Culture
What to watch at NFL minicamps: Potential holdouts, Kirk Cousins comeback, 5 early QB battles
The NFL’s offseason schedule rolls on this week with three-day minicamps, which start Tuesday for 10 teams. The remaining 22 teams will continue with organized team activities before holding their minicamps next week.
Offseason meetings and on-field sessions are voluntary until minicamp. But now comes the mandatory work period, and that means teams can fine players who elect not to attend.
These practice sessions help coaches and players further prepare for training camp, which begins in late July, paving the way for the preseason and regular season.
Here are some of the top storylines to follow around the league as minicamps get underway.
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Will contract disputes lead to holdouts?
The Vikings on Monday gave Justin Jefferson a mammoth new deal, and the Dolphins’ Jaylen Waddle got a contract extension worth nearly $85 million last week, but other talented wideouts are still awaiting their big pay days. The 49ers’ Brandon Aiyuk, Cowboys’ CeeDee Lamb and Broncos’ Courtland Sutton may hold out from minicamp because of it. They may not be alone, because Bengals wide receivers Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins have both skipped voluntary OTA sessions amid contract disputes. The Bengals exercised the fifth-year option on Chase’s contract, but he wants a multiyear extension similar to Waddle’s. Higgins requested a trade as he enters the final year of his rookie deal, but the Bengals have refused thus far.
Meanwhile, Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa wants an extension, too, but has attended portions of the voluntary workouts. Steelers defensive tackle Cameron Heyward, also desiring an extension, has skipped OTAs.
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New coaching regimes
Seven teams hired new head coaches this offseason, and an eighth (the Raiders) elevated their interim, Antonio Pierce, to the full-time job. So minicamp will be the first time that Pierce, Jim Harbaugh (Chargers), Raheem Morris (Falcons), Jerod Mayo (Patriots), Dave Canales (Panthers), Mike Macdonald (Seahawks), Dan Quinn (Commanders) and Brian Callahan (Titans) meet with their new teams in full. The same goes for the 15 new offensive coordinators and 16 new defensive coordinators. These minicamp practices give coaches and assistants valuable opportunities to teach their systems to players as they better familiarize themselves with their rosters in advance of training camp position battles.
Early QB competitions
At least five teams — and maybe six — figure to have quarterback competitions this summer. The Commanders have not yet named Jayden Daniels the starter over Marcus Mariota, so in theory, Quinn and offensive coordinator Kliff Kingsbury could be in evaluation mode. Meanwhile, the Raiders, Patriots, Broncos, Vikings and Giants all must settle on starters. The position battles may not begin in earnest until training camp, but don’t think that Aidan O’Connell and Gardner Minshew (Raiders), Jacoby Brissett and Drake Maye (Patriots), J.J. McCarthy and Sam Darnold (Vikings), Daniel Jones and Drew Lock (Giants) will wait until July to attempt to separate themselves from their counterparts with each minicamp rep and throw.
The Bears have already named 2024 No. 1 pick Caleb Williams their starting quarterback.
Aaron Rodgers is back on the field with the Jets after last year’s Week 1 season-ending Achilles injury. (Sarah Stier / Getty Images)
A number of high-profile players had 2023 seasons cut short by serious injuries. Now, some of those players find themselves at the tail end of their rehabilitation processes. Others have returned to the field and are using OTAs and minicamp practices to knock off the rust. Coaching and training staffs use these sessions to evaluate where their stars stand roughly a month before training camp.
Quarterbacks Aaron Rodgers (torn Achilles tendon), Kirk Cousins (torn Achilles tendon), Joe Burrow (wrist surgery), Deshaun Watson (shoulder surgery) and Daniel Jones (knee surgery) will all get in some work in various capacities at minicamp. Browns running back Nick Chubb and Cowboys cornerback Trevon Diggs, who both suffered ACL tears, are among the high-profile non-quarterbacks still working their way back to full strength.
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Familiar faces in new places
Some of the game’s most recognizable players changed addresses this offseason. Pass-rusher Danielle Hunter signed with the Texans. Running back Saquon Barkley jumped from the Giants to the Eagles. Fellow back Josh Jacobs left the Raiders for the Packers. And Derrick Henry left the Titans for the Ravens. Linebacker Leonard Floyd signed with the 49ers, wide receiver Calvin Ridley with the Titans, and the Steelers acquired both Russell Wilson and Justin Fields. With a few OTA sessions now under their belts, they should be gaining a good understanding of their roles with their new teams and can continue to show at minicamp what they’re capable of.
Rookie WR Marvin Harrison will get down to work when the Cardinals hold minicamp next week. (Mark J. Rebilas / USA Today)
How do the rookies hold up?
Williams, Daniels, Maye, wide receiver Marvin Harrison Jr., offensive tackle Joe Alt and other recent draft picks have all gotten a taste of NFL practices thanks to rookie minicamp and voluntary workouts. But for some, June’s minicamp will be their first full-squad on-field work, and in some cases, their first real tests against veteran competition. The rookies should be starting to gain familiarity with their playbooks, but the education process remains ongoing. The learning will extend through training camp, but the goal is to come out of minicamp with a good base so they are ready to compete in July.
Special teams experimentation
The NFL’s owners agreed to dramatic changes to the kickoff format this offseason. The modification calls for all players on the kicking team to line up at the receiving team’s 40-yard line while the receiving team lines nine players up on its own 35. Two men will line up downfield as returners. The kicker will still kick off from his own 35. The kickoff team defenders won’t be permitted to move until the ball hits the ground in the “landing zone” — inside the receiving team’s 20-yard line. If the ball hits short of the landing zone, it would be moved to the receiving team’s 40-yard line just as if a kickoff sails out of bounds. Touchbacks would call for the ball to be moved to the receiving team’s 30.
Minicamp will provide the first extended opportunity for NFL players to learn from their coordinators how to line up and execute the modified play, though some teams started experimenting during OTAs.
(Illustration: Sean Reilly / The Athletic; photos of Kirk Cousins and J.J. McCarthy: Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images and Nick Wosika / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
A famous poet once observed that it is difficult to get the news from poems. The weather is a different story. April showers, summer sunshine and — maybe especially — the chill of winter provide an endless supply of moods and metaphors. Poets like to practice a double meteorology, looking out at the water and up at the sky for evidence of interior conditions of feeling.
The inner and outer forecasts don’t always match up. This short poem by Louise Glück starts out cold and stays that way for most of its 11 lines.
And then it bursts into flame.
“Early December in Croton-on-Hudson” comes from Glück’s debut collection, “Firstborn,” which was published in 1968. She wrote the poems in it between the ages of 18 and 23, but they bear many of the hallmarks of her mature style, including an approach to personal matters — sex, love, illness, family life — that is at once uncompromising and elusive. She doesn’t flinch. She also doesn’t explain.
Here, for example, Glück assembles fragments of experience that imply — but also obscure — a larger narrative. It’s almost as if a short story, or even a novel, had been smashed like a glass Christmas ornament, leaving the reader to infer the sphere from the shards.
We know there was a couple with a flat tire, and that a year later at least one of them still has feelings for the other. It’s hard not to wonder if they’re still together, or where they were going with those Christmas presents.
To some extent, those questions can be addressed with the help of biographical clues. The version of “Early December in Croton-on-Hudson” that appeared in The Atlantic in 1967 was dedicated to Charles Hertz, a Columbia University graduate student who was Glück’s first husband. They divorced a few years later. Glück, who died in 2023, was never shy about putting her life into her work.
But the poem we are reading now is not just the record of a passion that has long since cooled. More than 50 years after “Firstborn,” on the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize for literature, Glück celebrated the “intimate, seductive, often furtive or clandestine” relations between poets and their readers. Recalling her childhood discovery of William Blake and Emily Dickinson, she declared her lifelong ardor for “poems to which the listener or reader makes an essential contribution, as recipient of a confidence or an outcry, sometimes as co-conspirator.”
That’s the kind of poem she wrote.
“Confidence” can have two meanings, both of which apply to “Early December in Croton-on-Hudson.” Reading it, you are privy to a secret, something meant for your ears only. You are also in the presence of an assertive, self-possessed voice.
Where there is power, there’s also risk. To give voice to desire — to whisper or cry “I want you” — is to issue a challenge and admit vulnerability. It’s a declaration of conquest and a promise of surrender.
What happens next? That’s up to you.
Cold weather can serve as a plot point or emphasize the mood of a scene, and this week’s literary geography quiz highlights the locations of recent novels that work winter conditions right into the story. Even if you aren’t familiar with the book, the questions offer an additional hint about the setting. 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 books if you’d like to do further reading.
When a writer is praised for having a sense of place, it usually means one specific place — a postage stamp of familiar ground rendered in loving, knowing detail. But Kiran Desai, in her latest novel, “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” has a sense of places.
This 670-page book, about the star-crossed lovers of the title and several dozen of their friends, relatives, exes and servants (there’s a chart in the front to help you keep track), does anything but stay put. If “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” were an old-fashioned steamer trunk, it would be papered with shipping labels: from Allahabad (now known as Prayagraj), Goa and Delhi; from Queens, Kansas and Vermont; from Mexico City and, perhaps most delightfully, from Venice.
There, in Marco Polo’s hometown, the titular travelers alight for two chapters, enduring one of several crises in their passionate, complicated, on-again, off-again relationship. One of Venice’s nicknames is La Serenissima — “the most serene” — but in Desai’s hands it’s the opposite: a gloriously hectic backdrop for Sonia and Sunny’s romantic confusion.
Their first impressions fill a nearly page-long paragraph. Here’s how it begins.
Sonia is a (struggling) fiction writer. Sunny is a (struggling) journalist. It’s notable that, of the two of them, it is she who is better able to perceive the immediate reality of things, while he tends to read facts through screens of theory and ideology, finding sociological meaning in everyday occurrences. He isn’t exactly wrong, and Desai is hardly oblivious to the larger narratives that shape the fates of Sunny, Sonia and their families — including the economic and political changes affecting young Indians of their generation.
But “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” is about more than that. It’s a defense of the very idea of more, and thus a rebuke to the austerity that defines so much recent literary fiction. Many of Desai’s peers favor careful, restricted third-person narration, or else a measured, low-affect “I.” The bookstores are full of skinny novels about the emotional and psychological thinness of contemporary life. This book is an antidote: thick, sloppy, fleshy, all over the place.
It also takes exception to the postmodern dogma that we only know reality through representations of it, through pre-existing concepts of the kind to which intellectuals like Sunny are attached. The point of fiction is to assert that the world is true, and to remind us that it is vast, strange and astonishing.
See the full list of the 10 Best Books of 2025 here.
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