrew, ‘You’re either playing this year or we’re moving on,’” Ebron said on his podcast. “Who the (expletive) would tell Andrew Luck that? Andrew Luck now says, ‘I’m not going to be ready, I’m tired of playing with pain. I’m going to retire.’”

Normally, disagreements between former players wouldn’t rise to the level of notability. However, the discourse underscores that the fallout from Luck’s retirement continues to hover over the franchise like a thick smog. The fact that Ballard has never been able to fully replace Luck has plagued the franchise. The club is betting big that Daniel Jones can finally be that answer.

The Colts have been to the playoffs twice since Ballard took over as general manager in 2017, and missed the postseason each of the past five seasons, despite playing in a winnable AFC South division. The pressure is on the GM to finally get over that hump in 2026, or the club might decide a decade was enough.

Baker Mayfield‘s MVP-caliber start to 2025 hit a speed major bump midway through the season and spiraled out of control as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers careened to an 8-9 finish following a 5-1 start.

Recently retired Bucs linebacker Lavonte David joined The Arena podcast and revealed just how much pain Mayfield played through.

“I’m telling you, Baker was going through a lot,” David said. “Baker had a lot of injuries that you didn’t expect a quarterback to play through. He had the oblique injury, he had the shoulder injury, he had a lot of things — like ankle injury, knee injury — he had a lot of stuff he was going through. The season’s over now, I can talk about it, but he had a lot of stuff that he was going through and he was really trying to push and really trying to be the player that we needed him to be. To be honest, we was doing his thing for the most part.”

Mayfield got off to a sensational start to his 2025 season, with his name being bandied around as an MVP candidate as he led the Bucs to several stirring wins, including tossing 379 yards and 2 TDs on 29-of-33 passing against the eventual Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks in a Week 5 win. However, after a four-sack loss against Detroit in Week 7, Mayfield never looked right, and injuries began to mount for the Bucs.

The 30-year-old sat out the second half of a blowout loss to the Los Angeles Rams in Week 12 after hurting his non-throwing shoulder, but threw every other pass in 2025 for the Bucs, despite battling through injuries.

David believes the Bucs offensive struggles down the stretch were a combination of players missing time, including star Mike Evans, which thrust young players into key roles, and the injuries that hindered the QB’s ability to make plays off script, which had highlighted his early-season success.

“But you miss your top two targets in Mike (Evans) and Chris (Godwin) and you’re playing with a bunch of rookies,” David said. “You’re playing with Emeka (Egbuka), even though he had a solid year, he became the No. 1 guy and people were keying on him, people were locking in on him and he probably didn’t know how to handle that. You’ve got Tez Jonhson, you’ve got J-Mac (Jalen McMillan) coming back from injury. We were missing key guys. And then our offensive line was banged up. We had a revolving door with the offensive line all year, so it’s tough for him to deal with those kinds of things.

“I don’t think Baker should’ve got the blame at all because years prior, he’s playing lights out. Early in the season, he’s playing lights out. He put up 38 points on the eventual Super Bowl champions. I would never blame Bake for that.”

Mayfield enters the final year of his 3-year, $100 million contract in Tampa in 2024. After playing for relatively cheap, the soon-to-be 31-year-old is in line for a pay raise, and could potentially leap into the $50-million-per-year group. The question is whether the Bucs believe — as David obviously does — the 2025 struggles were a blip on the radar caused by injury and not a sign of future outcomes.

After somewhat of a down year statistically compared to what Walker has become accustomed to, elevating his game again will require a renewed energy.

Walker logged 3.5 sacks in 2025, the same as his rookie year, after hitting double digits in both seasons from 2023-24, but still proved plenty valuable to a new regime helmed by general manager James Gladstone and head coach Liam Coen.

Coen, who witnessed eight-time All-Pro defensive tackle Aaron Donald’s destructiveness while previously coaching with the Los Angeles Rams, set that bar of tenacity for Walker moving forward.

“I had an almost two-hour meeting with him at the end of the season,” Coen said at the Annual League Meeting on March 31 regarding Walker, per team transcript. “Just what that looked like in terms of dominating. I was with Aaron Donald in L.A. and we literally had to take him out of practice in order for us to gain yards on offense. And so, if you want to get where you want to go and where we want you to go and where you can go, I need to be taking you out of practice so that we can operate on offense.”

Walker, for his part, said he’s up for the task: “Obviously, he’s seen Donald. He coached — he was on the team with Aaron Donald. It just kind of help put things in perspective for me to be able to just click into a different type of mindset from how I was going throughout the year, and I feel like it really dawned on me that it’s just time to ramp things up, take it to the next level.”

Matching Donald’s engine is a lofty goal — Rams defensive lineman Jared Verse learned that lesson last offseason during a session with Donald, calling it the hardest workout he’d ever done and at one point jokingly asking Donald’s wife to “call the police.” However, if habits make the player, there’s no better individual to emulate.

Walker could also see an uptick in future production if he fares better on the injury front. He’s still incredibly durable, having missed only five games in four years, but three of those absences came last season, and he mentioned health as a factor in getting back to campaigns with 10-plus sacks.

“My main thing was just working on getting healthy, and then it’s fine tuning those little, small details within my hands, eye coordination, things of that nature,” Walker said. “Just trying to keep my twitch, as far as my strength, wrist mobility, working on a lot of things but it’s just ironing out small details. The further you get in your career, it gets harder to — I wouldn’t say it gets harder to continuously elevate, it’s just you’ve got to find those small little details within your game and continuously work those things.”

Focusing on the details, maintaining his health and wrecking his offense’s best-laid plans in practice — those are the elements Walker has identified in living up to his new contract as he did his last.

Considering the $77 million in guarantees the Jaguars forked over to extend Walker’s stay in Jacksonville, they believe he can put it all together through the next half decade.

Corum’s optimism might be waved away by some, but it is founded on seeing McCarthy excel up close in Ann Arbor.

Although Michigan was undoubtedly a run-first team, thanks in large part to Corum’s contributions, McCarthy was a leader on the Wolverines’ national championship team, completing 72.3 percent of his passes for 2,991 yards, 22 touchdowns and four interceptions.

The Vikings also saw enough in McCarthy to invest highly in him. Unfortunately, Corum and Minnesota’s faith in McCarthy has not translated to the field thus far.

With McCarthy sidelined due to injury in 2024, Sam Darnold led the Vikings to a 14-win season. Minnesota didn’t retain Darnold the following offseason, instead pushing its chips to the middle of the table on McCarthy, after which Darnold won Super Bowl LX with the Seattle Seahawks and the Vikings missed the playoffs.

McCarthy made 10 starts in 2025, missing time at various points of the season due to a high ankle sprain, a concussion and a hairline fracture in his right hand, and he wasn’t at all transformative when under center. He threw for 1,632 yards, 11 touchdowns and 12 interceptions with a paltry 57.6 completion percentage.

The struggles led the Vikings to sign Kyler Murray in free agency. They also brought back Carson Wentz, who started five games for the team last season. In doing so, they’ve ensured multiple avenues to quality QB play in the campaign to come, a must for a team with a ferocious defense and surrounding offensive pieces ready to compete now.

What comes of the depth chart remains to be seen, but McCarthy is still only 23. He’s barely double-digit games into his career, and he did show flashes in 2025 — such as a Week 1 comeback over the Chicago Bears or managing Minnesota to four wins in his final four starts.

His ex-Vikings teammate Darnold showed how long one can take to develop into the QB they’re meant to be, and his ex-college team Corum believes it’s all out in front of McCarthy to do the same.

First, though, McCarthy must find his way to the field amid a crowded quarterback room.

Despite the Titans recording a 3-14 record in Ward’s rookie season, the 23-year-old signal-caller showed glimpses of being a franchise QB for Tennessee. Toward the end of the campaign, Ward put together a four-game streak of throwing two touchdowns as the Titans went 2-2 in Weeks 14-17. He finished the season with 3,169 passing yards for 15 touchdowns and seven interceptions.

Ward did, however, suffer a right shoulder injury in the season finale, necessitating some rehab to begin the offseason. Saleh did not want to add a timetable for Ward’s recovery, but he added that the QB’s “progressing really well.”

Now heading into his second season, Ward will have to learn a new playbook with new Titans offensive coordinator Brian Daboll. The former Giants head coach has been known to develop quarterbacks along his stops in the NFL. As the OC in Buffalo, Daboll developed Josh Allen into a star with the Bills before taking the Giants head coaching job. In 2022, Daboll helped Daniel Jones and the Giants to Big Blue’s first postseason berth since 2016. During his final year in New York, Daboll inserted Jaxson Dart into the starting lineup a few weeks into the campaign, and despite his midseason firing oversaw Dart become a potential long-term answer at QB for the Giants.

Saleh believes Daboll’s experience working with quarterbacks could benefit the Titans and Ward.

“That’s going to be awesome,” Saleh said about the OC-QB duo. “I’m sure they’ll bicker at each other every once in a while, and they’ll challenge each other often. But that is the exact temperament that you want out of your quarterback.”

Saleh, Daboll and Ward will enter the next phase of their journey together when the Titans begin the first day of their offseason program on April 7, followed by voluntary minicamps from April 21-23 and the start of organized team activities on May 18.

Despite the Titans having a 3-14 record in Ward’s rookie season, the 23-year-old signal-caller had glimpses of being a franchise QB for Tennessee. In fact, toward the end of the 2025 season, Ward had a four-game streak of throwing two touchdowns as the Titans went 2-2 in Weeks 14-17. He finished the season with 3,169 passing yards for 15 touchdowns and seven interceptions.

However, Ward ended the 2025 campaign with a right shoulder injury that has seen him doing rehab to begin the offseason. Saleh did not want to add a timetable for Ward’s recovery but added that the QB’s “progressing really well.”

Now heading into his second season, Ward will have to learn a new playbook with new Titans offensive coordinator Brian Daboll. The former Giants head coach has been known to develop quarterbacks at his stops in the NFL. As the OC in Buffalo, Daboll developed Josh Allen to a star with the Bills before taking the Giants head coaching job. In 2022, Daboll helped Daniel Jones and the Giants to Big Blue’s first postseason berth since 2016. During his final year in New York, Daboll inserted Jaxson Dart into the starting lineup a few weeks into the season, which led to Dart becoming a potential long-term answer at QB for the Giants.

Nonetheless, Saleh believes Daboll’s experience working with quarterbacks could benefit the Titans and Ward.

“That’s going to be awesome,” Saleh said about the OC-QB duo. “I’m sure they’ll bicker at each other every once in a while, and they’ll challenge each other often. But that is the exact temperament that you want out of your quarterback.”

Daboll and Ward will start their journey together when Tennessee begins organized team activities on May 18.

The NFL announced on Friday that it has closed its investigation into abuse allegations against Rashee Rice, and the Chiefs wide receiver will not face any discipline by the league.

“There was insufficient evidence to support a finding that he violated the personal conduct policy,” the league said in a statement obtained by NFL.com.

The NFL’s investigation into Rice began in February after Dacoda Jones, Rice’s former girlfriend, alleged in a lawsuit that Rice physically assaulted her multiple times over a year-and-a-half period, causing injuries that included bleeding and bruising.

Rice’s attorney, Sean Lindsey, said in a statement obtained by the Associated Press that “Mr. Rice wants to thank the NFL for their thorough investigation, and looks forward to the start of the 2026-27 NFL season.”

Rice, 25, missed the first six games of last season following an NFL suspension for his role in a high-speed crash on a Dallas highway that left multiple people injured during the 2024 offseason. He was sentenced to 30 days in jail and five years probation after pleading guilty to third-degree felony charges of collision involving serious bodily injury and racing on a highway causing bodily injury.

After returning from his six-game suspension, Rice finished the 2025 season with 53 catches for 571 yards and five touchdowns as Kansas City went 6-11 and missed the playoffs for the first time in a decade.

Though he found it hard to get home in 2025, with his 3.5 sacks matching the output from his rookie year despite 42 pressures, Walker has developed to form a terrific one-two pass-rushing punch with Hines-Allen and was a major factor in Jacksonville’s first top-10 finish in points allowed since 2018.

Walker, 25 years old with a 6-foot-5, 272-pound frame, is also more than capable setting an edge in the running game. That’s an area where the Jags excelled last year; they held opponents to the fewest rushing yards per game in the league.

The Jaguars have mostly stood pat in free agency. Their only notable addition is running back Chris Rodriguez Jr. to help replace the void left by Travis Etienne‘s departure, as they’ve instead prioritized bringing back some of their own.

Walker, who was heading into his fifth-year rookie option, represents the most important homegrown talent Jacksonville secured this cycle. The team also might’ve scored a little bit of a bargain by rewarding Walker early, lest he had blown the top off his market with another 10-plus sack effort in 2026.

With an extension out of the way with plenty of time to spare, all attention now turns to the defending the AFC South crown.

If Walker and the Jaguars can repeat in the division, it’ll be just the second time in franchise history — and first since 1998-99.