Culture
NFL second-year breakout candidates: Will Levis and other 2023 draft picks ready to impress
The number of rookies who don’t bother waiting for their true breakout season seems to increase annually. The latest example, perhaps, is Houston Texans QB C.J. Stroud. Or, maybe Texans edge Will Anderson Jr. Or Detroit Lions tight end Sam LaPorta and running back Jahmyr Gibbs. Maybe Atlanta Falcons running back Bijan Robinson. Oh, and probably Los Angeles Rams WR Puka Nacua.
You get the point.
The 2023 rookie class made its mark, to be sure — and we’ve yet to hear everything from the entire group. With that in mind, let’s look at a few second-year players who could have breakout seasons (health willing) in 2024.
Quarterback
Will Levis, Tennessee Titans (Round 2, No. 33)
Frankly, a few guys have an argument here. Aidan O’Connell is in a fight with Gardner Minshew II for the Las Vegas job. If he wins that, do not be surprised if he (once again) outperforms expectations — O’Connell was one of the most undervalued prospects in the 2023 class. I’m also not ready to give up on Bryce Young, and I’m excited to see Anthony Richardson for more than a month.
However, the breakout pick is Levis. He was a really tough evaluation coming out of Kentucky due to a toe injury he suffered in 2022, but his downfield accuracy (and confidence) was much better in 2021. That’s what we saw last season with Tennessee.
During Levis’ nine-game run as starter, 21.5 percent of his completions went for more than 20 yards — a tick better than Stroud’s number (20.5 across the entire season). Being consistently accurate at every level of the field is the next step for Levis, and it’s attainable with more healthy reps.
Running back
Tyjae Spears, Tennessee Titans (Round 3, No. 81)
Gibbs, Robinson and De’Von Achane all enjoyed big rookie seasons. Had it not been for a major ACL injury, Baltimore’s Keaton Mitchell (currently on the PUP list) would have joined them.
Spears was on the fringe, too, rushing for 453 yards on 100 attempts. He tied with Gibbs for second among rookies (behind Robinson) with 52 catches for 385 yards and another score. Replacing Derrick Henry with one human doesn’t happen. But even though Spears will have help from Tony Pollard, don’t be surprised if he’s the new star in Nashville by season’s end.
Also keep an eye out for Chicago’s Roschon Johnson and Seattle’s Zach Charbonnet.
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Wide receiver
Tank Dell, Houston Texans (Round 3, No. 69)
Jayden Reed, Green Bay Packers (Round 2, No. 50)
Josh Downs, Indianapolis Colts (Round 3, No. 79)
A broken fibula limited Dell to 11 games last season — and even so, it still might be cheating to include him here. The former Houston Cougars dynamo racked up 2.22 yards per route last season, third among rookies behind only Nacua and Rashee Rice. Despite his small frame (5-foot-8, 165 pounds), Dell is a force underneath and better in the air than people think (six contested catches last year).
Reed (64 catches, 793 yards, eight TDs) was one of the most unsung contributors to Jordan Love’s breakout season, and Downs, another undersized speedster, was arguably Richardson’s favorite target in Indianapolis prior to the QB’s injury. (Downs could miss the start of the regular season with a high ankle sprain.) Also don’t be shocked if Seattle’s Jaxon Smith-Njigba (who missed a lot of time in college) steps up and reminds people who he is out west this season.
Those players, Nacua, Rice, Zay Flowers and Jordan Addison make for an outstanding WR class just by themselves.
Tight end
Luke Musgrave, Green Bay Packers (Round 2, No. 42)
Tucker Kraft, Green Bay Packers (Round 3, No. 78)
The 2023 tight end class was hailed as potentially historic, and it’s hard to hate on the production. LaPorta set a rookie TE receptions record, and Bills rookie Dalton Kincaid would’ve been the runaway top first-year tight end in any other season but 2023.
Oddly enough, though, the top two breakout candidates for 2024 play for the same team.
Musgrave is the favorite after putting up 34 catches for 352 yards and a touchdown in an injury-shortened, 11-game season. Kraft, his classmate and teammate, isn’t far behind. He played the full season, finishing with three fewer catches, three more yards and one more touchdown than Musgrave.
Both are terrific athletes — especially Musgrave, who flirted with 4.4 speed in college at 6-6, 250.
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Offensive line
Sidy Sow, New England Patriots (Round 4, No. 117)
Darnell Wright, Chicago Bears (Round 1, No. 10)
Joe Tippmann, New York Jets (Round 2, No. 43)
Matthew Bergeron, Atlanta Falcons (Round 2, No. 38)
Peter Skoronski, Tennessee Titans (Round 1, No. 11)
Sow, a hyper-versatile and athletic big man, was one of my favorite Day 3 picks from the 2023 draft. The 6-4, 325-pounder was a left guard/tackle at Eastern Michigan, then shifted to right guard as a rookie. It wasn’t always pretty, but Sow had some big-time flashes in 13 starts.
Tippmann (who had some snap issues early in camp) and Wright both showed their potential in the run game last season and should continue to improve, while Bergeron got a full year’s worth of starts at right guard for the first time in his life. One of the most athletic linemen in the 2023 class, Bergeron was a right/left tackle only in college and could make a big jump as part of a very solid Atlanta front.
Skoronski, an outstanding college tackle, had his move inside to guard stunted by an early-season injury. If he can stay healthy, the Titans’ offensive line — which also added Alabama OT JC Latham in this year’s draft — might surprise people.
Defensive line
Tuli Tuipulotu, Los Angeles Chargers (Round 2, No. 54)
Keeanu Benton, Pittsburgh Steelers (Round 2, No. 49)
Calijah Kancey, Tampa Bay Buccaneers (Round 1, No. 19)
Karl Brooks, Green Bay Packers (Round 6, No. 179)
As with Dell, it’s probably a bit unfair to include Tuipulotu here — he had a really good rookie season (as did several rookie linemen, including Anderson, Jalen Carter, Byron Young and Kobie Turner). However, the quick and smart 6-3, 260-pounder now gets to work with Jesse Minter in an offshoot of the Ravens’ system. Look for the Chargers to heap more on his plate and unlock more than we’ve seen. He could be a star in that defense.
Benton has dropped weight and appears in line for more work after a very efficient rookie year. His combination of punch and foot speed could provide a serious, versatile upgrade inside for the Steelers.
If Kancey can stay healthy for a full season and shore up his run discipline next to Vita Vea, Tampa Bay’s interior could be the best in the NFL.
Brooks, another Day 3 favorite from 2023, made the absolute most of a rotational role at multiple spots for Green Bay (four sacks, 25 pressures in just 256 reps — also, don’t forget about Lukas Van Ness) and, like Benton, has the athletic versatility to be a terror for slower linemen. Arizona edge BJ Ojulari also was on this list before he went down with a knee injury early in training camp, a tough blow for a promising youngster.
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Linebacker
Jack Campbell, Detroit Lions (Round 1, No. 18)
SirVocea Dennis, Tampa Bay Buccaneers (Round 5, No. 153)
Otis Reese IV, Tennessee Titans (UDFA)
Campbell’s rookie season got complicated when Detroit asked him to move out of the stack and into an edge role for a brief stretch. His play over the second half and into the playoffs, though, was very good. It wouldn’t be a shock to see him get the green dot as defensive play caller, even with veteran LB Alex Anzalone on the roster.
Dennis didn’t play much last season, but the 2023 fifth-rounder is in line for more work with Devin White now in Philadelphia. Dennis was a long, explosive general nuisance inside at Pitt (12 TFL, seven sacks as a senior) and has the type of effort/instinct combination Todd Bowles covets.
The best rookie linebacker in 2023 was Vikings undrafted free agent Ivan Pace Jr. But another UDFA, Reese showed real promise and serious play speed for a handful of games late last season. He could be an answer inside for the Titans this season.
Defensive back
Christian Gonzalez, New England Patriots (Round 1, No. 17)
Brian Branch, Detroit Lions (Round 2, No. 45)
Jordan Battle, Cincinnati Bengals (Round 3, No. 95)
Tyrique Stevenson, Chicago Bears (Round 2, No. 56)
Gonzalez had a great first month last season before his year ended because of a shoulder injury. The best mover among corners in the ’23 class, Gonzalez (4.38-second 40-yard dash, 41-inch vertical, 32-inch arms) could be a bright spot early for Jerod Mayo.
Branch is another player who might have outperformed this list, but he did lose several games to injury last season. More importantly, Detroit plans to further expand his role in 2024 — the Lions believe he’s a future Pro Bowler. Cincinnati could say the same about Battle, another ex-Alabama safety who looks like a potential perennial stud.
Other candidates include Joey Porter Jr. and Christian Izien. Stevenson, though, had some outstanding stretches last year in Chicago and should only improve opposite Jaylon Johnson.
(Top photos of Will Levis, left, and Keeanu Benton: Matthew Maxey, Mark Alberti / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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