Jacksonville Jaguars WR/CB Travis Hunter learning quickly.
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Jacksonville Jaguars WR/CB Travis Hunter learning quickly.
The Jacksonville Jaguars are one week away from opening the 2025 NFL season by hosting the Carolina Panthers on Sunday, September 7th at 1 p.m. Be sure to set your DVRs accordingly.
Of course, everyone is excited to see rookie first-round pick Travis Hunter. Not only do they want to see him play on offense and defense, they just want to see what he can do on the field period. At his Thursday press conference, quarterback Trevor Lawrence said that so far in the offseason and training camp, Hunter has been “impressive” going both ways.
“Yeah, just to see the amount of work you have to put in to do that, it’s hard enough to play one way in the NFL, much less two ways,” Lawrence said. “To learn offense, defense, it’s a lot. He’s done a really good job.”
Lawrence says Travis Hunter has been handling the mental aspect well
It’s not just the physical rigors of playing offense and defense, but there is just so much to know. It’s a Herculean task to learn a single position in the NFL let alone two that each have multiple alignments.
Lawrence noted that Hunter has handled it extremely well for a first-year man.
“It’s his responsibility to know what to do when he steps in the huddle and he’s done a great job with that, but also being conscious of he’s a rookie, he’s got a lot going on, he’s playing both ways,” Lawrence said. “Just trying to help him as much as I can with little reminders or different things with the formations or concepts or whatever.
“Just trying to give him reminders so it’s not, hey, you’re on your own, pal. Figure it out. And he’s done a good job of knowing it, but as much as we can help him out, I think that is important.”
Jaguars head coach Liam Coen talks about challenges with Travis Hunter
While players like Lawrence are surely being counted on to help Hunter in his development, there are challenges for the coaches as well. Head coach Liam Coen said that there is a lot of preparation that goes into his development.
“Every single person had to be truly on board with taking on this situation and opportunity,” Coen said via Bleacher Report. “When you’re talking about scheduling, that’s a curveball and a half because you’re saying, OK, we’ve got to make sure he’s getting X amount of days on both sides of the ball, but on those days, he’s not on one side, we’re still making sure we’re getting him in meetings on the other side of the ball.”
The Jaguars better hope that Hunter is really good, because they’re investing a lot of time and resources into his progress.
“So talk about (assistant) coaches having to take some extra workload on,” Coen added. “They don’t get much of a break because if it’s during special teams (portions of practice), he’s not on a special teams unit but there’s going to be an offensive or defensive coach meeting with him every single minute of his day that he is in our building. That took a lot of time to map out, and it was a curveball, especially for a first-time head coach trying to put together a whole operation.”