Thursday Whispers – Who looked good in the spring?

You see all these stories on the internet about who looked good in the spring.

When it comes to those stories, we are offering a consumer alert, may the buyer beware.

The spring is really one big classroom in the NFL world, on the field and in the meeting rooms.

It’s not really about style points.

I heard one coordinator recently, with another team, say there is no competition for positions in the spring. He was saying that the spring is about teaching the system and working on technique.

He said once training camp starts, that is when true competition for jobs will start.

So, be careful about hanging your hat on spring assessments from the media about who looked good.

Now, I don’t want to be a hypocrite. I do write notes in the spring about players making nice plays in practices, but my philosophy is this – if a guy makes a great catch, in a spring camp, it’s still a great catch. Remember, over the years, spring camps have been referred to as “passing camp,” because that is basically what these are. With no pads, limited contact, and no tackling, you can’t take a lot of way from line play, and the ability of defenders’ tackling ability, but you can take a little from passing plays.

But just because a player had a nice catch or two, doesn’t mean he’s having an overall great spring. He might have made a couple of nice catches, but how is he picking up the system? How is his technique? How is his route-running? We have no idea, so I’m not going to write that he had a great spring.  How the hell would I know? I’m not in the meetings, I have no idea if he’s repeating mistakes on the field that need to be corrected all the time.

All I’m doing is saying that he made a play that looked impressive, like if a DB intercepting a pass.

A nice grab is a nice grab, but it’s just a small sample size of what is going on.

So spring assessment of players can be downright reckless and devoid of context.

The recklessness has become worse over the last few years, and here is why:

You have reporters at practices making bold statements about who is looking good, without the qualifications to do so, and then you have people who aren’t credentialed, so they can’t see the practice, taking the baton on these assessments and writing blogs on the myriad team websites out there on the World Wide Web.

So it’s turned into Kabuki Theatre.

Or a bad game of telephone.

Some spring practice assessments, many dubious, are being written and then promoted all over the internet by others who didn’t see them.

Even worse, people are doing video blogs about these assessments, looking in the camera, telling people so-and-so is looking good, when they didn’t see it themselves, and the information they are using is not exactly coming from Bill Walsh.

Strange days indeed.

Take all this stuff with a mountain of salt.

June 25, 2026

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